u love to see it

new development: admins told us we could reschedule to monday (fathers day and ppl on both teams being unavailable) but just now went back on that and are forcing us to play sunday with only a day's notice

how are they even allowed to do that, we were perfectly ready to play on thursday and then the night of the match they seemed to cave and say okay fine it can be reschedule (cuz there were gonna be 2 ringers on both teams), and now they're flip flopping again? this shit is seriously so absurd it's like they're trying to be as difficult and as possible

like sorry but the admins should just forfeit the right to make decisions for a div at a certain point, once the season is started let the rules be how they are for that season -- u failed to even start the season correctly with the map pool, had a shitfest swapping that around (but did it via a poll thankfully), tried to implement this nazi ass no reschedule rule mid season, changed it saturday to sunday, then said we could have this exception to do monday, then went back and said no exceptions, what's next? 3 more flip flops after this? jemond stepping in and saying enough is enough let the players have their way?

the lesson to be learned here is if you try to be too heavy handed as a league and make too many strict rules, you're inevitably going to make the wrong decisions and piss the players off (see all the RGL bad threads -- did we ever see those threads for esea or etf2l? no because they just let ppl play the game and don't get in their way), but alas our Community League cares less abt the community than their own power tripping

gotta love the classic RGL admins being completely out of touch and making overly strict rules, then refusing to admit they were wrong / head admin doubling down with unilateral decision for a division he has never played in

can we talk about the fact that they randomly decided in the middle of the season, that games cannot be rescheduled past saturday???

like i get it's stupid if a match gets pushed back more than a week or so, but to go from effectively no limit on rescheduling to the most strict limit it possibly could be, is a very Bad idea (also, playing matches on fridays or saturdays literally never happens in 6s lol at the very least let people play on sundays)

changing the map pool mid season is already crazy enough, but if you're going to do this, at least do the same process of polling all the team leaders and getting a consensus

i just played 2 centers and both were semi stacked at least and the second had ppl someone constantly sniping on the other team (warning in chat that theyll get banned doesnt stop ppl)

you should just change the config to disallow offclasses lol its a lobby so who cares if u cant heavy engi on last, better that than aids offclassing to mid IMO (im sure theres a way to override the RGL or ugc or whatever configs people run the lobbies on)

also you might want to do more linebreaks / paragraphs in your posts if you want people to read thru them cause a big wall of text a lot of ppl just skim over

stacking makes the site pretty awful a lot of the time but i do like that lobbies start up before scrim times usually and you can play *some* tf2 even if its not very high level

have to say tho, RGL open pugs seems strictly better (tf2mix/mixchamp basically, because of the auto picking, and actively developed even if still having flaws) and i feel like trying to get people to play there or in captain pugs is a better idea -- you can't all of the sudden change the culture for tf2center that's existed for like 10 years, the toxicity/stacking/people not comming/perma offclassing stuff will be pretty difficult to get rid of

people also have a bad taste of it in their mouths so avoid it, im sure tons of casual players tried it, had a bad experience and said nope not trying comp anymore

oh we got owned no denying that, but no way should any pug ever go for longer than an hour that’s an actual crime against humanity

anyways here’s some more bugs/things to fix for dolphin: when a pug is starting half the time it doesn’t make a noise, the ready up screen blocks you from seeing who’s added, it only shows the total number of players currently added in the name on your browser tab, you can’t add as different classes after readying (e.g., the A pug ended and you want to main class), if you click not ready (to see if you want to play the pug or not) you can’t re ready if more people add up later

the chat is also still minimized by default and blocks your view of medics if it
isn’t minimized (i believe at least) and seems to literally prevent you from typing if you say a swear lol (can’t hit enter, just censor it to “granary is ***” if you’re really worried about people saying meanie words like Ass, Hell, Shit)

the voice channels take a few minutes to detect the game is over and join the two together, and half the time it’ll leave someone out, shit is so over engineered, what it should be is just: when the pug is running the voice channels are locked, but after it ends they become public and don’t delete themselves after 10 mins (that way ppl can join and hang out while the next one is being picked)

dunno if this is possible but the way tf2center makes your voice channel name MEDIC: [current steam alias] makes it so much easier to figure out who’s who (had a newer medic be confused by this trying to figure out who “follow me” is), either that or do what pugchamp did and change people’s alias in game to their registered name

it’s also not at all obvious that the “div” next to your name is just your current elo lol, it should just show both the elo and their actual RGL div (as a captain I have to click through to their RGL to get real information about them, which takes 5 seconds cuz of the cloud flare does protection lol, just overall super janky)

just played an hour long pug please for the love of god make these end at 30 minutes or at the very least limit the overtime

pretty much what the others have said, especially these days a lot of the advancements have been engineering improvements (better methods for training/finetuning/rlhf, quantization/other optimizations), you want to do a PhD and actually do research you definitely have to like math and theoretical stuff (and tearing your hair out), but the vast majority of actual work is just engineering skills (applying other people's research)

on the topic of research i feel like ppl see the AlphaGo deepmind video and stuff like that and say omg this is the dream!! but if you really think you want to do research you need to accept the fact that you will have to stay up to date reading papers constantly (Pain) and there's a huge potential for burnout, it really isnt as sexy as it sounds (i did my masters and got a job and then realized i hated it, having to sit at a desk for 8 hours reading papers and working on shitty research code / be expected to write a paper on your own in 4 months, shit made me wanna kms)

also phd applications are even more competitive and almost impossible to get in unless you have a first author paper at a top conference, and a large number of ML or even data science jobs require a PhD, it sucks but if there's an exciting field that also pays well, odds are it's going to be very competitive and hard to get into

my main advice for ppl who want to get into cs stuff in general is to get as much real world experience or side projects as possible, the tough thing is if its a PhD people are willing to believe you learned something in your years of research, but a masters student who did only research for two years a) still can't get into phd programs very easily and b) employers don't give a shit about ur research and want real world exp ive seen some of the most horribly written code -- phds who got into top conferences doing their entire project in a jupyter notebook

dont get baited rahmed everyone and their dog wants to work in ai now and tech companies have already been extremely competitive and terrible to find jobs in bc of layoffs for the last few years (not sure if u were serious but figure someone reading this might have the same thought)

i know a number of people who have struggled finding jobs even with a bs or masters from a top cs program, the market has been shit for a few years, networking and startups are the only ways ive seen people find success, but as someone who worked for an ai startup that ran out of money (lol) i would recommend people do Other Things instead of jumping on the bandwagon

there are tons of tf2 people who studied cs tho so odds are someone you know is either in school for it or working in software somehow (we're all computer nerds it makes sense), talking to people is the best way to get a feel for the industry and whether or not you should try to pursue things

about the tutoring thing im sure this will make it a bit more difficult to get people to pay for tutoring, but my friends who have done online cs tutoring for example a lot of times are asked to help with complex problems that someone tried to figure out with gpt (lol) but failed to do so, plus i think people just enjoy talking to another human and having it not be as isolating / stressful struggling on a homework assignment

i may be wrong but i think the site only makes a noise when the pugs starting if you're added, it'd be nice if it did it for everyone so people knew when to add if they passively had the site open (e.g., you sit out the A pug and then miss the B pug right after it bc you're looking at something else)

Cool to see tftv new articles being written again, nice to get a glimpse into things for someone who doesn’t follow the eu scene much these days

Edit: maybe it would be possible to include the rosters for each team as well

IMO the current rgl pug system takes a lot of the character / community feel from pugs, a lot of the fun for me was hanging with everyone in the mumble channel after and when the next one is being picked, but that shouldn’t be hard to fix if RGL wants to (I posted on the thread)

Captaining yourself lets you play with people you like, but the elo system might discourage people from wanting to do that bc it risks them losing elo / people getting mad at them for picking bad teams. I’ve played a few games and I definitely preferred the atmosphere of previous pug systems (e.g., seeing someone’s win loss on a given class when you hover over them kind of feels weird to me, if this was a faceit ladder with prizes I can see it but for example I went 0-4 on soldier pugs and someone pointed it out and it made me not rly want to add again lol). Maybe I’m the minority in disliking elo and these more competitive features but they definitely do add more pressure to a class that is already stressful enough.

But I think the larger issue is just a general trend of medics getting burned out / not seeing any strong reason to keep competing at the top level, most of the old heads like myself have quit or decided to offclass or play at LANs only. If yall want people to play medic more the first thing you should do is be less hard on newer players (like referring to them as 1300 elo lol)

request: make it so channels stay open after pugs (they boot you after 10 mins or so) or add a public hangout channel people can join to talk between pugs (can restrict to only verified players to prevent mic spamming)

also when map voting is happening there should be a visual/audio cue counting down and the duration should be longer (15-30 seconds after the pug is picked or something), currently its totally unclear when the voting is active or when you can no longer

How will ringers and scheduling be handled, the site only allowed six names to be added to a roster but if it’s two weeks Monday through Thursday each day I’ll need to find ringers for certain days