[deccan]

Sorry to hear about that. Yeah, hooking up with random players does create this kind of problems, but having a regular group can be hard to sustain too, since you need to find people who play at the same time that you're on and who have characters at approximately the same level.

I don't know if you know this but you can control loot settings in AO with the /team loot command. This is useless for boss loot of course, but in killing other stuff, with /team loot alpha turned on, the game rotates looting rights to everyone on the team, which eliminates the problem of all team members looting everything as quickly as they can and have luck determine who's fastest.

Also, team missions give good loot but you don't actually need a team to do one. You need a team to get a mission of course, but after that you can just solo the mission yourself. I've accepted invites from people who want a temporary team to get a team mission to solo lots of times.