How do I team with playtimes like this?

So I seem to have some trouble actually playing this lovely game lately.

See, soloing is boring. I really enjoy playing on teams! And yet, I can't seem to do that either.
I have lots of time, and none of it is very close together. If I want to join a team I either A) Hope to dear god that I see one looking for people and have a character I actually want to play with them, or B) Start a team, spend more than half the time I have forming it, then have to leave halfway through the first damn mission.

And hell, C) Finding a steadier group of people to join up with whenever I'm on doesn't work either- In addition to liking team play, I also like actually following the story of story arcs, and with the completely random times I can be on or have to suddenly leave.. well, nobody has the patience for that kind of sticking around, and It'd be cruel to want someone to.

So I end up doing E) A jar of almonds.
Er, D) Solo for a minute or two and then get tired of being level 7, or 11, or 27, and fighting nearly-identical groups of foes a hell of a lot because I can rarely up the difficulty solo and live.

Global channels? Yeah, I keep those up, and once in a while I'm glad I do, as Virtue LFG makes A) up there actually possible. But only once in a while. Most of what's there is task forces which, if you hadn't guessed from my description of available playtimes, are right out.

What the hell should I do?


And I swear to god if you tell me to join a Supergroup I will bake your innards into a quiche and feed it to your SGmates.

Actively pursue global friends. Then, when you're on, ask around among them. If someone I knew and enjoyed playing with said "hey, I wanna do <x story arc>, wanna come help?", the answer would usually be "sure, sounds fun!". I don't usually have goals more sophisticated than "run into crowds of enemies and toe-bomb them" or "OMG I HAVE SO MANY COLORED AURAS". (Scary thought: I do NOT play this game high. I just really like bright colors.)

My guess is there's a fair number of people who'd be fine with doing that, and I usually find that even duoing most content makes it a lot more fun.

ETA: BTW, I will be polling SG folks to see whether they like quiche, and may get back to you with an additional suggestion depending on the outcome of the poll.

I'd just say stick with B, but just form small teams of three or four.

With short and erratic playtimes there's really no way to reliably get a full team without, as you said, wasting half your playtime already. Finding one or two people takes a whole lot less time than finding seven people, so really just ought to cut down on recruitment time and team-size.

I know how you feel, though, unlike you I can play for large chunks of time, I'm usually playing very late at night-wee hours of the morning and I hate being on teams that are just plowing through content so I can't even follow the story. While I can find teams, finding teams that are willing to slow down enough for me to follow the story is almost impossible

What I have found takes some of the tedium of soloing out for me is changing characters often (then again, I have severe altitis with 114 characters at the moment). Generally I play a character only while they have bars of patrol XP, so they level a bit faster.

Also, I will try to find a character's threshold by just changing one difficulty and run a mission. For example, change the difficulty to +1/1 level and see how well I can run that. If it works well up the difficulty to +1/2, and so on, until it stops being fun. I've found most characters in the teens (except my defenders) and higher can handle at least a little higher difficulty.

You might also try advertising in one of the server threads (if you only use one server) for like-minded people, likely to be on in the same time periods you are, who are understanding that you may have to keep popping in and out. That might get you some global friends as seeb suggested.

Sounds like your problem is more "half an hour at a time, unpredictably" than "playing at weird times".

I sort of figure that if most people can put together an hour block of time to watch a TV show, they should be able to put together an hour to play a game. Of course with Tivo I don't know if people DO put together an hour block of time to watch a TV show these days. And you may have something (tiny baby or "press button every 23 minutes to save world" or whatever) that limits your abilities in that direction.

One possibility: Teambuilding faster. How big do you make your teams? I find it easier to build teams of 2-4 than 6-8 . For my teambuilding I tend to use uparrow a lot: something like "/t $target, interested in a small team, 2-4 players, level 17 missions at +1/x2?" allows you to shotgun out invites to 10 or 20 people just by clicking on them in the search window and hitting enter,uparrow,enter . With a 2-4 person team you are usually fine with 10 or so invites.

On Virtue, make sure you use lots of parentheses. They might have you blacklisted if you're not as parenthetical as them.

I do agree with the server thread idea though as a real attempt at a solution for your 15-minute playtimes between spats of cleaning out kitty litter boxes and planning your next trip to Wal-Mart. Maybe you should re-evaluate the number of cats you're keeping too as they're apparently interfering with your gaming life.

Depending on your hours, look into the global channels for different timezones. Like Australia. I know there are others too. That might help rather than just the ones focused on specific servers.

My suggestion... run a few missions to build up some camaraderie with the players on the team. Then tell them you are wanting to find more regular players to team with, and send Global Invites.

We have global friends that will do a mission or two then duck out afk for a few hours and then come back. Just let them know if you can not start a tf or if you have limited time. Doing paper or radio missions should not matter and its all good.

I work a late shift and play between 1a-4a ET, but I'm usually able to put together a full PuG from scratch in under 5 minutes just about every night.

Here's how.

I just wanted to say that I got the "jar of almonds" bit and I am sad that "Whose Line" is no longer on nightly.