{"id":485,"date":"2006-03-10T09:02:24","date_gmt":"2006-03-10T15:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp\/2006\/03\/pugsly\/"},"modified":"2006-03-10T09:02:24","modified_gmt":"2006-03-10T15:02:24","slug":"pugsly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/2006\/03\/pugsly.html","title":{"rendered":"PUGsly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Been sneaking odd moments to solo with Lynn (she&#8217;s just shy of 26 now), and, esp. since hitting Striga, she&#8217;s been getting lots of invites for PUGs.  And I usually go ahead and take them, as it&#8217;s often at hours that there&#8217;s not a lot of Alliance folks on.<br \/>\nTHE GOOD<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s good eats.  Lynn tends to play cautiously on her own, which makes overall XP\/min relatively low.  On a PUG, willingly or unwilingly, it&#8217;s usually faster-moving, and overall XP\/min goes up (even with debt).\n<li>Scrappers are usually in decent demand.  And I&#8217;m often the solo scrapper on a team (and more often than not, the only melee character, which can be kinda dangerous but fun).\n<li>Most PUGs are okay.  Some seriously suck, but they are balanced by ones that are really cool.  And it&#8217;s worth noting that PUGs are often only partially that way &#8212; a core of players who know each other and who want to flesh out a team.\n<li>Being a manager at work, I prefer to let someone else make the decisions (assuming they make them competently).  For that matter, I never organize a PUG myself.  Too many decisions, and not getting paid for &#8217;em.\n<li>Things are always different.  The line between &#8220;practiced comfortable playstyle&#8221; in an established team (or duo) and the boredom of &#8220;lather, rinse, repeat&#8221; is a fuzzy one, and subject to being crossed based on mood.  Running with different players adds some variety.\n<li>There&#8217;s always the chance of finding someone you&#8217;d like to adventure with again.  Hasn&#8217;t happened to me yet (not helped by cycling through various alts), but you never can tell.<\/ul>\n<p>THE BAD<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>No RP to speak of, of course.\n<li>It&#8217;s a pain when you get brought in as the 2nd or 3rd player and the leader won&#8217;t go forward until a full team of 8 is recruited.  (Yes, that lowers overall XP\/min.)  I like large teams, mind you &#8212; while it increases the chances of someone doing something horribly team-killing stupid, it also adds to the flexibility of the group.\n<li>Some leaders can&#8217;t lead out of a paper bag, which often as not means that decisions of when to go, which passage to take, etc., get made by the least patient or most rash team player.\n<li>Some players &#8230; are just stupid.  Or inconsiderate.  Or both. They&#8217;re the ones that everyone&#8217;s waiting for to go off and sell between mishes (every time), the ones who run in before buffs\/debuffs\/mezzes\/<em>planning <\/em>takes place, etc. (every time), etc.  A PUG is something like Russian Roulette in terms of getting these.<\/ul>\n<p>THE UGLY<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Team leaders who stand around excessively trying to find an Empathy Defender usually do so because they know they&#8217;re going to need one.\n<li>I feel an odd commitment to a team, even if it&#8217;s strangers.  Which makes pulling out of a disastrous one sometimes difficult &#8230; though a trip to the hospital is always a good excuse.<\/ul>\n<p>The good outweighs the other stuff, for the moment.  I&#8217;d rather team up with Alliance folks, but depending on the &#8220;kindness of strangers&#8221; isn&#8217;t a bad approach right now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Been sneaking odd moments to solo with Lynn (she&#8217;s just shy of 26 now), and, esp. since hitting Striga, she&#8217;s been getting lots of invites for PUGs. And I usually go ahead and take them, as it&#8217;s often at hours that there&#8217;s not a lot of Alliance folks on. THE GOOD It&#8217;s good eats. Lynn &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/2006\/03\/pugsly.html\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;PUGsly&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":352,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gameplay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/352"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}