I've been dropping into pugs almost since I've had access to hard mode. According to most everyone else in the game, pugs suck. Mostly full of random people who pull "leet" builds off of PvXwiki and have no idea how to use them properly (or at all); utter morons, like warriors who try to slot six rechargeable (hard) resurrection skills and two single-use (soft) ones and then wondering why they die twelve times in a simple mission; or people who just can't be bothered to play with noobs. And I've dealt with all of that at one point or another.
And I can't say as I can say the same.
In fact, the vast majority of my pugging experience has been one of success. I go in having run the mission at least once before myself, check for stuff on the wiki site (it has a few helpful notes and tactics there), advertise what job I'm doing—which, aside from one instance when I advertised myself explicitly as a healer, reminded my group I was a healer, and they still managed to convince themselves that I was nuking—do my job, get the mission done, end of story. If it's a straightforward kill-stuff-until-the-end-zone then there isn't much else to do. If the specific mission requires a small bit of tactical planning—say the thing we need to kill isn't reachable by melee characters, or one person needs to perform a particular task, or one route is a bit easier than another—then I ask about it before we go in, and usually that gets the group talking a bit.
Here's where my specific personality has a slight advantage, I think. My tendency, once I've familiarised myself with something (whether it be a game or work or whatever, so long as it involves a team effort), is to go in, check on the plan, confirm the plan, execute my bit. I assume I know what I'm doing. The purpose of the check is to make sure I'm on the right track, and if I'm not then to make sure I get on the right track. After that I pretend it's the right track, and if it doesn't work the first time then hopefully the task wasn't of major importance.
And in games, screw importance. If things go belly-up, whatever. Find the issue, fix the issue, run it again.
What I don't do is give anyone else reason to suspect I haven't got the full picture on the plan. If I check on the plan and the leader goes "no, we're doing this way", I don't say "well I've never done that before" because that immediately paints a target on my back, especially if the plpan goes south later. I say some variant of "okay, cool", run a quick check to see if I can find what's being talked about, and fall back into a secondary position BECAUSE even if I don't know the full details of the plan, I can still do whatever my main job happens to be. If I'm damage, then I can damage; I just might be damaging from a different location.
Added to that, I can adapt pretty fast to surprises. If the party suddenly takes a detour I'm not used to, the only time I'll speak is if I can't immediately see the benefit of the alternate path, I'm concerned taking this path might actually screw us later, and I have time to type out the query. If we're running our asses off to somewhere and the three of the lead four jink left, you can bet I'm jinking left right behind them. And again, if we die so what.
More often than not I won't lead. I tend to sit myself in the party window and either wait for someone to pick me up or look for a good forming group to slot into. (Usually if I see two slots left open I won't offer to join unless the leader is a monk, because those groups are usually looking for monks.) And you might think from my earlier description of the woes of the elementalist in hard mode that this can take forever, but that actually makes it really easy to get slotted. My class is a known quantity. We might not be able to pump out damage on the magnitude we're actually supposed to be able to, but we are definitely damage and probably some bit of utility along with that. We're not universally sought after, like monks (no one plays monks for some reason; I would but I'm out of room), but there's usually a slot set aside for us.
Mesmers get most of the party hate, actually. Which is a shame.
Where was I? Oh right.
Most of the time I won't lead. But if I feel the pace slow somewhat (and since I've been pugging for "ages" I'm used to high-speed runs; completing Unwaking Waters in something like a minute-twelve, for instance) I will more often than not speak up, if not step up and take over direction completely. Which I've had to do on more than one occasion.
Basically my take is this. If everyone knows what they're doing and how they're going to do it, there's no need for a leader. We'll be functioning as a sort of collective unit, everyone doing their job precisely when needed and moving forward pretty fast. (Sort of like MMO special ops, come to think of it. =P ) If anyone isn't sure what they're doing, I'll wait for a second to see if someone fills them in by reflex, and if there's no immediate answer and I know what's going on then I'll pitch in. If the leader isn't sure what the procedure is (or if they bail, which has happened before when someone got pissy) then I'll most likely take over, and I can do this because most of the time there will be other players stepping up alongside me and then we've reverted back to the first instance where we're just functioning on expectation and reflex.
For instance, was running a really long mission (Gyala Hatchery) with Beth and Des and another friend of mine (and former alliance-mate), and before we went in all three of them asked which way we were going—Des and Beth both asked "back way?"—so I went ahead and gave the affirm so as not to waste too much time, since obviously all four of us knew the route. And halfway through that a slight variant was suggested and we took it (from my perspective to test it out, see what it did and how it worked), finished the main slog, backtracked, I threw out a relatively different idea and everyone else went "ohay that works", over and done.
Whereas last night we had a small uncertainty whether or not to enter a particular outpost, and Des, Beth and I spent about ten minutes just kind of sitting there waiting for someone to make a decision (mostly because I didn't care). So just stepping up and saying "yes we're doing this" when everyone knows what the deal is can help save a lot of time.
All that to say that because of the neurosis which I've now explained in several paragraphs (and which I do not think about while I'm doing it), I have had probably about a 90% success rate with pugs, and don't expect that to change any time in near future. Or at least before September, which is when I'll likely be able to start playing again after summer's over.
But I can see where people get off on bashing pugs after hearing that players try to pug elite areas, which are essentially very difficult regions that sort of require a small element of tactics and skill and planning to be able to pull off, whether it be in team communication or just figuring out the next set of leet builds so you can roll your face on the keyboard and win. (Which, you know, regardless of how cheap it may seem, still requires some degree of knowledge of how the game works and what's in which area and so on.)
Personally, I would almost never pug places like The Underworld unless I knew the people I was playing with, and once that happens it's not so much a pick-up group any longer, is it? Sure you can whale your way through about three-fourths of it, but there are a couple of sections that actually require some strategy to get through, and if you're going in with seven other random people and you have no idea if they even know what their job is, let alone how to do it, the fact that you can still hope for success boggles my mind.
Like, they're even hard on normal mode. So, you know....
Anyway. I also find it amusing that Beth's primary is a ranger, Kei's primary is a ranger, and I was damn well close to choosing Ranger first—although I don't consider elementalist my primary so much as it's the class I've spent the most time with. I like paragon and necromancer too much to call elementalist my definitive primary. And then there's the five other classes I have running....
