Organica

Wow, I had no idea that' s how team teleport worked. That's incredibly stupid.

Can I add, now that you have field crafter, how annoying it is to sell salvage when EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF SALVAGE ANYONE'S EVER HEARD OF is needed for one of your recipes, since you have them all memorized?

I played Mouse Police for 5 or 6 weeks straight, and when I played another character I was amazed at how easy it was to sell common salvage. Wow! It didn't ask me if I REALLY wanted to sell it!

I have field crafter on 4 toons, and I have all the 45-50 badges on Mouse... I don't want to go through that again soon.

Yeah, your level is always whatever level you're at regardless of build. If you start a second build, you pick powers up to your current level, you don't start over at level 1. If you then gain 5 levels and switch to your old build, you'd have 5 levels worth of power/slot choices to make for that old build. Your actual level doesn't change when you switch between builds.

I think I've hidden once, ever. I like random invites, they lead to great teams sometimes. If I'm doing something else I just say so.

I don't know why people on Virtue don't get invited to teams, I was on at least 3 different teams just last night based on random invites. (I DID have my lft flag up.) And then I joined a SG team to end the evening. ^_^

Last night when I logged in, I immediately got 3 badges... Professor, and the 2 accolades associated with it.

I've been working very hard on badges on my main for the last 2 months, so that was a great start on the evening. I loaded up on inspirations and headed to RV to kill some Mu Guardians, which I'd been doing for the last few days. Bing! Got that badge after just a few fights.

I checked to see what other gladiator badges I could still get easily, if any. Hmm. Bladegrass, that's an easy one. Got that. The Coralax one... that was much easier than I'd realized. Picked that up too.

I went looking for Jurassik, and found him. It was Monday night, Hami and MS raids going on (Virtue), but I managed to talk two people into helping me. We engaged him early by accident, but the other two were both rad trollers, so it only took 3 of us to take him down. Yay for /rad!

I finished the evening running an Ouro TF, which nabbed me two badges, Cut-Off and Ouroboros Mender. So that was 9 badges on the night. I'm now at 693 badges. I have 3 Ouro badges left to get. I have the 3 shard TFs and the Eden trial. I haven't killed Baphomet yet. I have several Day jobs to get still, and more than a handful of PvP badges, but... I don't think I could possibly manage another 9-badge day again, on this toon at least. ^_^ (And I'm more than half convinced I won't go through all of this on another toon, at least any time soon.)

Geas of the Kind Ones. On a long timer of course, but it's very nice to have, when you are (as an example) fighting 3 Mu Guardians and all of their friends at once in RV. I hit that, and my endurance bar climbs even as six or eight Mu do their best to drain my endurance, and while I'm wailing away on one of them.

^_^

I think my third or fourth Katie run, I decided I knew how things went and ran out to help free Katie on the last mission. This would be on a toon with superspeed, no fly, and of course Katie latched on to me.

I felt stupid, but we still completed the mission. And I've seen other people make the same mistake since then, on several different occasions, it's a common mistake when people aren't completely familiar with how that mission is usually handled.

Kronos spawns in quite a few different zones. It depends on what zone you're in when you trigger him, and if he's allowed to spawn there. (Not allowed to spawn in Atlas Park or The Hive to my knowledge, and probably some other places).

And of course, there are special GMs spawned during holiday events and the like, and hundreds of nameless GMs on monster island in PI.

And we didn't mention the... I'm forgetting the name now... clockwork knight that spawns in King's Row, but you only get the badge if you prevent him from spawning.

I actively market with 10-12 different characters. Most of those I only log in once or twice a week, a few that are not on my main server I may only log in a couple of times a month. On most of these characters, it doesn't bother me to keep stuff listed for weeks at a time, because I hate eating the listing fee. If I thought it was a good price when I listed it, I assume it will eventually be a good enough price to sell.

I'll pull stuff down and relist if space is becoming a major issue for that particular character, though.

Another practice I implemented months ago is to put out bids at relatively low prices for IOs that I like in the level 30-33 range, which is what I like to slot my characters with (and which can be hard to come by). I have quite a few slots tied up on various characters with bids like that, some of which have been up for months. But I also have 2 full storage units in my base with level 30-33 damage, defense, resist, and other IOs that I use frequently in building my toons. That's been quite useful.

/em ponders the concept of a "real" fake nemesis as opposed to a "fake" fake nemesis.

It does need more time.

That said, we completed this for a friend on Virtue recently (about a week ago). We'd just finished a TF when the event popped up in PI, so #1 we had a team already assembled, and #2 we were able to get other high-level people to join in very quickly. That's virtually the only way to accomplish it; you need at least 2 relatively high level teams assembled within the first few minutes or you're probably doomed to fail.

I'm afraid I may have lost my altitus. It started a few weeks ago when I was helping a friend work on badges. He's up to 666+ badges now. Meanwhile, my "nominal" badger and main toon Mouse Police had a measly 400 or so. I decided to do something about that.

After a respec and rebuild to make the toon more PvP friendly and also more TF-exempted friendly, I began working on badges in earnest. At the moment I'm at 619, and working my way through the Ouro badges. After that I have a lot of PvP badges to work on, and random Gladiator badges and other stuff.

But I've hardly played any other character in the past 3 weeks. I have four defenders that I'd recently played up to the low 40's, and they haven't budged from there. Another defender is 47 and holding. I have big plans to purple out a war shade, but she's still level 33. And after listening to Steampunk-related music lately I came up with several Steampunk-related toons, but I haven't done a thing with them... every night when I log in, I just want to get more badges for Mouse.

What's a poor altaholic to do?

1.45 billion!

They are worth it: on my fire blaster, my dark melee/electric brute, and my regen scrapper. Those are my 3 heavily purpled toons.

They will be worth it: on my war shade. I have the sets ready and waiting in my base, I just need to get to 50. ^_^

Would not be worth it: on my invul tanker and scrapper or my ma/wp scrappers... or probably on most of my other toons. Massive recharge is nice but not always your #1 priority, and that's mostly what purples are good for.

Oh, and... two weeks ago I spent most of a week soloing radio missions at -1/+8 in PI in order to get all of the safeguard side mission badges... as many as 10-12 missions a night... and I got 3-4 purple drops during that time. ^_^

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.

Taunt is not essential. People that flip out because the tank doesn't have taunt aren't worth teaming with in my book, just like people who insist that ever kin must have speed boost, etc. etc.

On the other hand, taunt is very useful. I have it on all of my tanks. I don't have it on my brute, but only because it's a very tight build and I had other powers that I found more useful to take.

Some sets have a much stronger taunt aura than others, too.

I think the PuGing on Virtue is generally excellent, but Freedom is not bad either. The "Freedumb" tag gets overplayed as much as the "LolRPVirtue" tag does. Both servers have a lot of quality players.

Every server has a good group of players at its core, but the smaller servers have fewer of them so your chances of finding a good random PuG go down.

In an average gaming week:
1) How often do you PuG instead of grouping within your SG or friends?

Until recently I did this 100% of the time, as I ran my own (solo) SG and I liked to group.

In the last two months I've been with a very large SG and probably group with SG members 95% of the time now. But it's such a large SG that it often feels no different, I only know a handful of the regulars well. They recruit all the time so it's not unusual to team with people who are new and don't necessarily know what they're doing.

2) How often do you group with friends and fill the rest of the group with PuGs?

Most teams these days are filled from the SG first and then anyone else that wants to join. Usually half the team is from my SG at least, but it's not an insular SG, they like to team with new people and find new people to invite to our SG.

3) How often do your PuG members do what you feel needs to be done without being told to do so?

I've always felt that Virtue has a lot of people who PuG all the time and know what they're doing. You get the occasional annoying or idiotic player, but on the whole, my PuG experiences on Virtue have typically been good to very good.

There was one incident a week ago where two members of a PuG got into an argument with others on the team because one of the tanks didn't have taunt. (Seriously... we had two tanks, so what's the big deal? Not to mention I was playing an invul scrapper, I have a good taunt aura) They quit right in the middle of an AV fight. C'est la vie. I 1-starred them, we recruited new people, and we moved on.

Incidents like that are rare, but it's something at least that you can avoid when playing with your SG mates. For example, you know your friend with the kin troller doesn't have speed boost before you invite him... and you make jokes about it, instead of getting into a sudden argument or just being annoyed. ^_^

4) How often do you find yourself telling PuG members what you feel they should be doing (for the good of the current team/session)?

I try to warn people when I know we should pull, because otherwise we're going to be fighting 2 or 3 groups at once. Usually it's too late anyway.

Other than that I don't try to tell people how to play. More likely I'll force people to play an up-tempo stlye just by charging in on my own if we're just standing around. But if I do that, I'm usually prepared to solo the full spawn if necessary. ^_^

5) How often do you find yourself adding PuG members to your friends/global friends, and if those lists are full, using other methods of remembering them?

I tend not to. I think other people do this a lot more than I do; I suspect I get invited to teams a lot more often by people who remember me, than the other way around. But if I've teamed with people for a while then I like to global them... that's how I wound up in my current SG.

6) How often do you group with complete jerks in a PuG?

Not very often, but see above.

What annoys me is how the safeguard side missions give credit to the individual only. The "stop weapons deal" for example, only goes to the person who clicks on the glowing weapons rack gets credit for that, and it takes 10 times to get the badge. It's tedious to do radio missions over and over solo until you get through 10 safeguards, but you're not really encouraged to team with anyone else, the way it's set up -- unless you can find people who are not badgers but are willing to indulge you and allow you to finish all the side missions yourself.