Well watching JustGaming4Us does not help

Went into Infected space on my healer. One guy had 27 critical ship injuries. His shields would flicker on and off! Pure waste of my heals. So I say something about getting his ship fixed before doing elite STFs and he responds "oh this is nothing, I once had 65 injuries going"

I sometimes hate puggin STFs

My most recent bad STF wasn't actually that bad, just a lot of work on my part. We lost one person due to a disconnect for a KSE. Hit the tac cube, and I went to handle right probes - we were organized, and had someone on left probe duty. The other two went to start taking down the left gateway.

Now, don't get me wrong - we got the optional with 20 seconds to spare (), but I basically did over 60% damage to the tac cube in the beginning, solo'd the 2 cubes on my side, and finished off a cube that wandered over from the left with 80% health remaining. I took out the generators, transformers, and gateway on my side and still had time to rejoin the group and blow 5 generators, the remaining cube, and everything else.

Such a lot of work. Nice people, just not very good. One of them was all "GG! We did great with just 4 people!" while I'm biting my tongue.

Nothing wrong with autofire if you know what you're doing - I have one button specifically mapped to both clear target and recall fighters.

I've blown a generator early before (because we can't really cancel our plasma torps), but I do enough DPS (around 12k on target) to blow the transformer before anything gets there anyway.

This is completely wrong. RML only works in teams with sufficient DPS - when I'm with good people (most members of UFP and our allies, or private STF channels) we can do RML and clear CSE in around 5 minutes. In a PUG or groups from public channels, MRRMLL is safest and easiest because... well, some people suck.

With 3 purple projectile officers, having 2 plasma torps and an omega could work, I think. Not with commons and without DOffs, though.

When I first joined PESTF, it was good. People all knew what they were doing (10%, MRRMLL, 3/2 split on KSE) and had competent builds. Recently it's been full of weaksauce that's barely better than PUGs. (Like the 3 I mentioned in my story above.) It's like weak people heard "Oh, there are strong players there" and joined en masse, utterly diluting the quality of the inhabitants.

dont say such things. them ppl on the estf channels are real hc players...

srsly, estf channel is only for those, who dont want to pug stuff, and want a team, who knows atleast one tactic, that is not rly required, but atleast foolproof... (though they can annoy me with their 10% ISE thingie, when its clear, that we do not need that, and I pop "early")

that one knows how to take a pounding

Yeah, I had some really bad runs with people from the EliteSTF channel -.- Sometimes even worse than pure pugging xD

There is something that I have come to understand in the long time that I've been playing stf's and that is that it seems to me I'm the only one able to protect the kang in Cure or stop the probes in Khitomer. I say this because, everytime I warp in to cure no one is protecting the Kang. They've all run off to attack a cube. In Khitomer everyone runs off to attack a generator forgetting the probes. So there I am stopping them. Or people start out protecting Kang or stopping probes then move off to attack a cube/generator. Makes me laugh.

The main problem with STFs (and PVE... and PVP...) is the lack of communication within the team. If everyone knew their roles in whatever STF, things would go much smoother - however, it's the following types of people who frak up the mission:

1) Noobs who are using <Mk X gear. *I can pull off an STF with white Mk X gear, if I so needed to. It's all in the build.

2) Noobs who don't know what the chat box is, or have it shut.

3) Noobs who don't know what they are doing in the mission, and fail to ask for help.

4) The "wannabe-Fleet Commanders" who try to order people to do stuff. No one wants to listen to you!

5) Trolls. *Nothing you can do if you get one of these. Report them.

6) AFKers or people who tab-out in the mission loading screen. *Report them.

Easiest solution to both above posts:

Don't pug.

Go to PublicEliteSTF, ask how to do things, and answers will be given (most of them not troll). If you team with players from there, roughly 50% are competent, 25% good, 10% VERY good, and 15% idiots. Thankfully you usually get the other 85%.

ISE four players were hiding under the starbase.