I think it's important for the new players that things like tf2center and rgl open pugs are active. It's unreasonable to expect a platform like tf2center to host top quality games, but I'd really like it if we could get the site populated enough to serve as a way to consistently be able to play 6v6 at any time even if it isn't always the most serious or balanced experience. Like it or not, r/TF2 thinks TF2center is the spot to play a pick up game of 6v6, and I think it's worth taking advantage of that. The weird thing about tf2center right now is that it has this reputation as being a place for noobs because the playerbase was much more ugc steel level back in the day, but now it's more like a retirement home for experienced players who just want to do fast rollouts under the influence after a long day at work after the kids go to bed. So you basically end up with some 1200 hour kid getting yelled at by bunny monster for being bad (love u Joaquin I know ur just tsundere).

I'm not really sure how to solve this issue, but I think something like noobsday Tuesdays where we set up lobbies for players with no or little rgl experience could be cool and effective.

maybe we all (me included) need to stop coping and realize this is possibly just the passage of time and the waning interest in competitive tf2, but on the other hand i do feel like there's plenty of lower level players to play the game.

i think the problem is that pugs are too cumbersome in NA. i have more fun playing tf2pickup.eu as a burger and getting shit on and playing with 120 ping than really any other form of pugs because you can actually play on demand without the threat of being fatkidded every pug like RGL pugs do to anyone whos not part of the in-crowd on that site already.

even other avenues like TF2CC discord pugs, its too much work. what if im hanging out with my friends in another discord, i now have to go and add up to another discord channel just to wait for everybody to add up? and then you get the knock-on effect because of that where people dont add up until theres only a few people left needed to pug, and it just makes things take too long. and ESPECIALLY after all that, what if you were the first person added up and it takes half an hour or even longer to finally get 12 in the VC queue channel, you're so excited to finally practice scout and then you get random rolled onto medic, play a shit pug, and then pugs die. its just not worth it

RGL open pugs seem like the perfect solution, because it's like tf2pickup.eu but i think explicitly because captain pugs are offered as an alternative, a big chunk of people who are already too nestled into that system and prefer it for whatever reason would rather stay there, which creates a herd mentality "oh all the best players are playing those pugs, i need to go add up there since the other one is dead anyway." in an ideal world we'd get all the lower level players playing RGL open pick pugs, but i think people just give up hope when they see all the people added to captain pugs and see 0/12 on the open section

also the elo system is a terroism super plague on pugs, even for the captain pugs. people care about that gay little number too much and it creates this insulated ecosystem where everyone is trying to pick the best pug possible so they can gain elo when in reality i think a lot of invite players need to seriously wake up to the fact that this game (comparatively to most games that exist) is like, STARVING for players. we already had a thread from an invite player complaining about how there's no medics, but then all the replies were about how insufferable it is to play with invite players as a medic player if you're not meeting their expectations and how the tryhard elo-desiring environment creates this atmosphere that makes you never wanna add up for medic again. invite players need to take a note out of the FGCs book. pick new players! who cares if you lose the pug, get some random on scout and teach them to play! allow them to fail, let them learn. it'd be easier to do this if there were no elo

As an older, mediocre player with life responsibilities, the current situation is awful. The limited time I can set aside to play the game, waiting around 30-45 minutes for a pug that may or may not start is terrible. I would love if we can get back to having a service that I can reliably know a pug will start at any time. I don't think I've played a pug in at least two years, and it saddens me.

The current state of in-house pugs is terrible because it's fragmented such that pugs can only happen at time when a critical mass of that subgroup are on, all other times there's never a critical mass anywhere, even if there might be 20-30 folks open to play among all of them - there's no way for them to know.
Even TF2CC, which is probably the most workable for newbies -IM/Main level pugs are still running consistently only in the hours before scrims. Weekends are dead, after scrims are sporadic.

Given how prevalent trolls and cheaters are as Valve gave up on policing the game, truly open experiences like tf2center are a big risk and I have no interest in devoting time to them knowing odds are good it'll be terrible. It may be hard to ever bring them back to the old popularity because of that.

I have high hopes for RGL open pugs, but they don't seem to attract much vs. captain pugs, would love to hear why more people don't try to utilize them and what could be done to get more adding up.

very wishful thinking, most of the people aren't that patient, you start doing some stupid shit and you get shittalked, it's not good but it is what it is

honestly i've tried running highlander pugs as in hl.tf2pickup.us in NA and it worked for some time and it had some success but i think the reasons why it was a thing was because:
- some people disliked people who ran rgl pugs A LOT like they were openly unhappy about it
- rgl pugs didn't work at all or there were serious issues with their operations (which seems to be fixed now)
- no fatkidding

however when rgl pugs started working normally people moved back to playing these simply because more people were gathering up there and after like 2 months of no games i've closed the site because i saw no meaning in maintaining the operation, meanwhile i was thinking of hosting tf2pickup.us but after this i kinda gave up cuz i thought that na 6v6 people are happy with what they have so this service is basically not needed
however, if there is an actual interest from the community we could make it happen, i just need to see that people really want it and we could do something about it
the big difficulty is getting admins to maintain the site and getting actually trusted people, i strongly empathize on the latter because i am extremely happy about what kind of admin team i have for eu pugs as i know they have a good intent for the matter

this is the exact reason why skill values for all players aren't public on tf2pickup.eu as it prevents people from e-dick size competitions and people actually focus more on the game than getting better/worse elo

Every discord pug group always has like 2 invite dodgers, 5 nc players and a 12yo screamer added, it's not surprising nobody else wants to add into it. Who is that fun for?

and the heavily curated pug groups never run anymore

As a member of the 4v4 PASS Time pug group, we used to have major issues with low player count. As a result, some days I'd be waiting for hours in a VC just for pugs to never run. I grew frustrated with this and eventually decided to talk to oog, who is the main developer of the open source pugBot.
He and his collaborators ended up adding a system for pugs where players could just type "/add 4" and add up for 4 hours (as in, they're available for pugs for 4 hours, not that they want to play for 4 hours) (inspiration from Good Shooting Pugs). They can "/remove" to be removed from the queue, and once the bot gets enough players for a pug, it pings everyone who added up. It's a phenomenal system. Below is an example:

https://i.imgur.com/F9L0Rcp.png

It definitely alleviates some of the issues you have with pugs; it always struck me as strange that more servers don't adopt it.

the fact TF2CC doesnt have this implemented since yesterday is nuts

i cannot speak for the rest of the NA community especially higher level players but i absolutely would play on it if it was formatted the same way as the EU one is. i would volunteer to admin too if it was needed

You make some other good points about availability and pug quality, but this is not a prevalent issue for TF2Center in my recent experience.

I am glad if that's the case, I don't mean to imply it's like that now.

I really mean more that anywhere without strong gatekeeping has a real risk of being infiltrated and ruined by those folks. I've seen it happen in other sites and groups many times and so I am wary of any open access pug service, I imagine I am not alone in that, is all.

As an open player in the tf2 scene, it can be a little intermediating to say the least to add up (unless I'm with my friends on fireside) because, what if pugs are shit? What if I do bad for the team and get yelled at? What if I have to leave randomly during the match or during the queue and wastes everyone's time? There is so many little factors as to why I don't add up as easily as I do. but I just have to buck up and click join queue or else I'm never playing 6s or HL.

Another reason why I don't join up easily is mostly because, pugs are not consistent, if more people from tf2cc joined up in RGL open queue then yea I'd totally be down, I feel like some tf2cc people should join up in the RGL open queue maybe a certain day or something (but not Friday's cause that's their thing but you get what I mean). Right now I'm more on TF2Pugs.com because someone is always wanting to play given 6s, HL, or even just MGE and Ultiduo.

but what do I know I'm just an open player.

I am going to be super honest with you, people don't pick based off elo in those pugs and lowkey never have, they pick based on whose most likely to make them win. I understand you might want newer players to play but they end up getting rolled by the massive amounts of new information and it ends up not being conducive to learning. Putting newcomer-im players in these pugs would just make everyone's experience worse. I don't think captain pugs should at all be used to coddle newer players since that isn't what they are meant for.

This surprised me. NC-AM PUGs run pretty frequently, at more diverse times than IM and up. They also have Friday Newbie Mixes and Newbie Cups. Aren't you a main player? The last time I saw you in TF2CC was nearly a year ago.

A lot of people don't even know that TF2CC has PUG categories up to above main. So I assumed you were referring to higher divisional problems. It's odd to see you mention lower divisions.

Doesn't this apply to playing a PUG anywhere? What alleviates your anxieties? Especially when many servers including the ones you mentioned have rules against excessive toxicity?

It's a new feature that is going to be polled. If people hypothetically didn't want it, it wouldn't make sense to unnecessarily make the "workflow" of runners more complicated. Personally though I enjoy adding up even with friends and talking to new people or having conversations with friends where other people can join in. It feels a little dissonant when you tell high level players to pick new players they don't know when you don't even want to add up to orally interact with people you aren't familiar with. Even then a big chunk of people deafen before PUGs start so it's not that big of an issue in the first place.

"Doesn't this apply to playing a PUG anywhere?"

the only place I feel comfortable in is tf2pugs.com because I joined up and had a lot of fun and didn't get chastised for being bad at my job as a medic, there are times where it happens but it's not a lot, I will say this is mostly the norm when it comes to new players in the comp scene or just wanting to try out, they get intimated that they HAVE to play the meta or else they get bullied for it, or they HAVE to do the job right or else again they get bullied for it and you don't know if you can do the job right cause you might not even know if you are doing it right or just don't know how the fundamentals of comp TF2 works. (I haven't joined tf2cc or newbie mixes but considered, but rather play pugs than wait till Friday to play, I wanna play now.) On top of that you don't know the players or their playstyle or how they are gonna react when you are playing their pugs. What I'm mostly saying is that if puggers just Don't get upset at players but instead teach them a thing or two or just say nice try, that'll be nice, but this is the internet and time is money, they want to win 8/10 times.

"What alleviates your anxieties?"

I have to live and learn, take as the match comes or just have fun just playing the game and not stress about your role, focus on the objective and if you lose? it's just a game, that's my mentality.

"Especially when many servers including the ones you mentioned have rules against excessive toxicity?"

I feel like that's the truth but from my experience, standing idly by and spectating live pugs or livestreams on pugs on twitch, it either ends with a "gg" or just someone being a dickhead and pausing the match consistently to ruin everyone's night because they died a fair amount of times (which I have seen before and it was stupid, that happened on RGL's open pug servers).

if there really is a significant playerbase that wants to play pugs but doesn't get picked in rgl captain pugs, the move should be to start populating open pugs (https://pugs.tf.plus/pug/6s%20Open). when pugs were more alive, this was how things were set up; open pugs would run consistently with lower level players and some high level players would add up because they were more active than captain pugs. tf2mix on IRC was probably the most successful form of this in NA.

however this only really works if these pugs actually run often, which requires there to be people who actually want to play them. I think tf2 culture might have evolved past this point but i wish it could still be like this.

I'n my experience as someone in NC/AM, I think the RGL pugs seem more geared for non-open divs (I don't even recall seeing IM or Main players picked in 6s Captain). 6s Open is dead (at least when I try checking it), and when I try to play 6s captain, it's pretty much just invite/advanced players playing amongst each other.

I don't even think it's a bad thing that someone very experienced in 6's would rather not pick or play with someone who has too much of a skill gap, but when you can just hop on to TF2CC pugs (which for NC/AM pugs have been easily accessible) RGL pugs are kinda pointless for newcomers.

Also, I might just be totally confused, but I swear I remember TF2Center pugs needing you to play a certain amount of their pugs as a requirement to join a pug, but since every pug had this limit, it was basically off limits to anyone but those who were "grandfathered in" (I could be wrong since it's been years since I tried to play there).

EDIT: I forgot to add that even despite TF2CC being decent for NC/AM pugs, since skill isn't kinda immediately established and everyones kinda new, you can have basically the most unexperienced player playing in AM pugs while some god might be in NC pugs. The timings can also be odd since you have pugs that seem to run during the workday, or at like 3 AM in the morning, but not in the late evening when most would actually have free time. Still, TF2CC ends up being the better option for me (and the other people I play with in both divisions).

Not sure if it was like that before since I’m a newer player but it’s not like that now at least. When I had started playing a season and a half ago the only thing you needed was to link your discord, steam account and to make an rgl acc to play in nc pugs it was honestly pretty simple.

I checked it out again and it seems you're right. I'll try and play there at some point to see if it's improved, although I think the other problems also mentioned might pop up (the problems with pugs themselves not anything specific to TF2Center itself).

im happy to chat and mingle with new people, but with how long pugs take to get started and also like you said most people just deafen until the pug starts anyway, i'd prefer to just talk to my non-tf2 playing friends until the pug starts

This is basically what RGL Open pugs is and it's like the ultimate solution if you're just willing to use it. It has automatic matchmaking/balancing (granted elo is so inaccurate because of the low amount of players right now), and you can just sit in the queue for as long as you want until there's 12 ready. It's just that nobody adds up to it. If you're on your computer and you somewhat feel like playing 6v6 you should just queue the Open pug and do whatever while you wait for it to start. Even if you don't get a game today, people will see you added up and that can encourage more people to add tomorrow. We just need to get the ball rolling.

I dont think its talked about enough but we arent having a bunch of new players enter the scene due to the casual experience being pretty much unplayable. I dont care whether youve won prem 10 times or are hardstuck open your first experience playing tf2 was quickplay or casual which are now dead.

Those players who have installed maybe 2 or 3 years ago and are trying out the competitive format for the first time just don't exist in the same quantity as anyone installing in that timeframe would have got headshot but cheater bots over and over and probably quit.