Yellow Dawn II: The Revenge of Bad Mission Design

My second failed PUG today through the LFG system was 3 tanks, 2 blasters, 2 brutes, and a war shade.

We got.... words that I shouldn't use on the forums.

Where is this Learning Curve there?
"Don't PUG"?
"Don't use the LFG tab"?

I ran Lambda four times today, and succeeded all four times. Some teams died more, others less; the last attempt was a breeze because we had a lot of debuffs.

The problem with the LFG tab is that there's no clearly defined leader. Just because someone got the star doesn't mean they have a clue of what to do. It's important for someone to start talking, and keep talking, informing people about what they're supposed to do.

When it comes time to split between lab and warehouse, let people know what they're looking for and what they're supposed to do with the temporary powers that drop. When you finish the sabotage, use ALL CAPS if necessary so people understand that they HAVE to look at their temp powers and hand them over, or you can't continue.

The LFG tab can work very well if at least one of the people who join the league is willing to actually lead it.

The problem I ran into repeatedly was the queue sticking me in small teams, and with a heavy melee concentration but very few control/buff/debuff ATs.

My first lambda, was done with the globals down, and the first 8 people that joined in the LGF system. I lead it (and i've only ran 2 lambdas on test, 1 fail, 1 win) and we won, first time. got all 10 acids, all 10 grenades, and downed maraduer with no problem.

Second run, we got cocky, and tried for master of, and we failed. so horribly. but it was still fun. Third time, won, fourth, won, fifth, won. did 2 Bafs, failed both.

For my server, and group of people, Lambda is already on farm. We queue, we rock, we get our threads/astrals/components, we requeue, and go again. Baf is gonna be tough, but i figure once we start getting higher destiny powers (or even stacked interface powers) baf will be a lot easier to manage.

Read the guides, learn what your doing before you do it, and you wont faceplant the entire mission. There are 2 very GOOD guides out there on how to do the lambda, and how to do the BAF. follow them, and you'll win.

I don't think the mission design of Lambda is irretrievably broken, but pick-up groups are choking on all of the issues I predicted that they would after running it with a series of unsuccessful PuGs on the beta server:

1) Without clear instructions to the contrary, you can't stop half the people from trying to rush the Sentry, which does nobody any good and just leads to team wipes.

2) Without more time and clearer instructions, people aren't gathering anywhere near enough molecular acid to shut down the portals, and since the instructions on how to find it in your power tray (especially if, like a lot of people, your toolbars were full during that part) and how to consolidate the temp powers are not provided in the mission itself. So teams get utterly swarmed.

3) If you let the LFG Queue tool build your teams, it launches you in with a random team of 9 people which might not have any tanks, might not have any debuffs, might not have any buffs. And even if they do everything right, I'm not convinced that a randomly generated team of 9 people can finish that final stage. Also, no matter who checks what radio buttons in the LFG window, it stops adding people at 9, period, so if you are light on something or other, you will never get it.

What I suggested at the time, I still suggest:

A) Clearing the walls and the courtyard should be a mandatory step before the door to the Sentry unlocks. And ...

B) The gather-weapons phase needs clearer instructions in-game.

C) The queue tool needs to take all the people who volunteer to join a raid in progress and keep adding them until the raid is full.

And, now that I think of it, maybe instead of trying to paper over a bad UI choice with written instructions, maybe what the molecular acid and pacification grenade really needs is a different UI. Maybe instead of using the normal temp-powers interface, you should take a tip from the Warburg nuke mission and put those two powers on the Target windoid, with a counter next to each one for how many you have in your inventory?

And, yeah, 5 minutes isn't enough. Not for content that allows PuGs. It can take most of that time just to get the cats all hearded up the elevators.

It took me about a year of casual being aroundyness to actually complete an STF, when that first came out I read all the guides, I ran it constantly and I just couldn't get it. There was PuGs, Global Channel teams, SG teams, nothing worked!

So I gave up, I decided that the end game content wasn't going to fit for me. Called it bad design and left it alone. Now I can't recall the last time I had much of a problem with it.

Last night, after having only tried the Lambda briefly on test I did BAF>LAM>BAF>BAF>BAF

Of which we failed>WON>WON>boot crash>Fail>Fail (because of a UI bug)

My point is, at the start, it's just luck, and hoping you team with knowledgeable and good players, on the first day saying "Oh I'm never gonna win this", being rude and throwing toys out of the pram isnt good feedback, and isnt giving the new content a go.

Quote:

Originally Posted by VoodooGirl [*]Watching out for the Spinning Disco Portal of D00M!*

Wow, it's been live for one day and people are already declaring it to be too hard and an example of bad design.

Reminds me very much of:

ITF
STF
LRSF
Kahn
Barracuda
Hamidon
Ship Raids
Apex
Tin Mage

Did I miss any?

Every single one of those things were declared "too hard" and "badly designed" when they were first released, because PuG groups couldn't just mash buttons and complete it in a half hour.

It has been ONE DAY people. Is it not the slightest bit possible that maybe there is a learning curve to it? No, can't be, it's GOT to be bad design, that's the only possible answer.

Now, if it's around for a year and people are still having the same amount of problems with it, maybe then I'll concede there are enough flaws to constitute "bad design". After only one day though, I'll treat the knee jerk reactions to it with the credulity they deserve.

For the record, I tried and failed a Lambda Sector in the little bit of time I had to play. And I saw what we did wrong right away. It wasn't a case of it being badly designed, we just plain screwed up.

I'll outright say that the amount of defense ignoring AoE is outright bad design when one of your classes/arch-types relies on pets for both damage and survivability is bad game play design.

I'll also say that making another three classes/archtypes almost completely sidelined during an encounter is also bad game play design.

This is hilarious! No seriously I think this is just absolutely GOLDEN. People think this is the worst communication from the Dev team ever? Have you even SEEN what happened during i13 with the PvP changes? REALLY?! God people are spoiled in this game.

On TOP of that I have run BAF and Lambada multiple times and haven't won either of them yet and you know what? I think they are the best thing ever added to this game. They are HARD for once this game has HARD content and people whine all the way to the forums just like they do anytime something remotely challenging gets released. People can't stand to lose in this game on a sickening level. Every single time I have run these trials I KNOW that they can be done if people would just do what they needed to do rather then treat it like another tank and spank like this game has always been up until now.

As much as people like to feel special if you don't know what you are doing in these raids then let someone who does guide you. If the only thing stopping a PUG from completing it is the fact that people can't be bothered to pay attention then it isn't a design flaw, it is a player flaw.

So you know what? Good job devs. You've finally made challenging content that is fun to play, because overwhelming success isn't always fun and failure and learning are a lot more fun.