Author Topic: To Team or Not to Team  (Read 2145 times)

crayehal

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To Team or Not to Team
« on: December 17, 2012, 04:19:34 AM »
To Team or Not to Team?  That is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the game to suffer
The quests in solace to victory or defeat,
Or to take arms whilst friends against foes,
And thus banded together end them?


I am having teaming withdrawals...

It seems to me that players don't team as much in CO or DCU which I find contradictory in an MMO.  I already understand why CO players rarely team on missions. 

DCU seems more team-friendly.  I have been invited to several PUGs in the 2 weeks that I've played.  Still, teams aren't as common in DCU compared to CoH.

What the heck?  3 Superhero MMOs, and yet, CO and DCU seem more like a single player experience. 

Actually, the first MMO that I tried was CO, but at after 12 levels, nobody teamed with me.  Players were off doing their own thing.  Then I tried CoH and it was a whole different experience.  I was only on a trial account, but I got invited to over 20+ teams during that trial period, and sometimes by the same person.  Many thanks to Cerise26 for the multiple invites, even though I didn't understand exemp/malfactor and felt that a mere level 14 wasn't good enough for a lv 20 team.  So I apologized for being a lowbie and quit.  Still Cerise invited me again, and one of teammates explained the exemp concept.

Other players who invited me more than once were JillTheRipper and Erin Enyalios on her many different brutes.  It was Erin who took me on my first TV Lib farm.  She even offered to give me millions of infamy on Christmas day, but  I had to refuse since trial accounts were limited to 50,000.

If it weren't for these teams during the trial period, I wouldn't have subbed.  So when my toon was able to, I made an effort to form teams even though it required some effort, though I probably could have solo'd the mission.

As I play CO and DCU, I can't help but wonder why teams didn't develop in these games in the same way as CoH?

What are incentives to team?  So far, I can group reasons in several categories:
1) xp/rewards:  bigger team, xp bonus
2) effort vs time:  with contributions of heals, buffs, debufs and damage, quest is completed faster with a team
than solo
3) social/multi-player aspect - chatting, sharing common goals, checking out cool costumes/bio
4) RP - creative interaction

Here's what I discovered so far from CO during dual boxing.
1) Quest XP - Full Quest XP awarded only to mission holder.  Though quests can be shared, each player can only
receive the quest reward once.  This means that if your friend is the quest holder and the quest can't be shared,
after 2 hrs or teaming, your friend would've leveled more than you.

2) effort vs time:  some quests require collecting X items or defeating X of a faction.  On open maps and on buggy indoor maps, only the player that clicks the item or lands the killing strike on the target gets the credit.  There have been many cases where I cleared mobs around an item, and then someone else runs in and clicks on the item.  Ditto for kill steals.  So if you and a friend are in a team, each of you have to collect/defeat individually, so both of you end up competing against each other.

It is more difficult to track XP in DCU since the XP #s don't show in a log and only flash briefly
1) Quest XP - awarded only to mission holder.  Though quests can be shared, each player can only receive the quest reward once.  This means that if your friend is the quest holder and the quest can't be shared, after 2 hrs of teaming, your friend would've leveled more than you.  So unless you have the same mission, you won't level at the same rate as your friend.

On the other hand, there's also a notion that a super should be able to handle an X-sized mob.  To me, it's more
like a Superman vs X-men type of scenario.  For example, Cyclops has optic blasts, but take that away, and he's a normal person.  The same can be said of most of the X-men.  Superman, on the other hand, is pretty much a god until kryptonite shows up.  I think of X-men more of the typical CoH team.  Each one contributes to the team effort. 

However, if one thinks that their toons should be more like Superman from the get go, this kind of player is less  likely to team and more out to prove the strength of their toon.








FlyingCarcass

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Re: To Team or Not to Team
« Reply #1 on: December 17, 2012, 11:38:24 AM »
There's also the issue of instanced vs non-instanced questing. In CoH the average mission took place in a private instance that scaled to the number of folks on a team so that teams would be challenged while solo players would be accommodated (and as you pointed out, increased xp/shards/salvage yields promoted teaming), whereas in most other MMOs most of the missions/quests take place outdoors with a set number of enemies spawning in one area with shared rewards... in order to accommodate the solo player the enemy groups aren't challenging to teams. That's why in a game like WoW folks only formed groups for instanced stuff like dungeons or raids where enemy groups are made to be tackled by teams (and can't be soloed by most appropriate-level players (though that really depends on class)).