Originally Posted By: tfabris
My favorite example of this is encumberance in RPGs. It's a game mechanic that the designers deliberately insert into the game to make the player backtrack to town to sell goods after adventuring in a dungeon. It's a boring mechanic that I find exceedingly tedious, and which makes me shelve certain RPGs fairly quickly. In most RPGs, I would never have the patience to finish the game if I didn't have access to an encumberance cheat. This isn't a case of making a difficult thing easier... there's nothing difficult about going back to town and selling your loot, it's just tedious. Having to stop your adventure mid-dungeon because your inventory is full is simply annoying.

At least some designers are finally realizing that this mechanic sucks and doesn't really add to the enjoyment of the game. Off the top of my head Runic Games with Torchlight 1 and 2 as well as Bioware in SW:The Old Republic added in the option for your companion/pet to take off to town to sell your vendor trash for you. That doesn't work for anything other than vendor trash, though. Maybe someday there will be an option list saying to vendor something or save it so you can through it on the broker or stuff it in your bank vault and the pet/companion will take care of all the inventory issues (at that point, a lot of games would lose a money sink though, which adds different problems).