Radio missions causing stupidity

I present to you the following anecdotal evidence, both of which are amusing and sad.

#1

Teamed with a PUG in Steel Canyon, the leader decides to do a "normal" mission and not just a random radio mission (i.e, one from a contact with an actual plot). It happens to be the Tsoo mission with the hacker, where you must first rescue him and then escort him to a computer to get some information.

Everything is going pretty well, there are a few deaths but we are making progress. We finally reach the hacker and rescue him, only for someone to escort him back to the entrance. I try to explain in team chat that we need to do take him to the computer(rest of the team remain silent), which is located on the map, however this guy ignores me and takes him down all the elevators and to the mission door. We then get a load of "???"'s in team chat while I try to explain again why the mission hasn't completed. After I explain, the guy says he is confused and quits the team, leaving the hacker on the bottom floor.

Eventually we do manage to get the hacker to the computer but I feel like im babysitting a team that has had Mass Confuse used on it.

#2

After finishing a bank mission where I helpfully explained to someone how to get inside the bank (yes this person claimed he never could do bank missions), we travelled to IP for a bit of a change of scenery. We get the mission where we must go to Striga Isle. Of course most of the team have no clue how to get there and so I personally escort them to the boat.

Then we finally reach Ms. Peebles when the team starts to gather by the door to her left. "Aren't you going to click on her?" I said to the team lead, to which he replied "Everyone wait inside." Does the rest of the team challenge him? No, they attempt to run into the building behind Ms. Peebles. *Facepalm*. So I reiterate in caps that they need to speak to the contact.. but by then I had already given up hope on the team.


So, anyone else have any funny stories like this? I think its a real shame a lot of the population who probably live in the 1-30 bracket have such a simplistic time in this game. Isn't it about time we do away with the boring repeatable missions with no plot and instead open up all the contacts in this game (without having to be introduced to them) and show some of these players how great CoH/CoV really is.

Radio missions don't cause stupidity. In fact, they're probably the smartest way to get right to running missions, since every other way is, as you aptly described, more convoluted. It is rather unfortunate that the easiest and most convenient path to gameplay is also the one that offers the least interesting gameplay, but that's hardly the fault of the players.

I also have some doubts about citing familiarity with the poorly designed legacy systems of a pretendy fun time game as proof of intelligence.

Some people want their gaming experience to be simple. They don't want to deal with the markets and timed missions and Fed-Exs and hunts, etc. They just want to long in and hack, slash or blast stuff into submission.

Are they missing a lot content? Yeah, probably, but as long as they are getting their money's worth and they keep paying that monthly fee, so be it. It can be annoying to team with someone in the 20-30 range that doesn't know some of the mechanics of the game that you or I find second nature, but 7 or 8 times out of 10, when I show someone something they didn't know they could do, the response I get is, "Cool!" or "Thanks, I didn't know you could do that."

But none of that is meant to rain on this thread. Funny PuG stories are fun to read, so hopefully we'll always have noobs to openly mock, and newbs to poke good-natured fun at.

Rather than radio missions causing stupidity, I think this is more a case of AE babies not really learning the game at all while they button mash.

Yah anytime I see someone doing something truly "stupid", I remind myself that children as young as 4 and 5 years old play this game too.

Which also makes me look in the mirror and wonder what the hell I'm doing with my life.

Wicked Wendy, when it comes to TFs my personal experience is that there are a LOT of players that try to stealth and speed run everything and they get confused when they discover that not everyone on the team is built that way. I've had a TF or two that worked just like your experience. Mission starts, a couple of people take off and expect the whole team to somehow keep up. I just shake my head in those scenarios. I remember one Sharkhead SF in which the team leader said, "Just run past the spawns and pop inspirations to stay alive if you don't have stealth." You can imagine how well that worked.

I've gotten to the point that I always ask when joining a TF/SF if they intend on it being a speed run or not.

Haha, sorry for the mind-numbing annoyances of that team

Radio missions don't cause stupidity.
Intelligence causes stupidity.

Unfortunately... those few of us who do not achieve stupidity must suffer for it.

As far as Radio Mission only people and AE babies, what I want to know is what started the Rush Mayhem trend that I've seen waaay too much PUGing redside.

Not fighting to the bank. Nooo, that would be too easy. Now a lot of players seem to think that running/stealthing straight to the bank (a la Safeguards) is the way to do a Mayhem mission.

And, as I've had players tell me, it's a 50/50 chance you'll complete the mission because of the big Longbow ambush that magically pops up when you get to the bank, so it doesn't matter how you do the mission.

good luck D.B.B.

It took me a while to get the hang of Mayhem missions. Our first one failed big time because we tried to do it like a safeguard. Our second failed when we took up the suggestion to have an "experienced villain" show us the ropes. We found a guy who said he had run it dozens of times with the vet badges to show for it but he ran straight for the bank too. On our third attempt we followed the advice I had gotten from a forum post and it worked like a charm. It really is easy once you know what to do.

But almost every PuG I join that does a mayhem is a disaster. Even if the leader has the right attitude it doesn't always help because the team scatters and the longbow end up picking us off individually. Then it turns into a jail break with 2-4 longbow ambushes milling in the police station creating a basically impassable barrier. I don't join PuG mayhems anymore. I've had enough of those.

Other than that, I don't have much trouble with them. The worst I'd say are the ones where the star is inexperienced and doesn't allow anyone else to take the lead (not the star, just the lead). They tend to be long stretches of milling confusion punctuated by moments of stark terror. Definitely fun in their own chaotic way.

I've been on a lot of PuG TF's and Melancton's post relates my experience with those exactly.

As far as the rushing ahead on a Task Force goes, communication goes a long way.

Example One: The SG I'm in, Hero Force on Virtue, run a LOT of TFs. I know when MG is running the TF we're going to stealth as much as we can (probably because we want to run 3 more TFs that day, heh). This is usually true when others in the SG are running too. But the leader will TELL people that we're stealthing this mission, MG's toons are almost always equipped with recall friend no matter the AT so that we can summon the rest of the team, and people in the SG generally know what to expect if they've been on more than a couple of TFs with the SG. (And when I respec'd Mouse Police I built her to have superspeed very early and equipped her with a stealth IO, and I have ATT so I can stealth and teleport the team at least once on a TF).

Anyway, results are, nobody is caught off guard or surprised at what we're doing. Usually.

Example Two: My two friends from another SG, who pretty much form a 2-man SG and do things together. They have exceedingly well-IO'd toons and can speed and stealth, and will do that when they run a TF. They aren't built to port others. They typically don't warn anyone else. The rest of the TF (apart from me and one other friend of theirs that sometimes is on) is made up of PuG members. As a consequence, people don't know what's going on, get mad, get into big arguments with the ones leading the TF, and their usual response is, "Don't worry! Enjoy the ride!" Because frankly they can duo the TF without help.

End result: people get mad, people think they're jerks. But it's mostly a communication thing. If they took ten seconds to say, "We're going to stealth this mission, hang on," that would solve most of the problem, and if they worked harder to include the rest of the team when it was appropriate (teleporting everyone in to face a final boss for example) then that would solve nearly all of the problem.

And if you say, "speed run" or "normal speed, kill most/all run" before the TF, which people tend to do for ITFs but not for other task forces, that would go even further towards keeping people from getting angry or confused later on.

But yeah, my favorite "newbie" comments are generally people on a TF who are really surprised after 3 missions that we're not already done, or who disconnect and come back and are amazed that they're still on the team. And then there was the one guy who suffered through a very long task force (Synapse I think), asking when we'd be done, and then as soon as we'd defeated the final boss he quit, before we'd cleared the room and gotten the task force completion message (and the rewards). All we could do was laugh, poor guy.

We ran a Hess TF yesterday with someone who was really impressed by how cool it was, seeing the robot through the window and then later fighting in the room where the robot was. I like it when I get to introduce cool parts of the game to people who haven't experienced it before.

Saying what I already said, but in different words:

Radio missions encourage ignorance. That's an unfortunate design decision. Talking about evidence of player ignorance created by design decisions is useful; laughing at players for following the path the design creates for them is just kind of mean.

AE missions cause ignorance. Radio missions enable ignorance.

I actually kind of agree. The badge is the only really important part of the mayhem.

I dread mayhem/safeguard after-completion confusion on teams, though. You always seem to have somebody that is intent on doing the sides and the other half of the team just wants to exit.

Plus that all too common bug where parts of the Hero's ambush end up stuck somewhere instead of entering the bank. Generally because of those stupid bugged longbow eagles and their stupid slow hovering instead of flying. It's like having Vahzilok zombies shuffle at half speed towards something, and then forget what they were doing.