Something needs to be done about the PUG situation

OK. I have had a pretty nice time playing up til now, but the further I progess in the game, it seems, the more idiotic people in PUGs (Pick Up Groups) become. I have just reached thunderhead keep, and I have been there for the past 3 days off and on trying to complete this mission. First of all, it IS a hard mission to complete and second, the demand for monks in this zone is overwhelmingly high and to even get a balanced group that could beat the mission is hard in the first place. Now, I have attempted this mission some 20 times so far, each has ended because of some moronic thing somebody has done. Seriously. Every group that ive been in for this mission so far, there has been at least one person using all caps, or will not listen to the strategy, who will go ahead and aggro mobs anyways, who will rush when somebody is afk, who will blatantly try to fail (for example one guy just stood there and didnt move and said "bla bla either you fail or you complete the mission for me") after we were halfway through. Then you have the people who constantly argue, leave in the middle, etc.

I have tried this with henchmen to no avail...the king follows me and you cannot control him and the henchmen to pull groups and that sort of thing so we always end up dying. Something needs to be done about this. Either henchmen need to be made much stronger, or the mission needs to be a lot easier, or some kind of idiot detterent system because im ready about to quit the game because of this. Its pretty sad when you cant advance your character because of other people's idiocy.

i totally agree with everything stated by original poster

i say either fix the henchmen AI so that they don't suck, plus infuse all henchmen

or boost all henchmen HP by 50x (not exaggerating here)

or make it so that you can teleport anyone you want into your town (even if they've never been there before)

this business of being forced to have to party with the few people who happen to be in the same instance of the same town as you - 85% of more of which totally suck at PVE -is killing the gameplay and making Guild Wars not be fun

I agree henchmen need a better ai and more controls: playing with real chr's is fun but some missions need a perfect team, and than the weakest link will always break the chain. It should be possible to choose for a party of henchmen and really have a fair chance to complete the mission.

I never understood the deal with the rushing fools. I sortof understand the total f^ckwads who actually play to ruin for everyone else, they're just wired wrong and Guildwars should have a votekick & real /ignore so you could get rid of them, but what's the deal with the rushers?

You know them - the guys who hits the ground running and will just keep running into encounter after encounter without caring about tactics or energy levels or health, not even their own, like the mission was timed and every second counted. On my last mission we had one of these guys, and he died I think four times on the mission, plus he fuxxored the bonus. No one else died, although it was close since we constantly had to clean up his messes, and he wouldn't have had to die a single time either, if he'd just been a bit more laid back.

I passed it the first try with both my characters.

The first was a R/Me and we had a perfect team, we split evenly in half and stayed on our sides, unless the other needed help. Easily won it.

The second time on my E/Mo I was the healer and I had a henchman for backup, a few times people went down because we camped the middle and the henchman died atleast a dozen times. But it went well I thought, considering that some people spend days there.

The only thing I can say is that you need to do one group at a time. It's simple really, reminds me of Althea's Ashes in a way.

Those rushers are populary known as "Leeroys", from Leeroy Jenkins, a WoW player from PALS FOR LIFE, who, after being AFK while someone planned a hard battle, came back, and rushed in, screaming: "Okay, thumbs up, let's do this, LEEEROY JEEEENKINS!!!!", destroying their strategy, and killing them all.
There has been a lot of wannabe Leeroys in WoW after that, and it seems to have come to GW.
Yesterday in Thirsty River, we had a suicidal monk, who just ran straight into the first group of Devourers, without the rest of the group. What an idiot.

www.wimp.com/leeroy

_Zexion

Yes henchmen can be a complete pain, and they do stupid things at times. I agree with that but I also disagree because I took henchmen and beat the game with them during majority of the missions except 2 or 3. The most annoying thing is when Alesia or Mhelno run into a mob to ressurect someone when you don't want them to or they try tanking. However they key to using henchmen is patience, extreme patience. Be careful when to move to attack or trying to slip by mobs. Second I find that the order in which henchmen are in party helped me. I notice when I had 7 henchmen that if I chose warriors and melees first, then did my casters warriors were in front close with me and casters were back a bit. This doesnt solve their stupidity at times but it did make a big improvement especially during last mission.

Example of my party:
^(Me)
^(Devona) ^(Little Thorn)
^(Aiden) ^(Protect Caster) ^(Enchant)
^(Cynn) ^(Mhelno)

When moving my group usually looked somewhat like this. Not exact but similar. If I hired casters first you'd see Mhelno and Cynn where Devona and Little Thorn. This is not a huge difference but it was enough for me especially during last method. I've not tested this thouroughly but I will keep trying and checking from now on when I form my NPC party. Good luck hope this helps somewhat with the NPC problems.

As you all know, Gates of Kryta is a the first "challenging" mission and is a pain in the donkey when played with a bad group.
I found a working strategy.
First announce you are building a group.
Explain that:
a) You lead
b) You call targets
c) You all stick together
d) If anyone disagrees with a,b and c, he may leave.
e) If a, b or c is not respected, you will leave.

Then when everyone agree, you ask if they are ready. If someone is not replying for long without saying something like 'afk' before, kick him and get another. Once you start playing, if you see someone running off tell him that you lead. If the party scatters, leave and restart the process.
Yesterday, tired from 7 attempts at Gates of Kryta I blew the undead away with a party of 5 (including me). Only two people died in the process and only near the end.

Yeah, I always do that.. Just did that with one group, looked like a very nice group..right off the bat one of the monks starts charging ahead and crap..did it the whole time, but surprisingly we made it.

LEEEEEROOOOOOOOOY

rofl

There is no code available to keep out the bad players.

Just today a buddy of mine and I were trying to get to a spot and another player was looking for help to get there. We kept getting our asses handed to us and then we realized that we were dying because we relied on this new player to hold up his end. He kept running into groups and luring monsters by the dozens right on top of us. When we told him not to rush he told us his system was out of date... AMD 3Dnow or whatever... I think it was equal to a P2-400 ... Cripes, thats gotta be the dumbest thing ever. How the hell can a guy get 17th level on a POS system like that???

Anyway, we went back and replaced a couple of npcs with actual players (levels 20 and 18) these 2 were worse than the NPCs. I kept raising all 3 players more times than the npc. Then the new new players decided to drop without telling us. Litterally screwing us over.

Sorry to say but when we ended up back at the town. We took all NPCs and finished the quest.

Where the F***! are these people coming from? =\

Indeed, I am a Pure Monk, and really do enjoy playing the class and healing people.

I can't say I have had any bad groupings yet doing Quests and Missions, but in PvP matches what an attitude some of these people have.

I also take Henchmen a lot, so might be the reason why I haven't had a bad time yet. :P Hopefully..anyways....

*****
FIX HENCHMEN PLEASE!
*****

I just wasted 45 minutes trying to do the bonus in "The Wilds" mission. First, I didn't know what it was, so when I finally found it( Centaur thingy or whatever ) I was cruising along looking for the place, and four of my five henchmen died. when life pods and some seed things just WOULD NOT stop spawning from NO WHERE.

So, here is Alesia and myself..I have Banish and Bane Signet, doing 103 dam total + my measly 5-10 weapon + whatever she can do, 5? heh..anyways.

Her and I vs two Life Pods, stalemate. So I say screw it, run up where there was eight or so crits, get my WHOLE team up and ressurected, and when I go to retreat to fight another day, I find....that my henchmen have BLOCKED me from moving at all.

I mean wtf, I had the critters in front, ALL attacking me( are the henchmen invisible, or what? ) and all my henchmen standing right next to me twiddling their thumbs as I tried in vain to back the hell up. Once I realized it was futile, I just stopped and started healing myself but couldn't keep up.

Freaking pure Monk with four healing spells, and I couldn't keep myself alive, and I bet Alesia was healing me too..damn little...errrrrr. And I still died, and then sat there and watched for 15 mins, since once I died everyone's stats seemed to get all hyped up and suddenly the monsters couldn't kill my henchmen as easily, and my henchmen couldn't kill them, either.



Henchmen AND pugging needs to be fixed, so a person can choose, and know their choice is a good one for them.

Inac

...Which is why the U.S. army does not use games of this kind to recruit potential troops

Id love to see a VOTE option. basically you can vote a player out of the group if everyone else agrees.

so if you have some smartarse saying "complete the mission for me or fail it for everyone" - you can just say "ok everyone vote him" and boom! he gets kicked and a random henchie is teleported there in his place.

it would stop abuse, because the whole team would have to agree to vote, it wouldnt completely nerf your team because you would atleast get a henchie to help make up for the loss, and it would give players a chance to make these morons stop acting like selfish pricks.

Yeah, there needs to be some sort of system to prevent people from exploiting others gametime by purposefully ruining the game for them.

I don't get why everyone says Thunderhead is hard. I did it on my first try with people who've never done it before with only the 2 NPC henchmen as healers and no warrior tanks. I thought it was easy compared to Thirsty River. The only more difficult parts were probably the stone summit, the mursaat were cake as we always had 1 person manning the catapults and pelting them to death. The Mursaat Boss died in a few seconds and so did the last boss, so I dont' see what's so hard about it.

Mate that totally depends on the team, i did Thirsty River and succeded only trying once... we had solid strategy and it worked great... (wait for timer to reach 2 minute mark, warriors tank the enemies, i as ranger go kill the priest...), i think only 2 of us died once...

I did Thunderhead keep 4 times now (didnt have time to try it more times), and i failed 4 times by the lack of intellegience of my human teammates :P

And then im talking about stuff like people rushing in, people not sticking to the plan...

Big example was the part right before you get to the fort where you are attacked there is a sort of wall with some giants on top, and down below is a Beast master boss or something.... so our team decided that we attack the giants on top first, then the beast master to prevent being ganged from 2 sides... This worked out pretty good, monks kept in the back... but suddenly we were still halfway in killing the giants, the monk suddenly went into the usual rambo style like alesia (note im talking about a human player lvl 20), and started charging a full group of beastmasters and other dwarfs...
The biggest problem was that not only did that leave our group unhealed, also the monk took both henchmen... this kind of stuff is jsut totally stupid...

Another thing i hate, maybe hate most is people leaving for dinner etc when ur 1/4th into the mission... i can understand when the mission is going on for 20 minutes or more... but when we only started 15 minutes ago and 3 people drop out because they have to go... that pisses me off...

---

About how to counter this... well you cants sadly... making henchmen better should be done anyway...

Kickvote / leader can kick - is just switching troubles... you can kick people who are anoying, but that only leaves you with less people... i mean 8 people with 2 annoying rushers wont make it... but neither will 6 people...

Not to mention the abbuse which will come from this... just imagine you are nearly finished after 60 minutes of hard working for a mission, and then you get kickvoted at the end for nothing (only needs 4 friends to do this, or with leader vote only 1 leader)...

Thunderhead is annoying but passable with henchies, as long as you pull mobs apart with longbow. Just wait until you reach Ring of Fire, I'm stuck there because henchies get owned by mursaat 24/7 and I don't have resurrect (I'm not a monk). So far I've found only one group with decent players and that fell apart when monk of the group dropped out...

At least I've got chicken ;p

But yea, PUG's tend to be awful at times. But sometimes you can get some really friendly parties that are fun. Sadly, those are few and far between

By no way my post meant to help distinguish the good players from the bad players. That's impossible to do until you played with them. You just have to show them who's the boss. They are like jackals in all aspects.

Uh, because the U.S. military isn't anything like that.

As a W/Mo I always tell the Team Leader before we leave that I DO NOT CHARGE in unless we are ready for that. They laugh and say cool.... I try to help the leader keep the team together. To me allot of them just play to darn fast...stop for a minute..think it through..let people recharge/heal.

While my friend and I play we use TS on his server. We always talk it out. He is a E/Mo and will put the spell of "protection/healing?" on me then have me charge to the Warlock/spellcaster/etc. Get rid of him(s) and move to the lesser bad guys. We even join groups now and just use the TS between ourselves unless there is someone that understands how it works and we will allow him/her to join his server as a guest. There are a few good people out there now that look for us to be online and want to quest with us, because they know that we do not want to just waste our time dying! We always try to draw off some of these bigger groups of bad guys and pick them off before we do the big clean out. Makes sense to play smart. To me no one is powerful enough to just win on brute force.

in and of themselves, no mission in Guild Wars is "hard" persay. when you have idiot allies (which you usually will in any PUG), it is then that the missions become hard

Look at it this way topic poster, you might think some people are complete idiots, but hey, some players might think YOUR a complete idiot. It's just standards and level of play. PVE cannot structure itself to keep the lower skilled or higher to themselves, so it's a no go. Don't take this personally, I'm just trying to say, everyone has different standards, so no matter how stupid you think someone acted in a PUG, remember, they probably have that mindset in play, and just aren't use to it. I mean, it just goes to show how wide of an audience Guild Wars attracted. People who aren't very qualified to be "good teamates" from other areas still want to play this game. Rather then whine about them, either stop playing with them, or try to help them. If they refuse the help, then stop bothering. it's the way games are.

I don't have a problem using henchmen as far as AI is concerned. It's their lack of armor infusion which really screws them over in missions where you really need infused players.

I think it only took me about 6 tries to do Thunderhead Keep successfully. Then again, I play a rather good Monk so all I need for success in most missions are capable damage dealers.

In general, PUGs are pretty ineffective. I've yet to find a way of getting them reliably successful, due to the game's emphasis on skill. Even my 'strategy' of adding skliled players to my friends list seems poor, given that I don't seem to ever contact those players a second time - chances are they'd be in a different part of the storyline than me.

I think it'd be helpful if districts were a bit larger, and if AFK players were kicked to an AFK district after ~10 minutes so there's a higher concentration of players in each district who are actually looking for groups. Either that, or have an LFG system which lets you search across all districts - perhaps even across multiple zones (the Ascension area in particular would benefit particularly well from that type of system.)

'Only' six tries? I was pretty upset when thunderhead took me six times due to droppers. :|

"Only", in relation to the original poster's twenty tries.

I was disappointed that it took that many tries too, due to suicidal W/Mos, players not respecting aggro radius, players not being fully infused, and various other incompetance which was entirely out of my control. For PUGs, six tries is pretty decent; at least from my experience and from the "20 tries" horror stories I hear other players talk about.

That's the funniest clip I've seen in a while, ty.