What's your stance on outfits that invite you out of the blue?

I've been playing a lot on my TR lately, and on that character, I've been invited to no less than three different outfits. "Great," most people would say. "I'm part of an outfit now!"

Except for one problem: It was unsolicited. I'd never even talked to these people before. As a result, without knowing what sorts of things they were expecting, I was pretty much forced to turn them down.

If this were ten years ago, I probably would've signed up with the first one that did it, without question. Unfortunately, I don't have tons of time to play a game, I tend to take odd hours of sleep, and simply put, I didn't know any of the people who were inviting me to join.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-outfit or anything like that, and I'm no fourth factioneer - while I do have different characters in all factions, I also ensure that none of them (barring any future server merges!) are on the same server. In fact, I'm still fairly flattered that these people who I ran across as I was just doing my job sent me an invite, but at the same time, having played FPS games for the last, oh, 20 years or so of my life, I began to wonder "Do they even talk to people anymore?"

I know, obviously, not every outfit does this. Many of them test their recruits; several of them go by certain metrics, such as how skilled they are in a given scenario. Some only want extremely skilled players, for example, to the point where they'll try to scrutinize, say, infantry vs. infantry combat scores. Others are more relaxed and laid-back, and care just about having a good time, win or lose, and not expecting rigorous practices or whatnot. A lot fall in between these extremes.

And so I came here onto Forumside to see what you, the community, thinks about this. Barney, Elmo and Smurf alike - I want your opinions, from those who are seeking an outfit, those who are purposely *NOT* seeking an outfit, those who are a part of an outfit, those who formerly were part of an outfit, and yes, even those who don't give a toss about outfits and just play for fun. If you got an opinion, I want it - pure and simple.

• What do you feel about outfits who invite randoms? Do you feel this waters down the quality of recruits in their outfit?
• Should an outfit at least try to reach out to a prospective member and see what their mindset is? After all, one member might be a seventeen year old with a lot of time on their hands, while another might be an adult in their early 30s with a job and a mouth or two to feed.
• What do you think is more prevalent, the serious outfits or the relaxed ones? Is this a good or a bad thing?
• If you're part of an outfit, do you think it would be good to recruit randoms who you see doing well? (If your outfit already does this, do you think it should be more restricted with interviews of prospective members?) Why or why not?
• If you're not part of an outfit, why do you choose not to be? If you were formerly part of an outfit, what made you leave?

A big part of the reason I'm doing this is because while I, myself, wouldn't mind being in an outfit, I know I don't have tons of time to dedicate onto a game anymore (unless I'm seriously addicted to it, but the last game to do that was Disgaea D2). While I know I've got pretty good skills, the fact that none of the outfits bothered to even say "Hey, are you interested in joining us?" kind of surprised me - of all three that tried, the closest one did to that was a person asked to friendlist me and then invited me to their outfit, but they still never actually talked to me.

So now it's you, the community's, opinion who I'm seeking. What do you feel? Is Planetside 2 a game where there's a few serious outfits and basically a bunch of zergs with a tag, is it more of a relaxed coalition of gamers with the occasional serious outfit, or is it somewhere inbetween?

I'm interested in seeing what the replies are like. Perhaps a conversation like this will help us someday get better outfits for everyone down the line.

Big noob inviting outfits are good for the game. Although I prefer they not send random invites, but simply remind players that join their public squads that they're recruiting along with their basic rules. EXE on Connery is pretty good about this, there are some though that just throw invites around like candy and I don't think that's the way to go about it.

Why are they good for the game? Well they give new players some order in all the chaos and help them make some sense of what's going on and why, and how they can make themselves more useful. Most of the ones I've been in also have training platoons every week or so, sometimes they're mandatory for any player who wants to get invited to the private and/or more organized outfit squads.

They also discourage all the stuff that goes with being a self-interested pub player - not everyone listens 100% but it's better than nothing - and they will kick players who are actively a detriment by team killing intentionally and such.

I would rather my faction have big zerg outfits running zerg platoons, than to have a bunch of randoms zerging in a less organized and directed fashion.

To put it bluntly, I can't stand clans that randomly invite, but I also dislike clans that hunt for tagless people and start sending them tells. Random invites are a massive sign that the clan promotes zerging, and a decent amount of time they don't give much of a **** about the people who actually join. Now about the tells, I dislike them because they always seem impersonal and make the recruiter look desperate for members.

I feel clans should be sparking interest by public actions, like public squads (SQUADS), communicating in region, just stuff that get "pubbies" can get involved in without actually joining. Oh, and ceasing to call tagless people "pubbies", "randoms", and whatever else in public would help too. It's basically insulting people just because their tagless.

I hold them in a higher regard than I do outfits that have a sign up process whereby you have to make an account on their private website (likely to boost google standings), petition for membership by filling out a form providing personal information, answering a multitude of questions, and swearing to abide by outfit rules, and then have it all be for naught if someone you've never met or even played with decides you aren't "outfit material" because you were working a real life job when they had their "mandatory" teamspeak meeting.

Word of advice to upcoming/current outfits. Unless your outfit is MLG (and I mean that literally, as in will be attending and competing at MLG events) DON'T MAKE PEOPLE DO THESE TYPES OF THINGS JUST TO PLAY WITH YOU. If someone is never going to leave their house with the intent of doing "outfit" related things, your "recruitment" process should be this: "/outfit invite xxxxx." Kick someone if they are constantly disobeying orders or on the wrong continent or spamming platoon chat with distracting banter. This is a video game, not a real job.

I've been invited out of the blue many times.

I'm not sure if they do it by just picking out whoever is standing around the platoon leader who doesn't have an outfit tag, or if they actually watch people, but regardless it never works out. They recruit me because of my infantry combat, then find out I'm not well rounded because I can't be ***** to be. I never bothered to learn to fly because I don't care, so someone else always has to fly the gals; most of the time I respawn-hop my way around rather than drive; and because I don't care, I never even got the AMS for the sunderer because I'm too busy certing guns instead. I also have no vehicle upgrades at all so I can't pull tanks when the platoon lead says "Pull tanks", at least not if I don't want to get *****.

I'll stick to hopping into random platoons when I feel like it.

This is basically my exact same position. I can fly well enough to get somewhere, but if someone got me in actual air combat, well, I'd be screwed. I can't quite get the flying model down well enough to be pinpoint, though if there was an alternate flying mode where the vehicles controlled more like a hovercraft (think of Unreal Tournament 2004's Raptor/Cicada), I'd be in the air a lot more, even if it had to come with some "realism" caveats like not being able to turn on a dime. There are yaw controls but it's way too slow and so almost nobody uses them, especially in a dogfight.

I've also not got much upgrades in my vehicles, but as I finish fleshing my classes out, I'll probably begin putting stuff into the ground vehicles. I drive those decently well and was a tank ***** in other games, so not much has changed here. As I mostly play infantry, I'm focusing on those classes first, especially as it kind of annoys me how easy tanks can just wreck Infantry face to the point they essentially become cert machines, and not used as much for armor vs. armor combat.

Though that said, for vehicles to really be ultra-viable, there needs to be a way to change their loadouts (and, for that matter, to have different loadout slots, just like infantry so there's no need for constantly changing things) on the fly. Allow ammo stations to work like how terminals do for infantry, and/or allow Sundies to have this as a capability (obviously in the utility slot, so that a Sundy has to choose between being a vehicle retooling station or an AMS, not both), with limitations to prevent armor crowding around the Sundy and making it impossible to kill due to all the tanks around it being perpetually able to change their loadout to combat any threat, lest the aircraft that tries to do a bombing run gets swiss-cheesed by five Lightnings going Skyguard instantly.

I dont care for them, theyre the same as just grouping up with randoms, they may be great and a lot of fun one day but complete hell the next, if i cant count on the guys im playing with them i just assume not play with them.

Invasive.
But /ignore is there for a reason.

Irritating, but not as annoying as people who repeatedly spam squad invites at you. If I didn't accept your damn invite the first 2 times, what makes you think I will accept it one of the next six times you ask? More importantly after sixteen invites: that's a very nice vehicle you have there, punk, are you feeling lucky today?

I Always decline random invites. It looks like some cheap spam. However, when playing in an outfit's open squad and getting invite, I feel ok (still decline it, due to some reasons, but that is another matter). For all my netgaming history, I have never seen a good player community inviting random people. More of the opposite. E. g. my main guild (ELH) has a 2 weeks of test time, then a player gets into the cadet corps, where he will stay for at least 3 months, learning things, after that he may (or may not) get into the main group, where he can influence the serious community decisions. Some people don't wish to pass attestation and stay in cadet corps for years.

I don't even think that such random outfits are a good thing. They may create unpleasant community gaming experience and prevent the player from joining other groups in the future.

You know what the game is missing? An option to auto-decline outfit/squad invites.

Easy come easy go - if they dont work out or turn out to be annoying theres nothing lost leaving them to wait for the next.

One lot I left because all they did was use platoon chat as a recreational meeting group each night, another I left after we capped a base and was sitting bored waiting in the galaxy, there was a sundy right under a bridge and no one saw it, I wasnt the right class and was waiting till mossies flew past and Q spotted several times and rather than anyone give a damn I was told 'whoevers doing the spotting can either shut up or leave the galaxy' so i left the outfit after a minutes thought. After that I got a randomovite to a bunch who while not that tactically together as a fighting unit, the leader always wants to fly mossie squad when he comes on and that is just so much fun having half a platoon or more in the air roaming the map, id never have known if Id refused all invites.

Also if you get fed up of invites and really dont want to explore the game and find new friends, just make your own outfit name up with ASDF or FJFJF or something random and then no one will be able to send you any.

Mass invite outfits are bad for the game.
- They get fat with clueless noobs and generally lazy players.
- They do nothing with their numbers
- Members get bored and leave the game without seeing the best part of it
- Members generally get no internal encouragement to progress in the day to day playing of the game so they just run around never getting any better, these are the same players that will run into the arms of a scatmax again and again and again and again then log off and moan on the forums.

Players should be encouraged to look for an outfit that suits them and apply for that outfit. Outfits that run open platoons and actually lead those platoons should be the minimal standard of Outfit. These are the outfits that train the lesser motivated or able players, these player then progress in that outfit to become leaders or if that outfit fails to provide a high plane of gameplay the now basically trained players go looking for more from another outfit.

People that hate of recruiting restrictions
We are selective in our recruitment and require effort be put into the application and the player to be at a certain level of ability because we are a 12 year gaming community with a strong backbone at the center made up of long term members... mass inviting or allowing any person to join would ruin this atmosphere. We are also at the very top of the NC game on our server, were seconds really do matter when you are regularly flipping a point at 5..4..3..2. You need every member on the spot as fast as possible and switched on. People that are off doing their "own" thing make other members think "hey why am i giving up this outpost cap xp when this dude is over there farming in his lightning and not recalling". This is one of the reasons that most outfits worth their salt require you to complete an application and go through a trial, this along with planetside being a game that lasts for years and years in a persistent game unlike the yearly idiot tax of COD where most clans come and go every 6months, members joining a planetside outfit are judged on fitting in for the long term.

After the 3rd invitation? It's like getting flyers shoved down my throat after I've politely refused them. I don't mind a casual "We're Group X, if you want to join PM me". I don't even mind the public ads on the Region channel, they aren't frequent at all.

I press "N"

I think of them as zergfits that don't care about what kind of players they bring in, which pretty much means that they're just a gathering of randoms that don't care for anything but numbers.

I really dislike it. A fair few of our members have come from other outfits that were dead, but since it was their first outfit they had a sense of loyalty to them. We've actually had to pry some fantastic players away from dead outfits.

Both the random inviting and the "register at our site" outfits have a place in ps2 (and in any mmo really).

Sometimes i decline, sometimes i accept the invo. If the outfit becomes too stale or i become too stale for them i leave and after a while (when i get the time to play again) i get a new one.

It's nice and casual so i don't see the problem with it. As much as i would like to only be tryhard in games, i have stuff to do... like work and making money xD

I'm very picky when it comes to joining any outfit/guild etc. in any game. I don't like people who can't keep their cool and I never stick around any group that tolerates racism, sexism or any of the isms really and that makes picking an outfit a bit more of a challenge. I do think outfit play is better overall than going lone wolf but in most games as with this one there aren't any tools for finding the right outfit beyond a recruitment forum.

I've always put a higher standard within my own guilds of how you conduct yourself in the game rather than how well you play, So I would never join any outfit without at least getting a general impression of what they find acceptable and just getting a random invite gives me the impression that they have no standards at all.

Don't get me wrong I'm not going on a high horse rant here, People should play however they want to play and I'm not out to judge anyone just saying that I look for a certain sort of behavior in an outfit if I'm going join up.