I have the following pet peeves:
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Typos. I know I am not perfect, but there are plenty of tools out there for spell checking. When people do presentations I tend to notice typos immediately and those kind of things irritate me. I still remember a huge banner a team created within our company where they managed to put three spelling errors in their mission statement. Why not dump your text in Word or any other tool with spell check magic and fix your errors?
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Going against conventions. Guilty as charged. With my One King game for IFComp I tried to go for a VERB NOUN vibe in the hopes of simplifying game play. But the way I handled this was nonstandard and caused confusion amongst experienced players.
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Missing things. When the room description mentions something but you cannot examine that something because it has not been implemented. Okay that makes it unimportant to the game, but the author could at least make that clear instead of using a default error response.
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Missing synonyms. Sometimes I tried to refer to something in a game which I was sure existed but could not figure out the right noun or noun phrase to refer to it. Sometimes it was even the exact noun as used in the room description which turned out to be unimplemented.
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Moon logic. Needing to do something which appears to be totally unrelated to the goal you are trying to achieve. E.g. picking up some discarded underwear to unlock a door. If people want to go for this kind of thing, at least make it “logical” for the game, e.g.
Prison Cell
You see a sturdy wooden door providing the only exit out of this room.
You see some smelly underwear lying in a corner.
> open door
The door does not have a handle on the inside.
You try to push the door, but it appears immovable.
> get underwear
While holding your nose, you pick up the underwear with one hand.
Suddenly you hear some wood scraping behind the cell door,
and the door opens. "I forgot my laundry!" the troll exclaims,
grabbing his underwear, and runs off, leaving the door wide open.
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Moon endings. I remember playing a game called “fable” which looked nice but had a totally weird ending where the player apparently “wakes up” from some kind of alien-looking device and it was all a dream or something. Okay the game was not too bad, but why such a weird ending…
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“rare” unhinted verbs. E.g. imagine playing a huge game where you need to use a few times the command “search” to find something hidden. Unless hinted at, this would force the player to “search” everything and the kitchen sink, just to ensure they do not miss anything.
Maybe I should create a game “Moon Logic” and stuff all kinds of illogical things in there…