I feel 500 would probably be more reasonable so that newer players could begin to gain experience.

But 800 would ensure the quality of pugs for everyone. So I guess there is a pro and con to both.

The goal is not to give new players experience. That is the job of tf2center, and they do it as well as seems to be possible. As a replacement for pug.na, the goal is to allow decent (open+) players to be able to play 6s outside of scrim time or without a team.

I'm in total agreement. I'm just saying there can be players with less hours than 800 that could compete at a mid open level or higher and could contribute to quality pugs.

Not saying it is likely, just saying we should be aware of it.

if you are a new player you are probably not gonna get picked anyway unless theres exactly 12 people
i agree with avast

This guys has been doing really well today: http://steamcommunity.com/id/upiopanda/

http://logs.tf/733739

sycknesS only has 519 hours in TF2 and he played at the top of invite
granted that was years ago but still

Also to just give one further consideration,as I do think we need an hour restriction to help pug quality and restrict alts:

There are plenty of pubbers with well over 8k hours in the game. But if we had an hour restriction of 800 they could still join and perform maybe only moderately better than someone with 500 hours but has only played TF2Center.

The earlier players begin to compete in a competitive enviroment the faster they learn and improve. I think we could all agree that someone that has played 800 hours of TF2Center compared to someone that has played half the amount of time in PugMe or the old IRC channels would be probably be worse.

There are plenty of people that compete in ESEA CS pugs with less than 800 hours in the game. We should take into consideration what our longer reaching goals with a more accessible pug system and not just cut out everyone we don't think on paper is good enough.

It's an alt, even if they're good and legit I think it's something dango wants to avoid

unless of course he played 5 seasons of cs with less than 2k hours, including in Main

I'm pretty sure Upio isn't an alt. Hes a csgo player trying to get into tf2 competitive I was talking to him about it yesterday. His tracking is pretty fucking good.

Upio is legit. All I want is to quit playing against hackers.

is it possible to add an esea page to players' profiles

could be useful for captains to pick players they dont know

As far as I know there isn't any easy way to find an ESEA account by steamID. Haven't really checked into it though.

How about if you're bad you won't get picked? How dare you insult the legendary spiderjtg and his meta-bending skybox rollout!

iirc back in 2005/2006 lpkane used to run this site called steamid.com or steamid.esportsea.com (dunno which one) which looked up esea profiles based on steam ids so it is possible but i dont know any existing databases nowadays

edit: http://web.archive.org/web/20100712114845/http://steamid.esportsea.com/

Honestly if I were to guess, I'd say around 800. 500 is too low tbh considering that pug.na =\= tf2mix, so the target skill-range is kinda different. Plus if a player has less than 800hrs, they're probably an alt so yeah. There is also the issue of a cs player coming in to play tf2, but I guess that can be solved by having some sort of verification in place like confirming with an esea account etc.

also charis, while this won't fix the issue with alts, it'll at least greatly reduce the number of them/discourage people from doing it

If anyone can find something like this, let me know.

My biggest concerns are not staying signed in via Steam and the lack of requirements for captaining. I realize there is no ideal requirement for being captain, but I hope this place can find an optimal solution for poor captaining.

I've already changed captains to be picked by whoever has the most games, I'm just waiting for enough stats to be gathered so I can put a game minimum on it. I might just start with 10 games if it's that bad.

Maybe tsc can work something up to grab the shortened Steamid's from the ESEA site?

800 hours is a pretty fair minimum, it would be good if there was some way around it for the extreme rare cases but I'd err on the side of making it hard for alts/trolls more than anything.

instead of basing it on the number of hours played why dont you just make it so that if your most played class is pyro/engie/heavy you can't play.

It's just a matter of time when parents tell him that he can't live with them for his whole life :D

So either 800 hours and or some play for cs/tf2 in esea is what you're saying? If that's possible, that'd be great. Ask some admins from tf2pickup.net; it shows the division played in etf2l for each player etc so maybe they know something about that.

http://api.etf2l.org/

To clarify - having ESEA (or other) profile links would be a great thing to have, completely independent of an 800-hour minimum to add up. I am not sure if any kind of exception to the minimum hours rule would be remotely feasible to manage and even if it is, not sure that linking an ESEA profile would serve the purpose of deterring trolls/hackers since signing up for an ESEA account would be less of a hurdle than getting your hands on an account with the requisite hours.

1 more yo

Just in case you're unwilling to put in a minimum hours of 500~800+ in order to play, would it be possible to add a warning on people's names that fit criteria such as: low hours, private profiles, few games owned, little-to-no logs.tf/.ss presence? I like the idea of a minimum requirement to play, but I can also see rare cases where someone is new to TF2 but might have played just enough and done enough research to play.

I know for one of the criteria I suggest, private profiles, a lot of legitimate players here have them, but I imagine their name recogniztion will be enough for them to still get picked. Or maybe also add a whitelist if you use this idea so people can be vetted by admins to get their private profile warning taken off.

There is currently a bug where the bot crashes right when picks finish. This kills the pug very often because nobody remembers what team they were on after the crash forces them to reload the page.

Then instead of having an ESEA profile, make the requirement to have an ESEA account with at least 1 pug or match played in any game (including CS). Alt accounts will stop bothering with how much that requirement forces them to feed lpkane's wallet.

I know, this is my top priority to fix.

There is plenty of valid players that have never played ESEA

Linking an ESEA profile or having an hour requirement might fix the problem, but it could potentially be a big turn off for newer players. Randomizing the server password or using some other method to only allow authorized players into the servers would be a much better option. As of now even if no one picks the hackers, they just join the server and aimbot anyways.

I agree to linking ESEA profiles for information purposes only. There shouldn't be a requirement of matches played or anything because that excludes moderately skilled players that have the required hours.