With teammates like these... (Destiny)

by Morpheus , High Charity, Wednesday, September 28, 2016, 04:11 (2767 days ago) @ Claude Errera

I've had rounds where someone focused ALL of their firepower on the boss, and so had no (or almost no) kills - and yet, the round went faster because of them.

Absolutely--I agree with you 100%. I've seen plenty of teammates(including myself) concentrate solely on the boss, and only walk out with a handful of kills. And I don't blame them. There were rounds with bosses like Noru'usk and Val Aru'un where I was convinced I dropped into hell! Our weapons seem to have no effect, the whole floor is carpeted with enemies even more aggressive than normal, and you spend more time without shields than you do the whole game before that. So I absolutely understand trying to kill the boss as quickly as possible. That's still contributing, though. Those people are pitching in to help. Those are the people I give a "Helpful Friendly Highly Skilled". But unless it's Challenge, the boss fight is only one wave. A good half of those pictures were results from the entire game. As for the Round pictures?

Well unfortunately, I'd be lying if I said I remembered which rounds those screenshots took place. But a 4 out of 5 chance, that's a zone where I can safely assume they're standard rounds.

My point is this: Prison of Elders is a survival activity where three players go against larger and/or more difficult waves before culminating in a boss fight. You can work back to back and let the enemies come to you or split up and handle them in designated areas. Coincidentally, Variks basically illustrates my point for me: Fight, Kill, Survive.

Now, dying in Destiny is certain. It may be an accident, it may be intentional, a bug, etc. Whether it's the second you start the game or three years from now, you die. The next statement I'm going to make is in no way meant to be insulting(to anyone, for that matter)--it's simply fact: Every time you die, the unit(I guess I should say 'pack' ;-) is instantly "weakened". That's in quotes because of multiple factors: the death may be a minor loss(say, someone of low light level, or just messing around) or a major loss(a more powerful teammate, or someone of importance, like a relic holder), could be at a bad time or place, they could have Radiance, whatever. When someone dies in a Darkness Zone, the remaining teammates now have to do one or more of the following:

• Risk themselves to go out and revive that teammate
  
• Fight more enemies with less help
  
• Focus more intently on staying alive themselves to prevent wiping
  
• In the case of PoE, also juggling a critical objective to prevent dying altogether

When a teammate dies, any(or all,even) of the above things need to happen for up to 30 seconds(or more, if they're not voluntarily respawning).

Now again, I don't mean to insult anyone by saying this or appear rigidly taut, but it's just the cold hard truth: Every time you die, whether or not it could be helped, it hurts the team--even if it's temporarily. In fact, it's kinda like a three-legged table. It may be brief, but two legs holding up stuff on a three-legged table...you get the picture.

Now! Moving on to the "dipshittedness"...

I honestly can't believe we're getting this in Campaign of all places, but we have griefers, too. And they're the ones whom are even more infuriating. The most recent example I can think of was from earlier in the month. Challenge of Elders had a Precision Bonus, and I was looking through LFG to find some people to fill the card with. The first guy I found was pretty good--he was consistently getting precision kills and actively working on his job of killing adds first before damaging the boss any further. But the OTHER guy who was there--he was the definition of a dipshit. He was running around nearly the entire run with a sword. Not even an Exotic sword, by the way. There's no way you can get precision kills with a sword!! And if he wasn't going after the adds with it, he was slicing at the boss! So not only was he dying four times as much as either of us because he was stupid enough to bring a stick to a cannon-fight, but every single time he killed an enemy with it, he was taking away more and more points from the two of us who were playing correctly! A run which could've topped 45-52k, was dropped down to 31 thousand because of one dumbass.

Now it was pretty ignorant of me to use those terms as blanket statements--some may have been trying(I guess?). But I've seen a staggering amount of players run up to a Prison boss and think they can kill him in a single Scorch melee. I've seen Hunters (somehow) confuse invisibility with invincibility. And I've seen Titans drop bubbles on Knight Majors instead of weak Guardians.

In fact, typing this up it reminded me of a PoE where I died(see? ;-) and this Titan dropped a bubble FIRST, then ran almost all the way across the arena to get me--literally the opposite of what a sensible Titan would do in a situation like that. He nearly died himself! I pretty much had the X button ready because I was so sure I had to pick him up right as he did me.

"You're not as good at video games as I am - that makes you a dumbass whose actions can be characterized as 'dipshittedness'."

And hey, I'm not expecting people to be as good as I am--just to do their part.
Looking these end-game pictures, most of them total the kills/number of enemies to a little over 200--unless a team wipes of course. So in a perfect world, each person would get an average of 70 kills give or take. Obviously the world isn't perfect, but sometimes it just goes beyond reason. This is an example from the album. This guy frito, or whatever.

Unless there was a real-life situation going on, that is downright inexcusable. This one's kind of a bad example since upon retrospect he was only 14 light levels higher, but I'll use this as my fundamental argument, and a quick substitute.

Ldrago's end-game K/D ratio was 3.13. Think about that!
That means Acolyte, Acolyte, Acolyte, Ac--DEAD. Would you want to play with someone that you have to revive every three kills? In a game of more than two hundred enemies?

Reiterating, that's less time killing enemies, protecting yourself and your last remaining teammate, and/or dismantling mines, and more time having to run out there and revive that person again.

There's people helping people(what most of us do here), there's one or more people backpacking the others(like when Blackstar taught me how to switch from torn-runner to Malice Bubble duty) and then there's people weighing everyone else down(most matchmade/LFG games of Prison of Elders).

If your last line refers to your teammates, I think I'm glad I don't play with you very much - it makes you look like a pretty unpleasant teammate.

Sometimes when I get angry, I do something brash or rude, and yes it does make me look like a problematic teammate. But you have played with me before, and our experiences were (I hope!) positive. I know I sound like an egotistical jackass, but I consider myself to usually be a nice person.

But here's the thing.

I'm nice to my friends. I'm nice to friends of friends. I'm nice to those who participate. Those who are proud to help, but not too proud to ask for help. Those who can die, but get back up again. I am NOT nice to those who those who try to beat Precision Challenge with a sword. I'm not nice to the people who rush through strikes triggering everything at once, then quitting the second they get the Calcified Fragment/SIVA Cluster. I'm not nice to the person who trolls LFG sites and lies about raid experience just so they can get invited. The ones that only move their control stick around enough to not get teleported. The ones that spend more time dancing than living. The ones who steal rewards, not earn them.

I'm not nice to those people.

And in all fairness, I don't think I should be.