Monday 15 March 2010

Needy-ness is not Attractive (except in certain circumstances)

Playing STO again over the weekend, and experiencing a bit more of the social aspect of the game. Joining the STO equivalent of PUGs.

The problem was, although the PUG was very succesful, there was very little social interaction. In fact, in the 35 minutes I spent in that team, the only chat was the spamming of "Help!" from a muppet who had wandered off in to the middle of an army of mobs on his own, and not realised he could click the 'respawn' button to just get out of there.
And one line from myself along the lines of "I'm guessing many of you don't know the difference between 'Need' and 'Greed'"... Literally, that was it... And that's not artistic license, to emphasize a point. It's exactly how it was.

Firstly, let's consider the problem of 'Ninjas'. It was rampant in the PUG. There was no particular leader, just people thrown together becasue they all wanted to be in the same instance at the same time.
Of course I started out by 'Greed'ing everything, as nothing serious was dropping anyway. But soon noticed that almost the entire group was 'Need'ing on every single item. From the STO equivalent of Bandages (Hypos) to the Ground-Weapons, and even stuff that they physically couldn't use. I.e. Engineers 'Need'ing on Tactical kits and vice-versa.

So, before long, I started to click 'Need' every now and again, just for kicks. Not the most mature or sensible thing to do I admit... but hey.
Considering almost everyone I've met in the game so far is an Ex-Wow (or other MMO) player, surely the 'Need' vs 'Greed' situation shouldn't have to be so bad?

Secondly, the lack of conversation didn't really hamper the progress of the PUG, we wiped the floor with all the mobs. But I believe that if we hadn't had the healer in the group then we'd have suffered much more. She single handedly kept many of the idiots alive. People to whom the idea of flanking, and pincer movements probably sounded like menu options in a restaurant.

The raid situation was a lot of fun, and doing it as a fleet would have been a blast. As it was, it left a little sour taste in my mouth about the lack of socialism, and made me wonder if the game balancing was right if a team who didn't know each other, never spoke, and many of whom appeared to have suicidal tendancies, could succeed so easily.

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