Looking for Level Secrets When Playing Doom 2 Megawads for the First Time...

Do you guys just play through the levels ignoring secrets or do you try to find each and every secret before going onto the next level?

Well, I always try to find some secrets. The usual suspects of course, strange textures, alcoves, comouter terminals, walls with corpses infront of them. Other than that I don‘t bother much. It‘s nice to find them, but I am not a 100 % guy...

I try to find as many secrets as I can, but I won't lose sleep if I get to the end of a level without having found a single one of them.

I probably would get a title like "A Secret is Revealed!" because god forbid I never leave a secret behind as much as possible (although I couldn't get all of Umbra of Fate's secrets for some reason).

I like to look for secrets and find what I can, and then look on YouTube or Doom Wiki for the rest. My goal is to know every secret by heart.

I look for the secrets in general, and usually put a bit of extra effort to try to figure out any that tease with a "but I know you can get there" sort of preview where there's some item that's not obviously reachable, as well as giving some extra attention to exit-to-secret-level map slots, but aside from that I don't generally bother to do anything like save at the end and go back if I didn't find all of them.  Gives some extra replay value if I ever go back to them.  I'm not sure if I even have all the IWAD secrets memorized, every now and again I'll be replaying and have a "huh, never knew that was there" moment.

I usually try looking for secrets while in the middle of finishing the level, but once I seem to finish the level without finding at least one secret, I usually use the IDCLIP cheat to find out where the secret(s) is/are. ^{No regrets confessing this here}

I always search for secrets because most of them helps or will help in case that you're having trouble or just simply do 100% for casual gameplays. And secret levels are not the exception to this rule.

Fun fact: I change the message for secrets. Instead of the usual "A secret is revealed", I put "Secret found. Cool!"

I rarely look for secrets, only when I see them I use them, if not i do not care

Definitely ignore, if I find something by accident good, if not, I couldn't care less.

Besides, I'm pretty damn bad at finding secrets in general.

I disable map totals from automap/hud in any source port that has it as a feature, so I don't actively try to get 100% secrets for the sake of it. I only search if I've noticed something that hints towards one, otherwise I tend to just find them accidentally.

Normally I'll hit a few secrets just by keeping a keen eye on the surroundings, but I don't go out of my way to look for them.  Just the usual suspects - misaligned textures, oddly placed candles, automap showing a door where there isn't one, etc.  I think the only time I actually find 100% secrets on a map is when I legitimately can't figure out a way forward, and I end up finding everything except that damn yellow keycard.