PC gamers are generally docile. Give them 4GB of VRAM, an SSD, and access to their Steam account, and you’ll placate 99% of them.
Unfortunately, there are some things that get under every PC gamer’s nerves. Some of them are unavoidable. Others are a result of your own stupidity. In any case, here are the top 5 annoying things that trigger PC gamers every day.
Compatibility Problems
How many times have you dived into your PC trying to find the root cause of some obscure error message? Have you caught yourself looking through menus you have no business looking through? Trying to disable drivers that appear to have nothing to do with your issue?
What about the BIOS? When setting up a new PC for the first time, troubleshooting through the BIOS can be a nightmare.
Fortunately, compatibility problems have largely disappeared in recent years, as platforms like Steam make it easier than ever to install and manage your PC gaming library. Nevertheless, compatibility issues have plagued PC gaming since the 1980s – and they’ll plague it for years into the future.
Unnecessary Use of Clients like Uplay and Rockstar Games Social Club
We get it, you want to get people using your client. You want to reduce piracy. But forcing gamers who legally paid for your game to run online-only clients every time they want to play your game is ridiculous.
When I’ve decided I want to play a game, I want to hop in that game in under 60 seconds. When I need to fire up Rockstar Social Club, Uplay, Origin, or even Steam, it’s one more barrier between me and gameplay.
Please don’t make me stay connected to Uplay to play your game. I still have nightmares about Assassin’s Creed.
Building a PC
Building a PC is a productive and fun activity – when everything goes right.
All it takes is one little thing to go wrong and building a PC goes from a pleasant hobby to a rage-inducing, head-throbbing, nightmare.
I refuse to believe someone who says they built a PC and didn’t encounter at least one hiccup along the way. Whether it’s putting the RAM in the wrong slots or completely frying your electronics and starting a fire, building a PC can go from 0 to 100 real quick.
Console Gamers
Now, most PC gamers and most console gamers get along perfectly fine. They allow each other to enjoy their respective systems in peace.
Unfortunately, there’s a large segment on both sides of the border whose goal is to antagonize the other. All it takes is one visit to Reddit’s PCMR to get a taste of elitism on the PC side, and it takes one visit to a Battlefield 1 console/PC comparison YouTube video to see the other crowd.
The truth is: consoles are the right choice for many gamers, and PCs are the right choice for others. Many people own both. There’s no right or wrong answer.
PCs have better performance. That part is undeniable. You can upgrade a PC to perform 100 times better than a console.
PCs also cost more money, and they can lead to more troubleshooting problems.
At the end of the day, the only person who lose in the PC vs console debate are the people who waste their time starting arguments online. That being said, console gamers seem to be particularly good at triggering the average PC gamer.
Lag
There’s a reason this one is at the bottom of this list. It’s where it deserves to be. In this day and age, people around the world can download files at 1GB/second. That’s insane. What’s even more insane is that I still get lag when playing 10+ year old games like Age of Empires II on my PC.
Why is lag still a thing? Well, the internet is a complicated system, and you’re performing complex, lightspeed movements with players all over the world. Given that, it’s cool that multiplayer PC gaming works at all.
Still, lag is unacceptable and it’s the number one thing that triggers PC gamers.
