If you get a 4k monitor get bigger than 27 inch tho lol windows sucks ass and the buttons in half the applications (mumble) are tiny and don't scale right no matter what magnification settings tweaks and stuff you do

Imagine having a standout match that you want to show people and it's been put behind a paywall by RGL lol

Also, I tried to play the last two seasons in main and then advanced, and it was a gigantic headache both times going back and forth with admins about restrictions. Figuring out which players they'll let us play with/on what classes and then them going back on their previous decisions, shit is so dumb and has definitely made me and most of my friends not want to bother playing again. My essentially pubber/6+ year since playing open friends tried to play a few years ago and got put in main because Niko Jims plays highlander engineer, they got like 5 rounds total in the entire season (3 of which were me ringing on medic lol), they were all so frustrated with the experience they said screw this and didn't play again.

Obviously I get not wanting a super sandbag team to roll the division, but a no-scrimming team of washed up invite players who haven't properly played in 3+ years is not that big of a deal lol. All the restrictions actually end up doing is rewarding players who are scrimming actively now (vs 3 years ago) and actively deter older heads from wanting to play. Directly undermining player retention, at the benefit of *theoretically* saving newer players from the terrible fate of having to play vs better players (pro tip: it actually makes you better at the game to play better opponents!) is not a very good strategy long-term.

+1 to the idea of an unrestricted div, i know i and plenty of other people would love to be able to play the game, but don't care enough to practice for advanced, and get restricted or wouldn't be able to play main (also having cups and/or maybe shorter seasons for the unpaid one? would be nice too)

It sucks but I think another reality is pugs were a huge lifeblood of the game and the current abysmal state of them definitely hurts the game, RGL pugs seem like they'll never be a thing but literally if tsc just put pugchamp/mixchamp up again or hell if dango put tf2pug.me back up even, any sane functioning system would be infinitely better than the scattered/dead before midnight discord pugs we have now

cool idea, excited for the marxist one, i could listen to that man talk about anything for hours on end

would love to see more with previous casters like for example if by some miracle someone got cbear or djc or bloodsire or someone i feel like they would be super interesting to hear talk about the game in retrospect

no idea if they'd want to but id be curious to hear from ppl who don't stream or post much publicly like bdonski, blaze, etc (or for example lansky is around in twitch chats from time to time, would be dope to hear an interview with him)

zesty had his third eye open this whole time

i love the cheater cope saying "you're on my dick" and acting like people calling u out means they're obsessed with u (maybe if u dont wanna be shit on for cheating you shouldn't have done it in the first place, or take some responsibility at least)

https://gamerant.com/worst-steam-games-overwatch-2-reviews/
highly entertaining lol even articles about it mention how people say to play tf2 instead

feel like there should be a way to not have these fill up your threads page (can disable everything else in https://www.teamfortress.tv/forums but not events)

i miss pugchamp

based zesty algorithmically solving mixchamp

oh for sure agree with u on head to head it was just a separate comment on how it's a bit bizarre how there's RNG on when you face a team before or after they forfeit, us old heads obviously just think things should be the same as they were in ESEA cuz it just worked (schedules going out for 8 matches at a time and making it fair that way instead of a system which requires admins to notice and override fuckups, like scream mentioned he failed to do) but i think its still valuable to look at other ways of handling forfeits and stuff

It feels like whatever autoscheduler that is being used to "make things more fair" in theory ends up making things overly complicated and clearly doesn't work well. IIRC ESEA used to assign schedules 4 weeks ahead of time (twice a season) which meant you wouldn't have weird shit like playing the same team only a week after you played them last, maybe something like that could mitigate these issues?

I looked back at ESEA seasons and most seasons they had IM start with ~20 teams, where 3 or 4 max would die, leading to a situation where you played every single team in the div and usually didn't have rematches, I wonder if it'd be possible to restructure things slightly to try and have ~20 teams in adv? Last I played in S11 it started with only 11 teams and had 9 at the end of the season, whereas this season started with 15 and ended with 12. In ESEA the IM playoffs were also top 8 teams, which I feel like there's an argument for--it meant the more middle of the pack teams could at least have some hope of making playoffs, and it makes scheduling contentions like this not nearly as big a deal. Given how long there is between seasons you could probably extend playoffs a bit and do top8 double elim if people really wanted it as well. Maybe it's worth doing a poll of advanced teams to see if they'd want to do top8 next season?

Another potential scheduling thing that I heard but haven't seen discussed much is the idea that when a team dies, it's an advantage to the teams that have already played them, as the other teams either get forfeits, or get matched against better teams in the future (generally it's not the top teams that are dying). If there are going to be forfeits for teams that play the dead team, it would probably be the most fair to mark all previous matches they have played as forfeits as well, so a team that lucks into being scheduled against a team that just died doesn't get as negatively affected by it.

The idea that dead teams get fully removed from the scheduler with RGL means teams that didn't play them yet will have to play 16 matches vs real teams, whereas other teams get a free win obviously. IMO the best solution to this is to keep the dead team in the schedule until they've played each team once (then remove them), or somehow otherwise ensure that the amount of forfeits that teams get is even over the course of the season. Alternatively, if a team dies in the first few weeks you could just remove their previous games and have the teams that played them be rescheduled to play alive teams (therefore everyone gets to play the game more).

can we talk about the fact that fenomeno is unbanned already (has been for 8 months thankfully he isnt playing lol)

just get rid of them permanently, this just gives an even bigger excuse for them to be like "look guys ive changed, see this i paid my dues" and then continue to cheat and waste everyone's time