New Party Search Option - Worthwhile or a Dud?

I made exactly the same statement in saying that the majority of PUGs I have ever been in were not fun to take part in, due to anti-social behaviour, arrogance, and sheer elitism.

Are you going to suggest that i'm lieing too? Are you going to have the arrogance to suggest that my experiences are not valid or never happened?

You cant make a statement suggesting that someones own experiences in GWs or the real world are a lie just because you havent experienced the same thing.

Thats like suggesting the world is a nice peacefull place, where people dont inflict violence on others because you have never experienced it and we'll just say those who have are lieing.

From my experience and the experience of others, the majority of PUGs that we have all taken part in are not fun to be in. Its a proven fact from out experience because we experienced it. You cannot deny that and you dont have the right to do so.

No one would ever suggest that 100% of PUGs are all like that, but unfortunately from certian peoples experience 95% are bad and ruin it for the rest of us.

This is why we dont PUG, this is why we dont interact with others, because the alot of the time you have to endure attitudes which make the game worse.

But why this has anything to do with the new party system I dont know. How the party system can possible contribute to forming a bad PUG is beyond me. Joining a PUG on there is no different to spamming the chat window with "LFG...." for 30 minutes.

Its just absolutel obsurd that people are suggest the new party system contributes to bad PUGs. Its the usual excuse of "we cant find anything else to blame for it, so lets blame the new technology" which is either the party search option or heroes.

People are never willing to accept that the issues with PUGs is purely down the people inside them. The humans in the game. NOT the game.

I'll never say that I mastered all the experiences. However, I will say that with henchmen, and now with heroes as well, I've henched every area that is possible to hench and completed it. I cannot say that about PuGs, not by a long shot.

GW is based on skill, not levels and uber gear. That is why there are so many terrible PuG experiences.

After a day at work when at best I can only sit down for 1-2 hours of GW if I'm lucky, I don't want to waste that time by (possibly) redoing a mission several times with a PuG when I know I can get through it faster the first time with henchies with a high chance of success and no frustration.

Again, since GW is supposed to be a game that's not time-intensive, what you described probably took twice as long to complete and had quite a bit of immature frustrations. Why would someone want to subject themselves to that? In other words, what you described wouldn't have been enjoyable to alot of people.

There are also a number of classes that just aren't wanted in the majority of PuGs. If you're not a War, Monk, Ele or MM, you're chances of getting a group drop dramatically. So why should I waste an hour trying to get in a PuG with my mesmer/assassin/beastmaster...etc? If you say that's the elitests speaking, then the vast majority of PuGs are elitests, because that's all I see in outposts as far as groups forming.

Well, first off, the reason the party search feature is not effective, has nothing to do with any flaws. It is a great system and will work very well. The problem is that no one uses it. Plain and simple. You can't say something that isn't used is flawed. It is not, it is a great system and if you used it, you would realize that.


Your experience is a valid point, but the experience of others. Whatever.
While you chide me for speaking on the behalf of the experiences of others, you make an impossibly broad generalization, I bet base on forums you have read, regarding the community. Remember this, while a great number of people post in forums an exponentially greater number of people play GW.

To say 95% of all PUGs in the game are terrible is wrong.
Saying 95% of forum posters would probably be slightly more believable, albeit, still vastly incorrect.

I personnally believe this not to be the entire reason. It seems to me, through the various I hate PUG posts I have read in forums on this site as well as others that there is something else behind the lack of social interaction in the GW community.

The search option would have been a success back when there was only Prophecies, where playing in PuGs was very common. After Factions came out, PuGs deteriorated a lot because during the late game (where it was actually difficult to do missions with all hench groups), Kurzick and Luxon was split, and the missions only had a populated district. After Nightfall came out, PuGs are almost dead, most experienced players have more success with heroes and hench than trying to lead a PuG. Since many experienced players decided to only hero/hench missions, the quality of PuGs declined even more.

I think the PuG is dying off, not that the search option isn't working. More and more people choose not to PuG any more, so it is very hard to find a PuG team (and even harder to find a good one).

I like the party feature and whenever I am forming a group I always take the time to post in it along with spamming in local what I am looking for. Every now and then I get people who respond to my post in the party window however most my people come from my spamming in local. All and all I like it, I just wish more people would use it because so many people are lfg in local but are unlisted in the party window and with some towns it is hard to pick them out of the chatter.

Secondly, I got a few things to say about this pug issue. For me (and my experiance in DoA for the last 5-6 weeks) most pugs are horrible. This is why it takes ~ a week to get a single area cleared. However, the pug being terrible should not be taken as EVERYONE in the pug being terrible. I have run across some players that they look at something and say "All your bases are belong to us" and that thing is either dead or near invincibly healed. Despite this people rage and quit or do things that they should know better then to... like casting firestorm on a tank that has held agro. As for the reason for the cookie cutter build is because the average pug player (in general, do note the exceptions above) is because we know it has a high probability of success. When you know most likely you are going to get sub-par players who won't listen when you say things like "Do not take quest" or "Do not rebirth him" or "Wait for us to be ready to agro" you need every edge you can get. If everyone played at a competent level then the quests would go by quickly and everyone would be happy. I would however, like to say I have enjoyed some of my pug experiances despite them failing and the overal distaste for them (I know oxymoronic but I will explain). Although the thing went worse then Chernoble (SP) I met someone who is now on my friends list and I can talk to and I can help and they will help me. For me this is what pugging is about, meeting those few players with the same play style with me. And for those wondering here are what I see as the major downfalls of a pug group:
1) Rage quitters: Most people rage the moment things go south or join lacking the time to finish.. even when given a time estimate of how long mission or quest will take.

2) Sub-Par players: When I say sub par players I am referring to things like warriors who do not know how to body block. True, most classes with high armor can tank (Like dervish) but tanks should know how to correcty body block seeing how that is their main role in several missions. Or people who use skills that are not very good, firestorm anyone? Mending on a healer monk? Mending Healsig wamo? You get the idea.

3) Arrogent players: I admit of being this one every now and then, the elitist come out sometimes I guess. However, I try to keep it friendly. Instead of saying something like "You F---ing noob don't do that." Or "Noob watch out for that" I try to phrase it something like "Please watch agro everyone. It sometimes can be tricky, though you probably already know that." However, I have had some really terrible players. Partically one who continuly insulted the tank we had who was doing a most excellent job. The tank asked for an apology and the other person called him some rather unpleasent names which are breaking the user endagreement, called us all pve noobs, deered us then raged. That or players just because someone is still learning refuses to deal with them. I enjoy teaching new players who want to learn and who learn at a fairly rapid pace. Nothing against them, it is cool to see someone who sucked at first then 20-30 minutes they are playing like a pro.

4) General intolerance for non-cookie cutter builds. Remember the big MoF fade in DoA? No one would join your group unless you were running MoF.. and MoF was not that good anyway. But this is a testiment to our general lazyness. Why come up with something else when someone else has taken the time to test something and work out the problems?

EDIT
5) Time to make a pug. It still takes anywhere from 45-60 minutes to make a pug group even with the new party feature... this is enough to make half the party leave so you have to find new people... till you find people paticent enough to stay... and get that one rambo (almost everytime) who rushes through everything and messes it up for everyone else.

Cheers.

Why does no one use it?

As I said in another thread about Party/Trade search system:
It is very nice, though I would like to have ability to type 80+ characters per line, not 30 or so... or maybe even multi-line...
Otherwise people will be using old way to sell/buy as they can advertise more then one item and be more specific about it.
ANet, please fix this, it is a one dot in the code, not even a line :-)