Things you don't like about Go.

[Zombie]

For a complete beginner, having no damn clue what to do. As was noted in the Putting the Pieced Together thread, it just seems like it doesn't matter what you know. It doesn't matter that you know the basic rules, that you understand things like influence and so on at some level, that you are a relatively successful multi-game dilettante. Nothing matters. A couple stones plop down, and you're hopelessly confused. Whatever first instinct you might have to some play your opponent makes is more than likely completely wrong (or at least a blatant overplay, if the basic idea is correct).

In Starcraft or Magic you can say (even if you're a relative beginner) things like: "I'm going to build two barracks and then fast expand (game clock tells me it should happen around X:XX" or "I want a bunch of burn and little men and beat the snot out of their faces". These basic gameplans may have a ton of deficiencies, but they are there. It's much harder to make these kinds of simple statements of intent in Go, not to mention just general things like life and death, where a nice, big area just screams "invade me!" due to some structural deficiency.

I recently tried learning Yomi. I don't know how many games I've played, not terribly many, but it was amazing how a couple simple explanations very early on (mostly about the nature of the early, middle and endgame and the reasons that drive transition from one to the other) made things click. After that, I just... was there, and could just learn, learn, learn. The difficulty came from understanding the opponent, not so much the game.

Which is all fine. But I hate, hate, hatehatehate playing badly.

Also, Komi.

I have forgotten the year or so of flailing before I really started to play Magic, though. That a card should actually do something is a hard, hard lesson that takes a long, long time to actually learn. In my defense, I was confused and wanted to "play my way" instead of "just f*cking killing him". That mismotivation has since been corrected.

[Inkwolf]

Feline disapproval. She claims she is the only one here with a permit to rattle and bat around small objects. She insists on napping on the go board when I am trying to play,