Don't assume your teammates WANT to farm
By
AmazingMOO,
Posted on: 2009-06-02 22:01 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
QR- isn't all this just fodder for the "official farming discussion thread"?
@Mental Maden @Maden Mental
"....you are now tackle free for life."-ShoNuff
[ QUOTE ]
On reflection I realise that the Mercy Bank is a very popular levelling tool for lowbies, but at no point during recruitment or during the mission itself did I, or anyone else, use the word Farm.
[/ QUOTE ]
If you are in Mercy and you used the word "bank" anywhere in your broadcast, people will be 99% certain you mean to farm it. You may not wish this to be so, but it is the reality.
[ QUOTE ]
Having to explain and justify why I wasn't farming it was something I could have done without.
[/ QUOTE ]
Broadcast you are forming a "mission team" and if the bank mission comes up, make a point of saying "we aren't farming this." If anyone asks why, you say, "Because this isn't a farm team." I can understand if you didn't know this, but the only person in your story who was unclear about how things actually work in Mercy nowadays... was you.
I avoid the whole thing by soloing to 5 and then leaving for Port Oakes as soon as I possibly can. I only return to Mercy to watch the Rikti bomb it.
Villains: Annie Alias, Dr. Amperical, Shade Golem, Knight Marksman
Heroes: The Clockwork Mime, Soccerpunch, The Fissioneer, Samurai Houston, Oversteer
Join The X-Patriots on Virtue!
Azerrath wrote:
[ QUOTE ]
Which means someone's great/decent work is being missed out on.
[/ QUOTE ]
This was the reason I joined, and then quit, three AE teams last night. I wanted to run some of the content I've read/heard about, but all they wanted to do was farm Freakshow.
--NT
They all laughed at me when I said I wanted to be a comedian.
But I showed them, and nobody's laughing at me now!
If I became a red name, I would be all "and what would you mere mortals like to entertain me with today, mu hu ha ha ha!" ~Arcanaville
[ QUOTE ]
I avoid the whole thing by soloing to 5 and then leaving for Port Oakes as soon as I possibly can. I only return to Mercy to watch the Rikti bomb it.
[/ QUOTE ]
When that happens does that make it an "Alien Ant Farm" ? 
Ha Ha Ha Sorry I just had to. . .was the first thing I tought of when I read this.
An alternative to the originial thread title.
Don't assume your teammates WANT to do story arcs written by amateurs which in all honesty, anyone with any artistic background could've thought up themselves.
This is starting to resemble another "blame it on farm" thread which only serves to disguise the fact that some people only want to whine about how farming is making it inconvienent for them to get teams/teammates. Sorry but your convience is the least of my concerns. I pay 14.99 a month to entertain myself, not you. Selfish? You bet but then it's no more selfish than the people who whine about the opposite.
QR:
Oddly enough when I get invites to farms, even from people I don't know its usually in the form "Would you like to farm?" Either that or its a blind invite.
I've wound up on a couple of Mercy bank farms in my time. Wasn't looking for them, but at some point during that mission somebody said "Want to farm this?" or "We're farming this, okay?", and I've stayed. Oddly enough, by "farm" every single one of those teams have really meant "We'll do this mission all of two times total, then everybody's suddenly gonna have something else to do, or we'll all just get bored with our (lol)farming and go do different missions anyway". Funny, that.
All of my characters have "I don't do AE/MArc" in their search field, and it's only failed me once. Nothing to do with disliking farming, I don't do AE at all for other reasons. I don't know if that policy has kept me off farming teams or not, could go either way.
No one has ever sent me a tell asking specifically if I wanted to farm. Been asked to bridge ("Nah"), PL ("Don't know how, don't want to know"), and fill ("Sure, I don't mind"). But never to farm.
I take the firm (i.e. apathetic) middle ground on farming, can you tell?
[ QUOTE ]
This is the reason farming is bad for the game- people start thinking that the game's all about farming, and have trouble being convinced otherwise.
[/ QUOTE ]Change that to excessive farming, and you've got it.
But you can say that about ANY type of play.
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
This is the reason farming is bad for the game- people start thinking that the game's all about farming, and have trouble being convinced otherwise.
[/ QUOTE ]Change that to excessive farming, and you've got it.
But you can say that about ANY type of play.
[/ QUOTE ]
The general public have become excessive about farming. Pre-MA, I had about a 5-10% chance of finding myself on a farm team.
Post-MA, I can get a farm team in about 5 minutes, or a regular one in 30.
[ QUOTE ]
"Don't just assume a potential new team mate wants to do AE missions at all .. Farms or not!" This happened to me enough that I now ASK what type of missions before I even consider joining a team.
[/ QUOTE ]
I pretty much want to know what kind of mission it will be, what is the level of the person running the team, what is the difficulty set on, and where is the mission going to be - before I will even join a team.
Even with "send tell with your level before invite" doesn't even mean a tell will be sent with that much info.
If I do get a tell, many times it will include a lie. Like "We are a level 25 team". The leader is actually level 22 and they are fighting level 25's. I can understand some leaders wanting to do this to get the "biggest bang for their buck", but I'm no sucker. I can create my own team as well.
I'm definitely against farming. Farming/PL'ing in the MA have definably been tagged as being "against the rules". So if anyone has problems with me not joining an AE farm team, I probably have already put them on /gignore and 1 stared them.
I like running police missions, but some don't even consider them to be "normal" missions.
I think it is polite to always send a tell when inviting people to your team asking if they would like to join rather than just sending them an invite.
However, as there are trial accounts, I do tend to send a tell and then an invite if the person I'm inviting is below level 15 - as, if they are on a trial, they will have no way of responding in many cases.
And yeah, I definitely ask before I head anywhere to do a mission. I've been burned to many times ending up going some place and finding out the team was a farm or something else that I didn't want to be involved with. I've even gone that far, stated my objection and then been kicked from the team, so I know others' people's pain in dealing with jerks of such caliber.
That is to say, when I have a search comment that says "no bridging, no farming, no PL'ing, no kidding". I don't expect to arrive at a mission with my level 45, be expected to sk a lower level in order to bridge for them, and then be kicked from the team because I won't sk the lowbie for a PL. At least the leader on the team is a jerk, the others telling me that I'm wrong for not aiding in their conspiracy - as far as I'm concerned, they are wrong as well.
I'm not playing to work the game, exploit the game, or be used by people doing either. I'm here to play the game and have fun.
It seems a pain sometimes to have to go to such lengths to run with good people, but when it happens. It is great.
I managed to get on two good teams today and I ran a couple over the weekend.
I'm all for good AE content. By "good" I mean, non-exploitive missions that were created for content and creativity and not to abuse the mechanics.
[ QUOTE ]
NOW.. I pull up search and check to see what level the leader is and what zone he is in. Even then I ask what sort of missions he plans to run. POINT was I didn't have to spend all that time researching something as simple as a team invite until recently.
[/ QUOTE ]
Just ask them ... If they lie, you can add them to your ignore list. It's not like ignore is even permanent anymore.
[ QUOTE ]
Then I will start to solo and IF a blind tell comes in
[/ QUOTE ]
I'm assuming you mean blind invites. And for the record, I hate those. If I do accept, I'll most likly do as little as possible, and use extremely dumb afk and brb excuses to go do the laundry. If I get wife agro, I'll just leave the toon logged in, and let them figure out I left.
[ QUOTE ]
and should be honored to be invited to their story or their little PL farm
[/ QUOTE ]
With all the nerfs that are in place, if I'm on a team that is running story content, and the rewards suck, I will tell them it's not worth running this arc, and leave the team. I build my arcs now in consideration for reward first. Once I have adequate rewards, I'll fill in the story content. I have two arcs, one long and one very short, where I did this, and I've gotten nothing but praises as to how good they are, split evenly between story content, and rewards generated. If an arc doesn't have both, it gets 1-3 stars from me. The map you explained earlier, I would have given it 0 also.
With the rewards you get from my missions, depending on the definition you use as a farm, you could call them that. Most peoples definition of farms is my definition of fun.
[ QUOTE ]
I've even gone that far, stated my objection and then been kicked from the team, so I know others' people's pain in dealing with jerks of such caliber
[/ QUOTE ]
Judging from all your other posts, I find you calling anyone a jerk to be hypocritical.
[ QUOTE ]
<QR>
This assumption is not restricted to AE.
A week or two ago I felt like teaming, so I hit broadcast and got a team together. As it happens the first mission I had lined up was "Rob the Mercy Bank", and I mentioned that in broadcast to let people know I wasn't forming an AE team.
Everything was going great until someone grabbed the money. Suddenly team chat looks like this:
Player 1: Oh no, someone grabbed the money!
Player 2: Exit quick!
Me: What?
Player 1: Don't kill the guards!
Me: But...
Several of the team run for the exit, and the rest of us are taken out by the now overwhelming security. Once everyone is either outside or faceplanted...
Player 3: What happened?
Player 1: Someone grabbed the money. We'd have completed the mission if we defeated the guards.
Me: Um... I wasn't planning on farming it...
Player 1: Really?
Me: No.
Player 1: Why not?
On reflection I realise that the Mercy Bank is a very popular levelling tool for lowbies, but at no point during recruitment or during the mission itself did I, or anyone else, use the word Farm. Having to explain and justify why I wasn't farming it was something I could have done without.
So it's not just an AE problem. It's just more pervasive in AE.
[/ QUOTE ]
I totally feel your pain. I had a similar experience on my Corruptor like a year or so ago.
The leader basically sent me a tell saying "hey, care to join a low-level team?" with no mention of the words "bank" or "farm".
Having never heard of the bank mission being a popular farm, and conditioned by the normal game to automatically grab glowies if no one else is around to do so, I grabbed the money and later was summarily b***hed at by the team leader, despite the fact that not a single mentioning of "farming" was made during the entire mission. He basically ranted off about how I should have "assumed" that we were farming the mission...
Also, I've been away from the game for a while - what the hell is this "meow" nonsense I keep seeing sprouting up all over the place?
Two wrongs don't make a right. However, three rights make a left.
L00k, w3'r3 r3f0rmed! W3'v3 g0t l1v3s n0w, 4nd 1'm 4 buz1n3ss Pwnz0r! -Reformed Freak Proprieter
Seek. Find. Rularuu.
Target. Destroy. Rularuu.
Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls. Rularuu.
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I've put "Ma preferred but NO FARMs plz" in my search comment.
I get tired of being invited to PuGs who seem to think I want to do nothing but farm. I join up, roll into a mission and see that huge Paragon City street map and just sigh...
[/ QUOTE ]
I agree about farming, however I always wonder when I see the automatic perception about a given map. I've played arcs on that map that were not farming missions. It's not my favorite map by a long shot -- believe it or not, I like the big CoT maps better. At least there, the environment itself is conducive to a "search" atmosphere; it "feels" right -- but the big city map itself is not limited to farming.
[/ QUOTE ]
I'm not saying it was by any means. In the past when I've - oh spit! - found myself recruited by a farming team (meaning about four times now), it's always been that map though; so when I see it now, I start to get wary.
I'm sure there are perfectly good SFMAs out there that use it. 
The 'meow' nonsense was a "code word" of sorts for a blatant exploit in the MA system that has since been fixed. People would include the word meow to facilitate searches so others could make use of the exploit and gain ridiculous amounts of experience.
The Devs are now in the process of punishing those who abused the system most grievously in this respect, up to and including the banning of accounts. Despite this, there are still people actively on the lookout for "the next meow farm". This is, as you might expect, something of an inflammatory issue.
Iscariot's Guide to the Tri-Form Warshade, version 2.1
I'm sorry that math > your paranoid delusions, but them's the breaks -- Nethergoat
P.E.R.C. Rep for Liberty server
Folonius wrote:
[ QUOTE ]
Just ask them ... If they lie, you can add them to your ignore list. It's not like ignore is even permanent anymore.
[/ QUOTE ]
I had to quote this part because it's so frikkin' true. Ignore is a temporary measure now.
--NT
They all laughed at me when I said I wanted to be a comedian.
But I showed them, and nobody's laughing at me now!
If I became a red name, I would be all "and what would you mere mortals like to entertain me with today, mu hu ha ha ha!" ~Arcanaville
The worst case of this nonsense that I've seen recently was on a Silver Mantis TF. Pickup group, started the TF, and in the first mission we're all fighting the first spawn except for the leader, who is nowhere to be seen and it not answering on the team channel. Then we notice that the leader for some reason has run to the end of the map and is still not answering requests from the team as to what the heck they're doing.
Finally we find out that the leader had recruited the team to grind the TF as fast as possible for merits and didn't even think to tell us all that. Apparently he had assumed that no one came to actually play through the TF, despite how many people on the team were only about 20-22 and would be getting a lot of XP from a normal run. The team disintegrated moments afterward.
[ QUOTE ]
Also, a year ago, I was playing another brute and I was invited to a team where the map we hit was the University basement.
Not knowing the "way things work" I clicked the crate to complete the mission, as I was conditioned by the normal game to do this.
I was instantly assaulted by (poorly spelled and in caps) profanity from the "mapholder" causing me to bow out, and it wasn't until a couple months later that I realized I was invited to a farm focused on not completing the objective.
[/ QUOTE ]
... from the invention tutorial? Why would somebody farm that? It has like six Council guys in it. Why not just grab a newspaper mission?
Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.