In other words you're trying to fragment the pugging community even further by attempting to spread people across more services. I'm saying this regardless of how good your pugs end up being.

edit: this is mostly in reference to anything you do in NA, i dont know if other countries are in need of this sort of thing

Valiant effort but new pug platforms being announced and claiming the "definitive pugging experience" title over and over is getting tiring to see.
We'll just have to see in the midst of RGL pugs coming out at some point as well as probably another few pushes from FaceIt.

Hey RoL,

Thank you for the candour and can see your point in relation to NA. Many of the smaller regions, unfortunately, don't have platforms that they can play on which simplify the process of getting into the competitive scene.

But to address your point about NA, we do plan to reach out to various pug groups and work with them to see how we can meet their requirements and hopefully expectations. We are optimistic and hopeful that our team can bring something unique to your part of the world.

I wouldn't say we claim that we have the "definitive pugging experience", but we do have aspirations that our team wants to meet. We have an idea of where we want to go and aren't already locked into already-made systems; this is where our team wants to share our development with anyone that is interested so we can have actionable feedback if we need to change directions.

We would position ourselves wanting to have the goal of being the "definitive pugging experience", but know that is a difficult task to achieve and is only possible if we work with the people we have in mind to use our service.

this seems pretty cool and a lot better than how it's been executed in the past. I think the closest something has gotten was computerpugs when he was testing randomized teams with automated server creation/mumble moving. (Those were still really fucking cool.)

simply wont work cause the whole fragmented pug experience is a person problem and not a pug group/network one

ppl are too scared, soft, or just plain out bitchy to the point where they wont play with certain people or groups, some warranted but most of the times not. it seems like every 2 or 3 weeks im hearing rumors of a newfound puggroup like its a new elden ring dungeon i aint find yet that i have to ask for an invite or something for, pughub is prolly the best one we've had by far for a long time, along with stylespugs i guess? but i never get picked there

either that or you have the lil main or amateur players who splinter off and make their own groups because they dont get picked which adds onto the problem, and most that ive played with seem to not wanna get better or anything but thats its own can of worms

Just to elaborate on our post, we understand that some players aren't looking to improve, just want to play with friends or want to only play with people at a certain skill level.

A way we are attempting to incentivise players coming to a central system is that they will be able to host their own pickup games on this platform.

Whether they want the bot in their Discord or prefer to have everything already setup they can host private matches from our Discord instead. We are facilitating the ability to use our automated convenient tools for people to host public and private pickup games.

As a long-term goal for us, we will create ranked pickup games as outlined in our blog post. This feature won't be available for private use and is intended to act as our official matches. These matches will be highly structured, targeted at specific skill levels, contribute to a ranking system and provide skill progression regardless of experience.

We understand this is a difficult issue that our team plans to work at, but we believe this is a great step by having an open system that attracts all types of players, whether you want to host a private game for your friends or you are looking for a game targeted at new players, there will be something there to meet your needs.

please stop banning my friends for saying racial slurs : (

I don't think there has ever been a pug platform that has had the infrastructure to support a decent amount of pugs without having dogshit quality pugs because of the picking system(faceit). If these issues were addressed, I don't think player count would be an issue.

Most people were happy with the pugchamp system of picking, it's just that pugs never happened for a decent proportion of the playerbase since there were never enough medics, and of those medics, they were usually playing far above the level they deserved to be at due to that same shortage of medics/better meds playing combat classes instead. But I think that random medics has become enough of a standard that bringing back that system with a random medic feature would be a good solution.

Like literally just have pugchamp, but you don't need medics/captains (or an admin to get a server and do rcon shit) to start a pug. Then the system randomizes meds out of those added who then captain for their teams. Medics should usually be fine skill level wise since ppl who add are expecting to get picked which means they are roughly good enough for the pug. Maybe have some kind of opt in/out for the pug if you don't think you'll get picked and don't want to get rolled on med. Make it so that ppl can only get rolled once a day and it resets at 3 AM or something.

I get what tasheem is saying about circlejerks and stuff, but honestly pughub is about as public as it gets for a pug group, and styles pugs' only barrier is skill level.

untrue

At a high level most people are competent enough that they can play a passable medic. At a low level, there is not going to be a massive gap between an open medic main and an open fragging class player on medic, and it probably doesn't matter that much anyway. Issues happen when theres a giant skill gap like a main player playing med for an invite pug which really shouldn't happen as long as people are mindful of the pug they are adding up to. Or maybe having an opt in/out system like I said in my original post.

In the future, we plan to completely open up most of the server regions we support (30+ locations), which should cover nearly every area that competitive TF2 is played. However, while we are testing the locations will be limited to areas that have the least infrastructure cost.

I do like the idea you have suggested with the random medic feature and could see how we could add it as a setting for players to enable/disable in their pickup games. I'll make sure to bring it up to the team at our next meeting and see if we can gain some agreement to get it added to our task list.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png

Hey Spe0,

I'd like to keep this thread on the topic of the project we are creating, so if you wish to chat to us about your concerns you can use our support channels in our main discord here - discord.gg/qixalite. However, on a quick note, any of our platforms are governed by our Community Guidelines and any found breach of those guidelines will result in penalties.

We do take a strong stance against Discrimination & Hate Speech which carries a minimum ban period of 1 month, so I would recommend to your friends to change their behaviour to avoid more severe penalties in the future.

Appreciate your kind remarks! It is a core belief of ours that through automation and tools we can make the process more convenient for both PUG hosts and players; this won't be an easy ride for us, but we can only hope through healthy conversation between the community and us, that we can deliver on our ambitions and expectations of players (at least most of them).

sounds pretty ambitious but would be awesome if executed well, pugs are the lifeblood of this game and when pugchamp died and pugs were largely dead the community definitely suffered

can also see it being especially helpful for regions other than NA/EU/AU which all have established systems, could effectively take the place of valve matchmaking in that anyone who wants to play the game in a vaguely competitive setting could add up from anywhere in the world and have the possibility of playing and gaining elo (faceit had this but the site was awful and had no picking)

what we need is to code a really good bot to play medic

@aimisadick

as much as i hate to say it, i think RGL would be the best place to have a new pug system get hosted on because everyone who likes playing competitive TF2 is almost certainly registered on it already. having a huge userbase that is already set up to play and consists ENTIRELY of people who already like comp TF2 means you don't have to go hunt for people to sign up like FACEIT needed, and the structure of divisions makes getting pugs of a proper skill level even easier than FACEIT could ever live up to

No.

RGL is only for na lol what are u talking about

The infrastructure we have at the moment gave us confidence in striving for an ambitious goal. We have already begun reaching out and liaising with pug groups in different regions to get insight into what hosts and players want. It is a focus for us initially to develop a highly customisable pickup game solution where pug hosts are provided lots of ways to run a match how they and their peers want. This is our first step to try and incentivise inhouse groups to use a platform that makes the process of hosting a pug a lot more convenient.

Again, we hope we can execute on the development of the system and meet your expectations!

do we need a service that works for literally every region? i dont see how tf2's big enough where we need everyone under one roof like that

I do not trust Kodyn since when I was doing some business for qixalite with you guys years ago, some of you told me (in a Discord call) that aussies use kelvin as a primary temperature measure unit nationwide. I believed it for some reason, but never mentioned to anyone. Then, MANY YEARS LATER I casually mentioned this to a co-worker from AU and they just fucking laughed in my face revealing this long-lasting bamboozle.

I can't quite remember being involved in that joke, but I can imagine a few team members back then that liked to banter and joke around, it is part of the Aussie spirit after all XD. Also, it's nice seeing a familiar face on this post 200, would love to catch up with you sometime!

Is auto rupping after theres 12 people added up a thing?

Hey Smuk3sh,

Great question! The current functionality we have available is when a pickup game has reached the player requirements (e.g. a sixes match needs 12 players) it will lock the match and initiate a ready-up/afk check to ensure all players are present before the game starts. A pug host can choose to enable or disable the AFK check.

Hey All,

We are back already with our first update on the progress of our pick-up game system! Check it out here - https://blog.qixalite.com/pick-up-games-march-2022-update-1/.

Our major April update has dropped! We introduce player whitelisting and blacklisting with the highly requested pick-up game announcement feature, you can check all the deets here - https://buff.ly/3LYfrEo