The background for my previous post is that we’ve been playing TD since 2004, and we only play once a year--when we get together as a group at Gen Con.
This seems to make us unlike many other veterans—who play the same dungeon over and over, but we were also much more experienced and better equipped than new players.
Since we only play the dungeon once a year and we don't make large token buys, we aren't outfitted as many other TD Forumites (who may have Epic or Nightmare builds for all the classes).
We would buy one PYP pack a year and maybe a couple of ebay auctions.
We would occaisionally be able to trade some of our old stuff for new tokens on the forums.
(I have changed in the past few years, and I have been buying $1K packs or $2K packs to keep up.)
Over the years, we've run into a number of issues with other TD players, and we've tried to solve them different ways (see the previous post).
Here are a couple of examples:
In more than one instance, we had TD Veterans who spoiled the puzzles for us.
I remember one instance when a veteran solved the puzzle as soon as we got into the room--before we had a chance to even look around.
The rest of us objected to this, and then, in a later room, he solved the puzzle at the end of the room--without asking--in order to avoid push damage.
This type of behavior was not uncommon for our group to experience.
To be honest, I’m amazed at the number of long time players who have been posting in this thread that they haven’t seen this behavior.
On the other end of the spectrum, we had been playing in PUGs for a few years, and we ended up with a group of new players who were very drunk.
They showed up 20 minutes late (as we were entering the training room), and I was legitimately worried that we'd have someone *puke* in the dungeon.
It was awful.
Our experiences led us to avoid random PUGs as well as random TD Veterans—mainly because we only played TD once per year.
If we had one bad apple, it soured TD for the entire year.
This contributed to us losing one of our long term players.
I'll end this post on one of my favorite experiences:
A father and son joined us years ago (in the Woodie days), and I loaned them some rare armor and weapons.
After the adventure, the son was upset--as he had lost the loaned weapon.
I asked if he had fun, and he said he did. I told him that that was all that mattered.
I just wish I'd had the presence of mind to give him another weapons to replace the lost one!