I played with 3 random Japanese players (i think) I didn’t understand a word they said none of them could speak English but we communicated perfectly using the wheel and way points.

Then again I’ve played with English speakers who are the exact opposite

You might not be aware, but completing side objectives is significantly harder after completing the main objective. Completing the main objective increases the enemy spawn rate by more than 4x.

For this reason, I always ping side objectives, as well as enemy spawns I want to kill, prior to the last main objective. Once the main objective is done, I almost always bee-line straight to extract.

With that being said, I also always make it a point to communicate what I’m doing. Ignoring comms is kind of a dick move, in my opinion, but I try not to judge in case English isn’t someone’s primary language or if there are other circumstances I’m not aware of.

But yeah, if you want to do side objectives or look for samples, I highly recommend doing it before you do the main objective. And use map pings as much as possible.

Playing with randoms is a huge mixed bag for me. I live in the Netherlands and frequently get paired with fellow Americans, but there’s also plenty of people speaking French, German, Italian, Turkish… plenty of people that just can’t communicate at all.

I once joined a team of three French dudes who I was just barely able to understand their strategy for bot defense missions: wear the armor with explosion damage resistance and call in a 380 and walking artillery barrage on yourself. If possible, run to one of the little pillars and lay down on top of them (bringing a jetpack helps with this).

I haven’t done a bot defense differently since.

Maybe we need to encourage something like Deep Rock Galactic’s player base does: type ‘r’ in chat to ask if everybody is ready. It’d be awesome if it was added to the menuwheel of things you can yell while on a dive.

I mean, as host if you kick people between deployments then no harm no foul.

Some international players can’t read English, the text chat is easy to ignore and some have voice chat or all sound disabled/muted. So it can be difficult to co-ordinate with randoms but you can get lucky or just play on a low difficulty to relax and have fun with casual bouts of teamwork.

I just use pings and the comms wheel to indicate where I’m going and what I’m doing.

Also keep in mind that some players have interpreted the “meta” of side objectives being significantly harder to complete after the primary objective to mean “beeline for the extract after the primary objective is done”.

This might be an unpopular take but I think you were in the wrong there. If one guy jumps the gun when the rest of the team is doing objectives, that sure is kick material. However, If 3/4th of the team want to extract, you should follow along, not stay behind and do more stuff… Actual democracy happening right there.