test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Herding Cats, the team experience
nextnametaken
Posts: 2,212 Arc User
First I want to apologize to the forum regulars who I have to say no to when they want to farm lowbie content.
It pains me enough to not have a sixth or more slot to team a noob caught wandering Westside when my team is full. To have someone with multiple level 40s, besides myself while 360,000 noobs have come and gone and not known about questionite, or zen or Kevin Poe, or alerts, or the Socrates button or anything, just feels wrong.
Having said that, I wish I thought differently sometimes, beause noobs drive me up a freakin wall. Not just noobs, my friends drive me over the other wall. People suck, replace them all with Socrates and the Ape. I am done teaming.
Everything is going right, then there's an opening in the team and we pick up a troll, or a lagger, or a disconnector, or a leech, or a yappy RP person, or someone whose adamant to do Demonflame but will disconnect two rooms in after getting a costume part likely and then switch to an alt account, or some theory-crafting anal retentive from City of Heroes who just wants to copy his CoX build that he's played for seven years, and whines at every possible event in the game, and really isn't 'all there' in the team at all.
And in every team there's someone who always triggers Kevin Poe's bomb after being told twice not to.
Can't I booby trap that damn thing? I figured my in game boobs would demand enough attention so that when
I say "dont touch the bomb!" people would listen. But nooo. I need a bigger slider I guess.
[On Demand D-Cup Double Sizer Device!] in the Z-Shop or bust.
Also I'm going to mention here, because I keep forgetting to post a bug report.
The team leader team UI for who has what mission priority after setting it has gone to The Secret World. I have no clue what priority four people are seeing on their computers around the globe.
So this happens all the time:
Set priority. Ask if they have the mission heading. Wait for them to respond.
Wait for them to stop fighting because they stopped somewhere to respond.
Wait for them to stop spamming "Help me I'm down."
Kick them from the team or not .
Maybe they know where are going maybe not.
Maybe they go in the wrong damn direction because when I have Purple Reign incomplete and they have it
completed their arrow says "Go to Purple Reign", not "Go to Kodiak."
In a team of two its easy to synch things and talk this out, in a team of 5 from around the world, its a fourfivin' nightmare.
This conversation happens a lot.
Person1: My missions says its complete
Me: Ok return to Kodiak and turn it in
Person 2 moments later: I'm at Kodiak and nothing is happening?
This from people who have been playing since 2011 sometimes. I do not have enough face left to palm.
It pains me enough to not have a sixth or more slot to team a noob caught wandering Westside when my team is full. To have someone with multiple level 40s, besides myself while 360,000 noobs have come and gone and not known about questionite, or zen or Kevin Poe, or alerts, or the Socrates button or anything, just feels wrong.
Having said that, I wish I thought differently sometimes, beause noobs drive me up a freakin wall. Not just noobs, my friends drive me over the other wall. People suck, replace them all with Socrates and the Ape. I am done teaming.
Everything is going right, then there's an opening in the team and we pick up a troll, or a lagger, or a disconnector, or a leech, or a yappy RP person, or someone whose adamant to do Demonflame but will disconnect two rooms in after getting a costume part likely and then switch to an alt account, or some theory-crafting anal retentive from City of Heroes who just wants to copy his CoX build that he's played for seven years, and whines at every possible event in the game, and really isn't 'all there' in the team at all.
And in every team there's someone who always triggers Kevin Poe's bomb after being told twice not to.
Can't I booby trap that damn thing? I figured my in game boobs would demand enough attention so that when
I say "dont touch the bomb!" people would listen. But nooo. I need a bigger slider I guess.
[On Demand D-Cup Double Sizer Device!] in the Z-Shop or bust.
Also I'm going to mention here, because I keep forgetting to post a bug report.
The team leader team UI for who has what mission priority after setting it has gone to The Secret World. I have no clue what priority four people are seeing on their computers around the globe.
So this happens all the time:
Set priority. Ask if they have the mission heading. Wait for them to respond.
Wait for them to stop fighting because they stopped somewhere to respond.
Wait for them to stop spamming "Help me I'm down."
Kick them from the team or not .
Maybe they know where are going maybe not.
Maybe they go in the wrong damn direction because when I have Purple Reign incomplete and they have it
completed their arrow says "Go to Purple Reign", not "Go to Kodiak."
In a team of two its easy to synch things and talk this out, in a team of 5 from around the world, its a fourfivin' nightmare.
This conversation happens a lot.
Person1: My missions says its complete
Me: Ok return to Kodiak and turn it in
Person 2 moments later: I'm at Kodiak and nothing is happening?
This from people who have been playing since 2011 sometimes. I do not have enough face left to palm.
Post edited by nextnametaken on
0
Comments
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.
Time flies when you're always just in time to be too late.
I prefer this one:
...I just recently realized something really disturbing. We're all eating Sodapop3's "humble pie."
yah.
.
---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----
My Characters on PRIMUS
Toons and costumes thread
@Benevon
Leader of Super Serious Brooding Vigilantes
Feels more like a cry of annoyance at people.
I can agree with this. People, are dumb as friggen posts.
Is there no such thing as 'Learning' anymore? Holy mother of meerkats, I had to teach a level 19 a week ago how to open up his own inventory, since he had no gear or anything and was complaining that he couldn't do anything. I asked why they haven't tried clicking on things on the UI, and the only response was 'y shud i do that'.
I understand the need to be handheld through something you don't know. I get that. But, if you don't try things yourself, how the hell will you learn about anything the tutorial doesn't explain, aside from exasperating peoples such as myself.
Deliciously nutritious!
(On a similar note, please reinstate the blocking tutorial.)
Now, I will admit, I attempted Talos Takedown on a character with no gear, and if you're melee, it does come close to the wire due to the constant PBAoE he throws out.
But really, you can faceroll content in the game. I've even popped out one of my keys by literally rolling my face against the keyboard, and stuff STILL dies with little difficulty.
Deliciously nutritious!
A quick reminder:
Yes, please! I failed that the first time precisely because I had no idea about blocking, beyond when I was yelled at during an unfamiliar final tutorial scene to "OK, BLOCK NOW!"
"Now? How do I...what?...ah crap..."
I was referring to the part about the disguise. People just rush in like any other mission and don't know why they get stomped by the mobs.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Wow.
That's a lot of dumb.
Deliciously nutritious!
Fixed that for you.
Caliga's PRIMUS Database! --XXX--The Caliga Build: Threatening Haymakers! --XXX-- Caliga and Conquer fanart!
I would have plenty of stories, if I cared to remember them all. I'm confronted with people every day, in RL and in game, that I sometimes wonder how they even made it through kindergarten. There will always be idiots, and if they were a wild animal they would have starved to death or been eaten by now.
My advice, vent about it and move on. Eventually you stop noticing. Or you just stop caring. :biggrin:
My Characters on PRIMUS
Toons and costumes thread
@Benevon
Leader of Super Serious Brooding Vigilantes
I am actually paid to help stupid people by the supplies for their restaurants.
The level of stupid I deal with on a daily basis is so astounding that I cannot even fathom how some of the idiots out there can even make it to and from work each day.
That being said I generally dislike teaming in most online games yet I play them because the magnitude of the online world intrigues me.
I have played this game on and off since beta and will say that I have had some of my worst team experiences here.
This game is not built to be particularily social, at least not when you think of CoX or DCUO where much of the content requires teaming to complete.
This seems to breed random teams in the alerts Ive been playing that really dont know how to function as a team drawing off other players strengths and weaknesses.
I also dont really see many gearing their characters toward team play as the game is largely soloable.
I know there is alot of higher level content that people play on teams but for the casual new CO player it would take them a very long time to get to that content playing alot of solo adventures where they are building a rounded character instead of one built for a team.
Now try explaining to that new(er) player the concept of builds and roles as it relates to team play.
Yeah solo everything, there's a solution. That's the attitude that kills subscriptions.
Why spend $15 on an MMO when there is no "Multiplayer" element and $4 Saints Row III does everything this game does, but better, and you can play in a team with one of the 4,546 people currently online on Steam in that game right now.
The "solo it" attitude leaves us with only 300 people in Millennium City to hear anyone when they say "LFT anything"
How come you don't solo the forums? Go ahead, go solo a thread on your own. How much fun is that?
Do you appreciate that level 8 in the alerts with you?
Do you wish they had something else to do besides make the alert take longer after
having run the same damned' content three hundred or more times?
Well, if people would bother themselves to team some noobs and tell them to farm Kevin Poe
instead of going into alerts, the noobs would have something better to do.
The New Kevin Poe was designed as On Alert training for noobs.
Talos to some degree is similar training: "Dont' piss off the extra mobs"
"Don't stand in the dudes AoE attack and die if you can nail him from 30 feet away with a thrown tank!", "Use Socrates button to fast exit", "Meet at Kevin Poes, for questionite!"
Its all good if they learn, but when they don't its awful.
Like others in this thread I have had to teach level 30s about inventory or questionite or zen or mods or vehicles , their crime computer, socrates, and help a citizen missions and content they have never heard of and walk level 40s out to City Center to make a nemesis because they'd never been there.
Some of these people drive, and make the food you eat.
Scary isn't it?
Actually very little of the content in CoX required teaming, what teaming did was make levelling faster by such a large margin over solo play that you saw the infamous 'Freakshow Farms' back in the ye olde days of Peregrine Isle (replaced by the many, many farms that turned up in the AE once that went live). Teaming provided real substantial bonuses to levelling but then the old AE came out and you basically saw what you see now with Alerts. Nobody played the old content, one uberpowerful character would farm up 7 others by running AE farms and people would do this from 1-50 thus creating 'AE babies' level 50s that knew nothing about the game beyond the AE.
How is this any different from the 'Alert Babies' that you guys are complaining about?
Sure these teams would stick together longer than your standard alert team (usually 20-30 minutes per run) and thus it would kind of foster a sense of community (especially on the EU servers where such farms were free, someone came from one of the NA servers when they allowed roaming and got laughed out of Atlas for trying to charge for them like they did on that NA server) and allow for questions to be answered by the more knowledgeable people in the group.
Plus I built a character that could solo all except two taskforces, Lord Recluse Taskforce and the Imperious Taskforce, for those I needed probably a second or third person. the Mighty Rad/Illusion controller with perma-hasten, perma-AM, perma-PA was godlike before they threw in the Incarnate stuff and then it just became out and out broken by that point, only the Incarnate trials were any challenge whatsoever....and even then the Archvillains only lasted longer due to being hitpoint sinks.
low int you can work around,
low knowledge you can train,
not using what passes for your brain, I class as an idiot and I look for a large hammer
Reasons for not doing missions;
But they take to long,
This is quicker,
They're too hard(I nearly sprayed the screen with that one)
I don't know how to find them,
Level 40 questions;
HOw do I get a mission ?
Did you spam alerts to 40?
Yes, my boyfriend said it was better that way.
sigh.. explain how to collect the missions from UNITY, starting from the guy outside and double collecting form the terminal.
How do I collect mail?
mail- envelope symbol on minimap, items the until terminals under big arches in ren center
where's ren center
(check find person) you're standing in it
I eventually teamed and walked them to the terminal and Drifter
where's the powerhouse?
where are you?
ren center near Defender
turn around, see that big cog, thats it
doh
what's(not where) Lemuria?
How do I get to Canada?
you get the idea
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Where did I say solo "everything"? I didn't. So relax. I've had plenty of experience with new players in all games. I just made friends with people who know what they are doing and group with them.
And what kills subscriptions more than my "attitude" is lack of content, lack of dev attention, non existant GMs, bugs never being fixed, etc.
My Characters on PRIMUS
Toons and costumes thread
@Benevon
Leader of Super Serious Brooding Vigilantes
The new player at any level seeking help with a mission and told to "Solo it", is more turned off by that message, than they are by dev attention, GMs or the lack thereof, bugs they don't even know exist, and whatever else you might be thinking.
They will quit the game as soon as they find themselves not progressing or feeling like its a waste of time because they require dopamine drip provided by socializing and the lack of that dopamine feed causes them to have a systemic stress response. So they are gone, never to return, always to associate 'that game' with that bad cortisol reaction.
We had Dev attention, two or three of them in the forums sometimes.
An open Dev channel. We had GMs in the game holding contests and giving things away.
We had bug fixes, giants lists of bugs fixed.
We had Devs in the zone with us giving us buffs and actions figures.
We had Devs bend over backwards to give people the power set they demanded
and even make action figures and avatars represent those player's characters!
We burned through 1.7 Million players while that was the situation.
But that is neither here nor there. Stupid people, elitists and new players are not exclusive to this game. PUGs will always be a crap shoot. A big part of MMOs is making friends and enjoying the content with them. And you will be more successful that way than grouping with random players.
Not to mention, the free form aspect of this game has only bred builds that can solo the difficult content and thus, tends to breed out a teaming mentality. That part of the game is a real shame.
My Characters on PRIMUS
Toons and costumes thread
@Benevon
Leader of Super Serious Brooding Vigilantes
I hate when my team is too good, cause then I just feel insignificant and bored.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
This was all great and fine against warlord and whathave you, but Cybermind is a whole different kettle of fish. Sure, I could carry against him. I have characters that could probably solo him assuming the glitchy mechanics and lag didn't screw me over... But why would someone even want to?
...I just recently realized something really disturbing. We're all eating Sodapop3's "humble pie."
My Characters on PRIMUS
Toons and costumes thread
@Benevon
Leader of Super Serious Brooding Vigilantes
I feel the easiest way to encourage teaming/socialization would be to give an XP bonus when teaming. +5% XP for 2 people, +10% XP for 3 people, +15% XP for 4 people, and +20% XP for a full party. The newbies would get to make friends along the way and have people available for more difficult content.
Because it is fun. I have fun playing this game... wether I am playing it for 5 minutes or 20 minutes. and that is all the reason I need. there are no spread sheets or profit and loss reports that can ever change that
If they did not want to watch me solo it then they should not have died. I am the best, they should feel honored for getting to watch me be best! Helpless people should be glad that there is someone strong working hard to get their success for them
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Are you, by any chance, related to Caliga? lol
My Characters on PRIMUS
Toons and costumes thread
@Benevon
Leader of Super Serious Brooding Vigilantes
The most ironic statement in the thread so far.
It all starts with someone asking in zone how to add themselves to LFT interface.
I told them how to find teams and sent them to LFG channel, where they
popped up and got harrassed by a forum veteran.
Had to put her on ignore for the tenth time since I first teamed her at Kodiak when she was a noob.
Anyway, I saved this CoX Refugee from the wrath of she and we went doing the level 7 things level 7s do picking up another stray level 7 on the way and then we went to Poe's and we picked up a cute level 14 and all sidekicked down to 8 and increased the mobs and raided that place for five boxes of Q and ridiculous amounts of drops.
Good times.
Well halfway in I tell the level eight and seven to head back to Kodiak
to get their mission Xp for "Why'd it have to be purple". I set that as the primary mission, it is
complete for three of us but not the new level 14 person.
So what do you think happens to that level 7 noob when I send him off on his own?
Right. He goes back inside "Why'd it have to be purple", because that's where his arrow is pointing him to go.
Even though I said "Go all the way south to kodiak"...that is of course "balalaalabablal" to him because he
forgot what and where Kodiak was probably.
I generally assume, in those cases, that the person I'm dealing with is one of those kids that negligent parents allow on the internet despite the child clearly being far too young.
Gear was too complicated to bother with "numbers? stats? G? N? L? Acclaim? Stars? uh? what?
Just make me look awesome wjhile jumping around firing my laser and kicking people!".
I just wore whatever and did what I could do with what I had, in teams, cause obviously soloing things with level 3 tutorial gear would mostly go bad.
I didn't even turn in missions so that I could keep running them with lowbie teams, and not have
to run to powerhouse and figure out free form stuff that was all so complicated every time I leveled, which is like 30 minutes or less when turning in missions with teams.
When I'd hit level 11 or 12 or so I would need more character slots and I would buy them with real money.
Six months later someone said "You can get a new character slot for every
level 40" and well, screw newbie players in Westside, I needed XP!
But that is another tale.
My Characters on PRIMUS
Toons and costumes thread
@Benevon
Leader of Super Serious Brooding Vigilantes
This was a Ripper recruitment drive and we nearly made it. Unfortunately, the current person tanking, got killed just as the timer for a recruiment went off, we killed him about 10 seccs later. Frobot tanked him for most of it,
Amazing what a few deaths at the start do for peoples blocking skills. I only had to yell Long pull, when the whole lot ran up the middle. 3 stopped and the ranged pulled him
Mine is the level 11 at the top, finding out if the aopm I just got is helping me any. It is. Think I need a sheild next.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
What I like about recruitment drive is when you die it speeds up the count until fail, so with the current stakes of this alert better have others start learning how to block and pull on this particular alert.
(You never know how many times I would go be the puller of the boss just to see someone run up and pull the mobs behind the boss or venture off to the side mobs during the boss pull just to have half of the team wipe and went from 1/16 recruited to 5/16 in just seconds. Or better yet ignore the first set of mobs at the staircase and fly over to the boss and wipe in seconds, making us one step closer to failing.)
Handle: @drgmstr
"Embrace your dreams"
Come Check Out My PRIMUS Database Page!
RIP Caine
s( O 3 O )/ Will you answer the call? *SR'd*
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Bio:
He's a crazy guy in tights.
With Alerts, leveling is no problem!
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
Git Gud M8!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Cause I'm worth it. Playing since 2009.
They were originally designed so that if you hit a slump during levelling you'd always have missions available (since CoH had MASSIVE content gaps at the time). However the playerbase found that they provided a great way to level as a team due to never requiring story progress and being bitesized chunks of content, allowing for people to drop in and out of the group as they felt like without ever feeling like they're screwing people over.
By contrast CO has none of that, all the content is either aquired randomly (civie missions/Nemesis missions) or linked to a story in some way. If the Civie mission could be picked by a player from the Crime Computer (since they basically work the same as the Scanner/Paper missions) and then have a team just run those for teh XPs you might, might be able to pull someone away from alerts.
However face it, alerts are generally faster than questing, in the time it takes to run though 1 mission I can get the XP equivilent of 4 from 2 Alerts (if you get a good team admittedly) and if you have Nemesis Heirloom gear you don't even need to do the missions to get upgrades just 1-40 via Alerts then UNITY missions for Heroic gear and buy the purple secondaries off the Auction House. .
Help a Citizen missions are the content you mention without the randomness.
The randomness can be thrown in by changing team sizes and difficulty, some of the missions will scale the number of mobs.
There are 90 of these missions in the city that can be acquired from level 9 to 29 and they are leveled to the player they are given to. They are repeatable usually up to four times quickly before a cooldown happens, but by then you've leveled and can get other missions.
Help A Citizen missions are not randomly acquired and can be 'farmed', so that at level 9 you can stop doing Kodiak/Chief Surhoff missions and simply run around Westside saving Citizens for more missions.
All the way to level 29.
Then you find yourself some noobies and you teach them how to get the missions and go all the way to 40.
Done that more than 20 times before On Alert.
Very rarely are Help a Citizen missions given by random walk up Citizens that weren't saved.
I've been teaching people about the crime computer and Help A Citizen missions for two years. Most people are very happy to turn in / pick up missions in the crime computer, but some are full of hate for instanced content, or lordy forbid it doesn't have a continuous plotline, they can't even hack that.
Alerts are 2.5 times the XP value of mission content. Help a Citizen missions can only supplement those, not compete. People don't like to run all over the very boring open world. If they did you would see them all over the game map.
But go check the population in City Center and Downtown, aint nobody there.
Since people are carried by others in Alerts they are completely unaware that they even need to get gear. Level 16 I teamed today, was wearing level 6 gear, and that's not the first time that's happened. Admittedly this happens to me during double xp "Aint nobody got time for dat gear!". Maybe Ill be prepared this time.
I know Talos is tricky if you don't block as you can get killed. But Kevin "Electrogoth" Poe is easy.
Even later in the sewers, he's easy and they even removed the acid DoT spreading down from the ceiling... I still remember it as this acid DoT both killed Kevin Poe and my character in his sewer's hideout. :rolleyes:
Second point : I don't really see a difference in Talos mission. Before or After Alerts update, there were/are still players asking for help (and unaware it can be shared only if you've the costume device).
Actually I see less players asking for help for Talos but I don't think it means a lot. Is it because they can outlevel it and then the mission becomes easier? Is it because there are less players online?... hard to know and hard to tell...
Another point : everyone's camping in RenCen while the other areas are deserted.
My egoblader hit lvl 35 recently, I brought her in Monster Island and it's really heartbreaking there. It was used to be a living area there, full of people farming device mats, and chating and teaming for Moreau or Viper's Nest. Now it's down to 3-8 players.
So what you see and meet in RenCen is certainly the new Champs playerbase (I like the "Alert babies" expression) but I don't think it's a better or worse one.
The one thing I'm probably sure about is that this new playerbase doesn't explore like we did, doesn't team like we did.
Before Alerts, we were teaming when we wanted and when we needed it and it was lasting more than 5 minutes... now everyone has to team for the Alerts and it rarely lasts more than 3 minutes. And it certainly appeals to a different kind of players but... we all know this since April 2012, don't we?
It does not matter to me.
My costume...Is gorgious! I am just happy that you get to see it.
In all seriousness, if it's alerts I don't care. They are 2 minutes tops. Lose one, win one.
If it's an actual mission then I might be more annoyed.
But at least you get to see me, and that is all that is important :redface:
Old time member. I miss NERF :eek:
(don't hand out straight lines, if you don't want them used)
I was thinking of
Normal Person- social comment- Lost specimen- reward for capture and return
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!