Bad Team Mates in MMOs

Don’t you hate it when your team in an MMO just sucks? The other day I was playing League of Legends and I had 15 kills and 1 death, but I still lost because my team was terrible. This is especially frustrating in games like League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth and DoTA as each game can take upwards of an hour and a bad team can really ruin a game. These kinds of MMOs are very team oriented as well, so if you end up with one terrible player, the entire game is ruined.

The whole ‘bad team mate’ problem exists in a lot of MMOFPS games as well. In games like Alliance of Valiant Arms and WolfTeam, it can be very frustrating to lose a team deathmatch due to ‘noob’ teammates. I don’t even want to begin counting all of the games I lost due to terrible team mates in Alliance of Valiant Arms. My kill/death ratio is almost always 3-1 in these games, and I always end up with terrible team mates. Luckily, the terrible team mate problem isn’t a big deal in MMOFPS games, as each round only takes 10-15 minutes, so there’s no real time invested into each game.

Having bad team mates also sucks in sports MMOs like Freestyle Street Basketball and Smash Online. In these kinds, you NEED to work well with your team in order to win. So no matter how ‘leet’ you are, if your team sucks, it’s over. No one player can, regardless of his or her skill, can truly ‘carry’ the team to victory. This isn’t a big deal if the other team has a bad player as well, but that isn’t always the case.

Having ‘bad team mates’ is the worst when raiding in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Runes of Magic. One bad player can easily get an entire raid of 20 people killed. And dying while raiding is incredibly frustrating, especially after investing 2+ hours into a single run. Sure, you could always regroup and ‘try again’, but getting wiped can really lower morale, which can in turn lead to more wipes. The thing about raiding is, when you have so many people working together, the odds of one person screwing up increases.

The only way to avoid dealing with incompetent players is to play alone. But playing an MMORPG entirely alone is kind of lame, especially since these games are meant to be played cooperatively. You could also play these games ONLY with friends, but I don’t think I have friends online ALL the time, so I have to play with random MMORPG players sometimes, even if they do suck.