If you’re new to the game and don’t yet understand the dynamics of putting a team together, you really shouldn’t do it. This goes for adults as well as the younger players.
I’m fresh out of Outbreak, training with Ms. Liberty, when I get invited to a team. Stupidly, I think it’s someone blindly searching for sewer run teammates, so I accept the invite. That’s when I find out we’re supposed to run a mission in King’s Row. That should’ve been my first indication right there. King’s Row isn’t a super-high level zone, but it can be pretty rough on a level 2 controller!
I check the info on the leader and see that he’s level 10. The two other players on the team are levels 4 and 6. That’s when I started thinking, “this is a wide range of levels. No one’s going to get much xp.” I ask to be sidekicked using the game’s comonly known abbreviation, “sk”. I did this three or four times before the leader asked what that meant. At this point, I’d already checked his badges and saw there were no Veteran badges. This player is obviously new.
I kept my cool and explained what it meant, as I raced from the hospital back to the mission door, and he finally invited me to be a sidekick. Unfortunately, I died again before I even got to the mission door. At that point, I said, “this zone is too dangerous for me right now. I’m going back to Atlas.” To his credit, he offered to go with me to help me run my missions, but I explained to him that neither of us would get any xp that way. So I quit the team and took the train back to Atlas, where I decided to put my own sewer team together.
We started slow at first, but once most of us reached level 3 or 4, we started to seriously kick ass. We even made it all the way to King’s Row via the sewer network. When we emerged from the muck, most of us were level 8. This only took a couple of hours. Regretably, I had to log off before we could start running police scanner missions.
And now that I’ve written an entry that equates to “what I ate today”, you’re probably wondering what the point of all this really was, if you’re even reading this. Well, I stated my point at the beginning. Don’t try to be a leader when you’re not that familiar with the game. Ask if you can join a team and hopefully you’ll pick up on the jargon and various playstyles that come with the archetypes available to you.
As for me, I came to the conclusion that not all PuGs are bad, and I might start putting more teams together in the future.
