Toxic Pugs Make the Revamp's Skill Requirement Far Harder Than it Should Be.

I'm not saying this because of the difficulty increase. I'm quite fine playing right now with this difficulty in duos and solos. Which is the problem. This is where the rant starts.

Either I have literally the worst luck with pugs out of anyone in the entire game, or there are just that many bad ones. I play with my roommate 99% of the time. He plays elec healer, and I play earth tank. We do the duos, quest together, and even attempt alerts together. And yet we somehow always get at minimum one pug that willfully pulls too much, ignores what we're supposed to do in the mission, or just goes afk during boss fights, or tries to mess up the group out of spite. More often, we get two.

I just had an alert where I asked if we could attempt a feat in Avarice Impurity. The very first one. Where you only rescue one named and bring it to the penguin fight. Easy, right? An ice in the group barriered, rushed in, and activated all of them. Then ran back out, pulling all the enemies back to us. When I said something, they stopped moving for a very long time, only to fill the chat log with cursing in all caps. Mostly calling me and the healer names because he was on my side.

Fine, time to move forward, who cares about missing a feat. Then the other dps went afk. The ice followed his example, making us wait for several minutes before they started moving again. When we started the Lex Luthor fight, they both went afk again for over a minute. i had to literally drag the boss on top of them almost getting them killed before they finally moved.

At that point, both I and my friend had had enough. We did a di** move. When they finally started fighting, I told them that I shouldn't have to deal with their crap and then left mid boss fight. I know it's a bad thing to do, but I wasn't going to let them keep doing what they were doing and still get something out of it.

The problem here is... this is the norm. It happens all the time. Not that specific situation, but the general idea of it. I get that the skill requirement got raised, and I'm ok with that. But the people like me who have a league that doesn't help, or others that don't have one at all are getting shafted pretty badly when we get these people in our random groups.

Sorry about the rant. I'm still pretty irritated by the latest pug. The high skill cap is, in theory, a good thing for some players. But a high skill cap means that every piece needs to be working correctly. The game now requires that at least 3 of the 4 people in the alerts have to be doing everything just right, or you fail. I keep getting people that are actually detrimental to this.

Comment or not, I don't care. But don't whine about me complaining, or attack me. Because as I said to the people in that pug, why should I have to listen to some random stranger I don't know? You didn't have to read this. You chose to. If you whine. If you attack my post. I'll just put you on ignore. No skin off my back.

And don't say "get a better league", because thanks to the revamp any of the supposedly helpful leagues now have skill point requirements to even be invited. I saw one today saying 100+cr, with a minimum of 120 skill points. My Earth is only about 5 days of play old so far. I'm 109 cr, with 70 something skill points. That's not bad, right? For so little time, and no replay badges to grant the feats from my other toons? My roommate is the same, since we play together even for feats.
How do you even get into an actually helpful league anymore? My current league has an officer who thinks it's funny to offer help, tell you to invite them, all while in a group. Then he doesn't respond to you anymore. I won't say that I'm a great player. Saying something like that is pointless. I could say i'm the reincarnation of Elvis. That doesn't make it true. But my friend and I do solos and duos at bare minimum cr all the time without any issues. I can't remember the last time we've died in one. More than once, the two of us have managed to actually finish off bosses with two afk players. It just takes so long now with the increases to enemy health.
I will admit that I'm the first to call out someone for going afk or not helping. But my friend is usually right behind me. I have a lower tolerance for willful failure than he does. On the other hand. I always kind of want to know what goes through their head when they piss off the tank enough to leave...followed immediately by the healer.
TLR
Toxic pugs make alerts with high skill caps far more difficult than they should be. I won't name shame for two reasons.
One: it wouldn't do a lick of good.
Two: it happens far too often for me to keep track of every one of them.
If you disagree with my rant, then go read something else. No big deal. If you agree...then you've met some of these toxic pugs as well. I just meet them at a very high rate.

Why not kick them? You had the numbers to do so after all. But yh, there are very few good players on the game.

Kick them? With a 3 hour cooldown on said kick? And that cooldown activates if you vote, meaning that one kick costs my roommate and I both our cooldown? then what about the second one? The one that went afk on the boss first?

Only the person who initiated the vote gets the timer, no? Never noticed, I run with league.

Nope. My roommate and I use that kick pretty often with our wonderful pug luck. Voting for the kick activates their 3 hour cooldown as well. Or at least it tells him that if he tries to start a kick himself right after.

Well, at least you could have gotten rid of the first fool and give the other one a wake up call at the same time. Maybe got the new guy who joined to lick the other one. I wouldn't have left before making their day difficult too lol.

DCUO has become kick-crazy. That is an indication of a deteriorating or toxic community. The vote-kick feature causes more problems than it solves because it involves no risk. Kicking a participating player is always an arbitrary decision made selfishly.

Examples: I want to run content with my friend, so I vote to kick; I think that CR is too low, so I vote to kick; I don't like what you typed (e.g. raid mechanics explained), so I vote to kick; I disagree with your attitude, so I vote to kick; I don't like the XX's or OO'x in your name, so I vote to kick; I disagree with your loadout, so I vote to kick; I question your skills , so I vote to kick, and more.... we have all seen the rampant abuse of vote-kick.

Above the players are debating whether or not they should kick someone now, if it reduces their opportunity to kick someone later.
Vote-kicking is being discussed as though it is an opportunity to benefit. Who can we kick next? The fact that an imposed delay exists is an indicator that this feature abuses other players, and that if given the opportunity, inconsiderate malicious people would abuse others non-stop. Right now they have a 3 hour delay.

No-risk vote-kick should be abolished. The person who wants to kick someone should really just leave. In all of the examples above, you can replace the phrase "so I vote to kick" with "so I will leave to satisfy my self interests" and then you would have a proper resolution to the conflict. Therefore, vote-kick could be modified to make it a 50/50 chance that you kick yourself if you start a kick. That would be fair because, if the content is unsatisfying to you for whatever reason, then perhaps you should really leave rather than abuse someone else by kicking them. Your character's time is NOT worth more than any other player's time.

This shows the other side of the "nerf XXXX it is too hard " - some of the blame needs to go to us as players not automatically assume it is the content's or dev's fault.

This game has mechanics & roles - my general impression is most see things as DPS + Burn through & hope for the best. This *used* to work but revamp put a spanner in the works and YES ppl need time adjusting - some may even leave as it is not for them anymore but that doesn't change the fact that things have changed.

People are trying to get through stuff while others are just trying (lol). When i have days/times I need to pug a lot, best thing i suggest is LFG, it can seem like it takes longer but it will save heartache. When using LFG be clear on the roles you want/need and go from there.

If you are going for a feat then I still suggest LFG - like minded feat hunters are out there and WILL respond. Again it may *seem* like it takes longer but it is well worth it

If it went how the OP said, imo, they deserve a difficult day LOL

I'm sure many could tell you stories of ppl with 20 sp etc lol so you are doing fine - Maybe things are different at lower levels these days but my motto has always been this "try to be a few SP higher than your cr"

In fact - even the Devs have stated the best place to be with sp, in revamp, is the same or higher than cr, as this makes the game not so crazy. How this works in theory would prob get you 20 different scenarios/points of view

P.S. go to the league recruitment pages of the forum - there are 100% leagues out there that will help - some leagues have slowed down to what they used to be but most have a core group that will happily help

(My league is in there - Rising Legends)

u shouldnt queue on duty and expect to do feats... i for example queue on duty to ignore feats requests LOL

If you don't kick in situations where a kick would be justified, just so you don't get the 3 hour timer, when would you ever kick then? That basically means you never kick just in case that an even worse situation arises within the next 3 hours.

I had a similar attitude until I realized that I just prevented myself from utilizing the kick function properly. If there's a legitimate reason to kick someone (like cursing and going afk) then just do it.

Don't worry about casual players. Just form your own group and have fun.

Way to misunderstand. The kick has a 3 hour timer. There were two jerks. Who do you pick? I just left, because one kick just isn't enough, sometimes.

I would love to know how keeping SP anywhere within 20% of your cr is possible while gearing up. My roommate and I went from 0 to over 100 in just the double badges time period. Multiple tiers in a day a few times. The only ways I can see would be tons and tons of replay badges (not gonna happen), or not moving your gear up for a week or two each time you go up a tier just so you can farm feats. It just doesn't happen that way. The only cr you would be stuck at long enough to get your skill points close would be the upper 100's (150+ minimum).

I didn't mention that? I asked if we could, and they said ok. Then did what they did. I didn't realize I left that out.

It doesn't have to be toxic groups. It could also be pew pew pew players with tunnel vision.

Since I started running with my healer I realized that. I'm healing only the alerts so far but in EVERY PUG group I had at least one player who was constantly staying in the Bullet Frenzy of WC Infanterists. Same is true with standing in Dr. Fate circle or not cleansing the Eclipso aura.

The latter two are most hilarious though. Cause both give a Damage Debuff to the affected players and it proves again that the most greedy and ignorant DPS are still willingly giving up DPS for no reason.

tl;dr: Bad players before the revamp are still bad

What exactly did you say? Seems like a pretty crucial part of the story to me.

Deathmike out.

Pug Life. Most of the time its like a lottery. The good ones are mixed with the bad ones. Use the Ignore list.

its tough getting players to go back to redo old feats. in a blind queue you get what you get.

have you had any success with forming your own feat hunting group?

i totally want to post a video of otis day and the nights singing "shout" right now.

i know its not that easy.

As someone else has said, if you want to do feats in an alert, it's realistic to expect that your random partners are going to be there for a quick run and not interested in feats, particularly when it comes to old content. Some will do them with you, most won't. And they are perfectly within their right to ignore a request to do a feat.

The other stuff is just childish. I don't know what server or faction you're on but I don't come across that too often on the EU hero side. It sounds like you've just had a bad run of luck and come on here to vent about the community.

The community isn't great, there are some toxic people out there and some annoying kids etc, but the demographic of the forum is considerably more mature and reasonable.

My biggest bugbear with the community in the game is the attitude you get from people who are buying or selling via trade chat. But that's another topic entirely.

hero or villain? US or EU?

there are exploration feats, collection/briefing, PvP, LPvE, capsules, gathering, salving, vendor 00 and vendor 22 for styles.

these all net some fat SP early on

Honestly, there are just that many bad ones, and I have found it got exponentially worse since crossplay. Now that we have to slum with those filthy PS3/4 players (I kid I love you guys ) , I run into a lot more kids who just wanna mouth off (I do honestly see this part though). You probably got a couple snot nose kids who just wanted to be dicks.