Interestingly, even some respected games do stuff that violates this. For instance, Starcraft has queues but with several constraints that make them far worse than they could be:
Some types of things you might want to build cannot be queued (you cannot, for instance, queue your Barracks to build an addon, only unit production; if you’re researching upgrades at your Engineering Bay, you cannot queue level 2 weapons while already researching level 1 weapons).
Adding something to the queue costs the entire cost that it would normally take to build that thing and does so up front rather than charging you the price once the queued item actually starts building. In other words, if I want to queue up three 50-mineral Marines, that will cost me 150 minerals up front even though only one will actually be building at first.
These constraints mean that using the queue penalizes you, as queuing a unit means that you are essentially wasting resources; if you want to build three Marines, it’s much better to reselect your Barracks and build a new Marine after each completes than it is to add three Marines to the queue, as queuing them “wastes” 100 minerals on Marines not actually being built, which you could instead use on other things while waiting for the first Marine to build.
I consider this extremely annoying and essentially anti-competitive; Starcraft notoriously has a high barrier to entry in terms of pure APM (actions per minute), since the user interface issues mean that you have to take very many actions in order to play efficiently. I would be very interested to see what the game would look like in a version where the interface was designed to be as efficient as possible instead of adding extra constraints onto the player.
Interestingly, even some respected games do stuff that violates this. For instance, Starcraft has queues but with several constraints that make them far worse than they could be:
Some types of things you might want to build cannot be queued (you cannot, for instance, queue your Barracks to build an addon, only unit production; if you’re researching upgrades at your Engineering Bay, you cannot queue level 2 weapons while already researching level 1 weapons).
Adding something to the queue costs the entire cost that it would normally take to build that thing and does so up front rather than charging you the price once the queued item actually starts building. In other words, if I want to queue up three 50-mineral Marines, that will cost me 150 minerals up front even though only one will actually be building at first.
These constraints mean that using the queue penalizes you, as queuing a unit means that you are essentially wasting resources; if you want to build three Marines, it’s much better to reselect your Barracks and build a new Marine after each completes than it is to add three Marines to the queue, as queuing them “wastes” 100 minerals on Marines not actually being built, which you could instead use on other things while waiting for the first Marine to build.
I consider this extremely annoying and essentially anti-competitive; Starcraft notoriously has a high barrier to entry in terms of pure APM (actions per minute), since the user interface issues mean that you have to take very many actions in order to play efficiently. I would be very interested to see what the game would look like in a version where the interface was designed to be as efficient as possible instead of adding extra constraints onto the player.