Feature Creep - Give us some of the worst examples of feature creep you've seen. I'm working on some projects and I wanna see what I need to steer clear of.

[XYZpdq]

realplayer
winamp
windows media player (the built in one)

 

[Coffee Shits]

winamp

To this day, the announcement of "we skipped a version because its cool!!!!11" will be a sign of software getting shittier.

 

[get_ur_gamon]

World of Warships has insane feature creep. When the game first launched around 5 years ago it was just guns, torpeadoes and smoke screens. 3 years or so ago it started with a "torpedeo reload booster" which would magically reload all your tubes instantly. Now they are adding magic land based airstrikes, magic radar that sees through islands and carriers with infinite planes. The game has only gotten more absurd since then. I know it was always supposed to be an arcade-style game, but the level of 'magic' abilities gets insane.

Yugioh also has had the worst feature creep I have seen in any game. Mainly because Konami feels like it needs to make each set of new cards better then the last, or else people wouldn't buy new stuff. Or adding a new type of summoning that makes the others obsolete. And while the meta does need to change, Yugioh has become so bloated that it is pretty hard for new players to get into it, and each card has to have huge amounts of text to stay relevant.

7th edition of WH40K was notorious for being so bloated with so many bullshit rules that no one asked for, but were technically more "realistic". I'm glad they basically reset the rules in june 2017 with 8th and streamlined everything.

 

[Pinochet Was Right]

Oh god, itunes still exists for windows

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

World of Warships has insane feature creep. When the game first launched around 5 years ago it was just guns, torpeadoes and smoke screens. 3 years or so ago it started with a "torpedeo reload booster" which would magically reload all your tubes instantly. Now they are adding magic land based airstrikes, magic radar that sees through islands and carriers with infinite planes. The game has only gotten more absurd since then. I know it was always supposed to be an arcade-style game, but the level of 'magic' abilities gets insane.

Yugioh also has had the worst feature creep I have seen in any game. Mainly because Konami feels like it needs to make each set of new cards better then the last, or else people wouldn't buy new stuff. Or adding a new type of summoning that makes the others obsolete. And while the meta does need to change, Yugioh has become so bloated that it is pretty hard for new players to get into it, and each card has to have huge amounts of text to stay relevant.

7th edition of WH40K was notorious for being so bloated with so many bullshit rules that no one asked for, but were technically more "realistic". I'm glad they basically reset the rules in june 2017 with 8th and streamlined everything.

War Thunder has the same problem. Originally a WW2 game, but now it's become every era, with all the experimental vehicles and almost modern weaponry.

 

[Badungus Kabungus]

To this day, the announcement of "we skipped a version because its cool!!!!11" will be a sign of software getting shittier.

I'm still on 2.95 and the library feature was a mistake. Also pretty much everything after that version.

 

[potato fan]

OSes in general
just open wiki entry for any new-ish windows version and go to section "removed features" and see how many features were there for years you had no idea about
I think Vista was the worst, IIRC it came with like two new different ways to share documents with others in the same network, both almost invisible in UI, unintuitive, and not advertised in any way by MS. I learned about one of them by accidently clicking the wrong incon in system tray and being intrigued by the window that popped up.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

OSes in general
just open wiki entry for any new-ish windows version and go to section "removed features" and see how many features were there for years you had no idea about
I think Vista was the worst, IIRC it came with like two new different ways to share documents with others in the same network, both almost invisible in UI, unintuitive, and not advertised in any way by MS. I learned about one of them by accidently clicking the wrong incon in system tray and being intrigued by the window that popped up.

I know that holding and shaking one window in Win10 will minimize everything except that window, I learned that while trying to disable other Win10 features using a third party program that asked if I wanted to disable it.

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

I know that holding and shaking one window in Win10 will minimize everything except that window, I learned that while trying to disable other Win10 features using a third party program that asked if I wanted to disable it.

Wow I never knew this existed. Why is this a thing? It serves no purpose beyond some fancy, 'clap on clap off' style functionality. Man Windows 10 is an absolutely bloated garbage OS.

 

[Coffee Shits]

Wow I never knew this existed. Why is this a thing? It serves no purpose beyond some fancy, 'clap on clap off' style functionality. Man Windows 10 is an absolutely bloated garbage OS.

That's been around since 7.

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

That's been around since 7.

Where all the problems began. I think Windows 7 was probably the best OS that Microsoft ever made. It was really after 7 when shit started going downhill. I mean, look at what Windows 8 was. It was feature creep embodied.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Early Mac OS X had this good search feature.

Then in 10.4 it was replaced with Spotlight, which had to "index" volumes, a time consuming process.

Then along came Siri.

 

[Spunt]

NordVPN. Used to be easy on resources and easy to use, but late last year they pushed out an update changing the way logging in works. Rather than just put your login data into the app, they decided that NordVPN needed to be part of an "application suite" that you would log into over a browser. So you start the app, then it starts up a browser window (without the VPN up) so that you log into a "Nord Account" instead. In theory.

In reality the new login page was fucked. On many connections, the login screen would just time out after you entered your credentials and there was no way forward. In order to get my VPN working on desktop, I first had to tether my PC to my phone's mobile data connection (which was with a different provider to my home internet), log in, start the VPN, then connect back to my home wi-fi. It took them a MONTH to push out a fix for that, with many users unable to log in or use the app at all during that time. Six months on, it's still not really working properly. Connection times on desktop are terrible and I'm constantly having to switch servers on mobile because the connection goes dead. Logging into the "Nord Account" still takes fucking ages and requires an unsecured browser window to be open. There's also no sign of any of the new "suite" of apps using the same login, six months after they broke their core product to include them. My subscription expires later this year and I'm switching to something else.

I've heard of new features breaking a product, but this is the first time they broke the product before they were even implemented.

 

[Pinochet Was Right]

NordVPN™ requires you use it with your Raycon™ wireless earbuds while playing Raid Shadow Legends™ or listening to Audible™ audiobooks that you paid with your credit card that was inside a Ridge Wallet™ after they were recommended by someone at Skillshare™ when you were trying to learn how to use Squarespace™ since you couldn't go outside after cutting your ballsack with Manscaped™

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Early Mac OS X had this good search feature.

Then in 10.4 it was replaced with Spotlight, which had to "index" volumes, a time consuming process.

Then along came Siri.

10.1 also had a feature called Rosetta that let you run classic OS 7-9 apps through a transparent emulation layer in X. Apple dumped it during the x86 transition but it always bothered me since it wasn't a low level implementation and was likely portable.

Also, spotlight was a plague long before that. It started in OS 8. In os 7 search would just sit there tying up the whole computer thrashing the disk, but it got results and it got them quickly.

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

NordVPN™ requires you use it with your Raycon™ wireless earbuds while playing Raid Shadow Legends™ or listening to Audible™ audiobooks that you paid with your credit card that was inside a Ridge Wallet™ after they were recommended by someone at Skillshare™ when you were trying to learn how to use Squarespace™ since you couldn't go outside after cutting your ballsack with Manscaped™

And then clean up the bleeding with your Dollar Shave Club™ asswipes.

 

[Battlecruiser3000ad]

 

[Pinochet Was Right]

Another victim of feature creep is the Duke Nukem Forever of fangames, Megaman X Corrupted.

It was supposed to be a SNES style alternate sequel to X6 like Megaman 9 was for 8, but the dev revamped everything halfway through the decade of development and it's now a PS1 art style in a SNES graphical engine, and more and more things are being added.

It's coming out really nice but who's to say the dev won't get more ideas and rewrite the whole thing again?

 

[AmpleApricots]

systemd.

 

[Pinochet Was Right]

systemd.

I'd just like to interject for a minute. What you are referring to as "systemd" is in fact, GNU/systemd/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus systemd plus Linux.