It's sad you came across groups like that. I came across similar if not worse in COX so I feel your pain for real. In COX, came across teams and leaders that would kick people for all types of things. A defender that is not empath, kicked. Stalker, good luck getting an invite at all. kinetic controller without speed boost, kicked. Tank no taunt or refuse to herd, kicked. Scrapper acting like a tank, kicked. Dom without perma dom, kicked. Not IOed out, kicked. Blaster not spamming AOE, kicked. Costume not in the taste of the leader, kicked. No bio, kicked. Bio not up to standard to the leader, kicked. Female character not "hot enough", kicked. Female tank, kicked as they believed that it's unrealistic to a female character to be a tank (go figure). MM with first tier pets out, kicked. Blaster that have or uses any sort of knockback, kicked first offense. Controller that is not using holds often enough ot leader standards, kicked. Storm powers, automatically kicked before mission even begins. Tank that try to do damge, kicked (As one put it. "Tanks are not supposed to attack. They suppose to taunt and let the team kill. If they want to be damage they should of made a brute." (in fact heard quite a few people say that). Brute that out tank the tank, kicked. Brute that is not maintaining fury bar to standard of team leader, kicked. And so on, but those are the most commons ones I came across in COX through out the years.
I feel your pain. My experience with the CoH community was far more pleasant, but admittedly, I had a lot fewer issues playing on my own in that game, and I only felt the need to team when I was either helping out newbies, or working with people I had good working relationships with to start. In CO, I don't have that luxury.
Which is easy to take if the enjoyment factor is not determined by other player's actions when good actions add enjoyment and bad players lessen the enjoyment. In those cases, I guess the best thing to do is hope to find a better group or if no enjoyment is being found in the search then is it worth playing? That's a decision only each individual player can make and determine for themselves.
The problem is, like a lot of MMO communities, CO is old, top-heavy, and stratified. There's the freeforms on the top of the heap, with power layouts, specialization builds, and gear that make them like unto gods. Everything's boring to them, and the only reason why they're still playing is for the rewards.
Their main interest is running everything as fast as possible and efficiently as possible, which means focusing their teams into narrower and narrower pigeonholes of super-effectiveness and kicking or abandoning
anyone who doesn't fit their ideal team composition.
At the other end of the totem pole are newbie silver players, for whom everything is new and fresh and they want to experience as much as possible. They don't yet realize how gimpy their silver AT characters are, and don't realize the prejudice they're under for not being some godly freeform. They're new and unsteady and don't quite grasp the mechanics of the game or the strategies needed to play it, and invariably won't use what power they have to the fullest.
Then there's people like me, who are in the middle. Still stuck on a Silver account, but we know the game well enough to debate mechanics with seasoned veterans and hold our own. We've seen the content and played through it, probably numerous times, and started to develop that jaded "ugh, I just want this to be over with so I can play with the rewards" attitude that the veterans have, yet there's still enough unfamiliar ground left in the game that we can be surprised, pleasantly and otherwise,
if only we can get a team together to run it effectively. This is hampered by the fact that the game's high-end content, by and large, was designed around freeforms, not around ATs.
You've also got to consider that the queued events throw players together with no regard for their skills, veterancy, AT/freeform status, or
whatever. And given that level scaling in CO is terrible (if you're low-level being scaled to a higher level, you're gimpy from lack of powers; if you're high-level being scaled to a lower level you're gimpy because the system is overzealous and makes you
weaker than a character of the actual level you're scaled to), this means that any team automatically arranged by the game has a
very high chance of failure,
unless one member is just so stinkin' uber that they could solo the event themselves. Then that person (more often than not), winds up pitching a fit at the rest of the team for having to 'carry' them, leading to more bad blood.
Since people who subscribe, and people who don't, are on such an uneven footing, it creates a stratified class system within the game's community, and with that comes resentment from the accompanying class-friction. CoH didn't suffer that because, until you reached incarnate-level activities, a subscriber and a non-subscriber were pretty much precisely the same - and when you
did reach incarnate-level activities, the non-subscribers pretty much vanished altogether.
On a personal level, I want to tank. I
can do a lot of other things, but tanking has always, always been my thing in superhero MMOs. My first character I took beyond 20 in CoH was a tanker. My first character beyond 20 in CoV? A Brute (and this was before archetypes could exist on both sides of the hero/villain fence). All of the characters I've ever remotely enjoyed in CO? Tank ATs, or very durable melee DPSers (Devastator, Unleashed). But I've come to realize that, in CO, I
cannot tank without a freeform character. I can
try to tank. I can play a character that's supposed to
be a tank, but he cannot, in fact, tank. All of the tanks in CO that
can tank, are either freeforms, or gold ATs I have no access to.
The fact that I cannot play what's supposedly a tank, and enjoy it, due to the game's shitty monetization scheme, is demotivating. While yeah, maybe it'd get better if I subscribed to unlock those features, it galls me to pay money into something that wasn't fun for me to begin with. I'm not a wealthy person - I'm taking care of two elderly parents by myself, as well as trying to gain and hold on to a regular job. What little free cash I spend has to be spent wisely, on something that will bring me lasting pleasure - I can't afford to fritter it away on a hunch. Further, subscribing to the game will not improve the community. At best, it would only elevate my status within it. I'd still have to deal with all the elitist, hyper-specialized demanding jackasses out there.
And I'm just not sure that's worth it.
