Why don't people start teams?
By
Aces_High,
Posted on: 2009-07-24 16:24 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
This is me starting a team:
Me: *recruits a few people* Okay, what's everyone want to do?
Guy 1: I dunno
Guy 2: R U real girl?
Guy 3: We need a healer
Guy 4: Let's do a AE farm
Guy 5: So what are we doing?
Me: Ya know what, I think I'm just gonna go solo for a while and go to bed.
Now this is me not starting a team:
Me: *solos and RPs with NPCs, entirely happy most of the time, occasionally joining a PUG with no thought to what to do next, just doing random stuff with other people deciding what to do* Man, I love this game!
That's why I don't start teams.
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Okay, what's everyone want to do?
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See, this is your problem right there. The first rule of being a leader is to always act like you know what you're doing.
I solo a lot and I team a lot. When I feel like teaming I never have any problem finding a team, even on Liberty heroside or Infinity villainside. First, I type up in a notepad file: "Hello. Would you like to join my team in Steel Canyon for some non-AE missions?" I then open up the team search window and copy and paste that via tell to a bunch of people in my level range.
As people come on the team I type; "Welcome aboard. I'm still recruiting so it'll be just a minute then we'll get started." Or words to that effect. I never type like l33t or plz or ltf? R u a r3l grl? I always type like my english teacher was watching. When you're leading a team that makes a huge difference.
Once I get a good balanced team going I pick a mission and we start rolling. If it's a story arc I'll type something like; "This contact has some great missions, but he has a bad habit of sending people to just about every zone there is. Sorry about that in advance everyone." Just one of the reasons I prefer Fly as my travel power. Try typing that while you're teleporting.
Watch what's going on. If people start griping about something try to address it. Kick trouble makers. Invite new people. If people start complaining; "ZOMG! We needs a healzor!" You could say something like; "Let's try one mission with what we got. If it doesn't work in this mission I'll recruit us one." Then just go into the mission. If someone is going to quit because you don't have a h3alz0r, or they don't like something you're doing then "Waaah." They can go solo or whatever while your new team of hotness has fun. If the team does well you'll be surprised how quickly peope will forget that h34Lz0rS [censored].
After a couple of missions I'll say; "Gotta dump off this loot/train up/bio break. Let's take five everyone. Smoke 'em if you've got em."
And my last tip: put a little effort into making it fun. Throw out a one-liner now and then. TGIF! Tanks Go In First! On characters that I team a lot with I'll even have a few macros to liven things up a bit. My main tank used to throw out lines like; "I'm here to kick butt and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of bubblegum." One macro would activate taunt and say; "Bring it on $target! I like it rough." Since my Tanker was a tall busty blonde that particular line was always good for a laugh or three.
Leading a team can be fun. Can it be hard? Sure, if you're the kind of person that frets about every little thing or actually loses sleep over whether some guy you don't know out there is still upset because you kicked him your team.
One thing I don't like doing is being a dictator. When I do lead, I take into consideration my team's desires. When I'm on a team where the leader has the attitude of "it's my way or the highway", I take the highway. When I put together a task force, I let people know that we're working together and everyone is not working for me. So while, as the leader, I reserve the right to make a final decision, I encourage people to speak up. Likewise, if I'm on a team and there's a problem and we're disorganized and not doing well, I'll speak up and try to organize us better with more effective tactics.
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The first rule of being a leader is to always act like you know what you're doing.
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There are some great teaming tips in this post. Thanks for sharing!
I don't mind starting teams. I generally ask for an existing team first for teh sake of efficiency but failing that I'll start looking for a gorup. usually the hardest part of that process is getting the first person. People may be lft but they don't want to be the first person required to get a team going.
There is a similar problem when recruiting for SG's. People want the SG completely formed they don't want to be part of the bedrock on which more people will join. *shrug*
I've never really had trouble keeping a full team. I never worry too much abou balance. sometimes I may go loooking for a specific AT but if it isn't there I find someone else. I don't have a big problem with lackeying players either althouh I try to keep it to a minimum. I alwas start on Heroic difficulty and only increase it after I see if the team is capable of working together. Not every random team can handle +5 missions on invincible. I prefer quicker easier more frequent missions to slow slugfests where the team has to stop after every mob to recoup.
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Because it's frustrating as heck.
I love redside. I play on Champion. Redside on Champion is dead. It was limping before Issue 14 and the Mission Architect, but Issue 14 and the Mission Architect honestly put the final nail in it.
Just last night, I was on my level 29 Thugs Mastermind. During the period of a hour and a half, there were exactly three people within 5 levels of me either way that weren't already on a team in the search window. I sent a tell to all three of them, asking if they'd be interested in teaming with me. One was busy selling and buying at the black market. The other two were only interested in AE farms.
Seriously, I don't know if it's like this on all servers, but AE killed what little redside activity Champion had.
At this point, I'm looking forward to Champions Online just so I can team with other super-powered players again.
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LOL, trust me when I say you will be SEVERELY disappointed if you think there's going to be a lot of teaming in Champions Online. It's the most team UNFRIENDLY game I've ever experienced. For various reasons that folks are going to see real soon.
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My experience, on both Freedom and Virtue, has been that:
<ul type="square">[*]Nobody will settle for anything less than a 6 person team. They would rather stand around for another hour, if that's what it takes, than enter a mission door with fewer than 6.[*]If you persuade, say, a 3 person team or a 4 person team to enter the first mission, every single one of them will quit if you don't have a 6-8 person team by the time they finish the first mission ... and they expect you to carry your weight on the team while you're scrolling through the /search window and corresponding with 10 or 15 potential team recruits via simultaneous tells. There are people who can multi-task that well. I'm not one of them.[*]People care a great deal about XP efficiency, reward, and risk avoidance. They also resent 5 minutes of travel time more than they resent 45 minutes of standing around while the team leader recruits. As a result, it's possible to recruit a team for AE boss farms. It's possible to recruit a team to grind /newspaper and police radio missions, if (and only if) you promise to stick to Freakshow when you can get them, and Council as your only fallback. It's usually possible to recruit a team for task or strike forces. Zone story arcs? Double (at least) your expected time to recruit. Classic CoH story arcs, mayhems, safeguards, Ouroboros, street sweeping in hazard zones, anything in a PvP zone? Forget it, never going to happen, period, no matter how long you spend trying to recruit.[*]After doing at most 3 missions with a 6-8 person team, one person (not unreasonably, since it took us an hour to recruit) has to log off. Five other people will take this as an excuse to quit the team, themselves, because "obviously" the team is breaking up. At that point, my choices are two: take another hour to recruit more people, or give up and go back to soloing.[/list]
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Matches my experience pretty well. That, plus that there are about 12 people total set to LFT at any point, so there are never nearly enough looking to put a team of the practically required 6+ size together in any given level range (this goes doubly when trying to do something wacky like put together a team in the RWZ, where sidekicks aren't much of an option thanks to it being a hazard zone.) I'll go through the whole global channels thing if I have missions and plan to run for hours or want to do a TF, but that's about it.
Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.
I have to be in a certain mindset to start my own team, because I've found many times it requires a level of *work* I don't want to bother with in my *game*.
If I'm feeling patient, starting a team is the way to go. But some days, many days, I don't want the headache.
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this goes doubly when trying to do something wacky like put together a team in the RWZ, where sidekicks aren't much of an option thanks to it being a hazard zone.
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Not to mention the annoyance of being unable to search for players on the other side while in RWZ. You'd think the Devs would have allowed the search tool to scan both sides when in a co-op zone.
We know it can do it, for the first month when CoV went live Search brought up Heros and Villains at the same time.
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See, this is your problem right there. The first rule of being a leader is to always act like you know what you're doing.
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Yeah, I'm well aware of why I don't make a good leader. I was simply pointing out why I don't want to be the leader. It's just not worth the effort when I can have fun without any of the effort.
Snippet:
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But teaming for zone (let alone regular) story arcs, Ouroboros arcs, mayhem or safeguard missions? I gave up long ago. I can solo three times as many of them as I could get done with a team in the same amount of time, because of the drastic reduction in standing-around time.
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Strangely, this isn't my experience at all.
I had a team of 5-8 people doing a regular contact's story arc versus Nemesis for.... oh, 4ish hours? It had a semi-rotating membership and we went to practically every dang zone in CoH for that contact. The pace was good, and the few deaths we had were resolved quickly and withot complaint. I have to admit, that when we got down to 4 between two missiosns I worried a bit... but then I got 3 tells from folks I had /tell-ed saying "Sure" and we were perfect again.