Mix is such a circle jerks nowadays it's not even fun.

Tf2center isn't as great for team comms and such but it's miles ahead of what the lobby was. Would rather play with randoms that occasionally comm than idiots in mix who kind of earrape people with their constant in-jokes and memes. Also getting kicked for no reason and asking why when you come back and getting no response gets old.

Whether it be IRC or in-house, I find that most people are awful at captaining which makes pugging a frustrating waste of time.

i don't pug out of a crippling sense of self-doubt

aka i don't know how to jump around and shoot the ground

I occasionally play in inhouse pugs, but only when invited.

I'm scared of meeting new people.

tf2pickup.net
best life

I don't pug because generally 50% of the team I'm made to pug with is worthless/doesn't care/is just fucking around so it's not really worth my time. I'm not saying I need pugging to be super serious to have any fun - but I need it to at least somewhat resemble something other than a shameful display: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay9ZxsulN2c

Unless I'm drunk - to very, very drunk. Then it's not such a big waste of time because it puts me in a place mentally where I can be confronted with stupidity that makes my game-play less fun/harder without getting upset.

being a euro, it's pretty much all about mixing for me. tf2pickup.net is pretty good, but i just prefer to play with my friends.

I always had fun pugging with you :(

And, to answer your question, Slin.

Not tryharding =/= throwing. A lot of people seem have a hard time finding a middle ground.

Id love to pug but I don't know of any euro pug sites so I'm stuck with tf2 center.

http://tf2pickup.net/

I pug because it's the only form of organized competitive TF2 I can play now that I work nights. However, I did play a ton of pugs before finding this job and played in ESEA. It's [usually] a fun way to play and can help teach you things you won't learn in DM/MGE. There's also the fact that pugging with someone could very well lead to friendships you wouldn't have obtained otherwise. It's how I befriended a lot of people I'm chill with anyway.

I usually play in tf2mix but I much preferred pugna before it ended up being dead until around scrim hours. I normally take up in house offers whenever I get any, though that's understandably not that often. Unless I'm not in the right groups. Every once and a great while I'll subject myself to torment and hop on tf2center.

As far as tryharding or goofing off, I enjoy it more when there's more actual competition. So anywhere from a game where people are playing normally to a game where people are doing the best they can to win. I don't hate goofing off; in fact, I enjoy doing it at times like anyone else. It's just considering this is my only form of organized competition like I mentioned above and don't want to completely rust myself out for when I am able to play in leagues again, I'd rather keep it normal or competitive between teams. I don't think goofing off ruins anything though. Unfortunately, it's not any time I can go and goof off with a "long hair, don't care" mentality throughout the game. I regrettably (I can live with it because this is all I have at the moment, but still) care more about my performance in pugs than I should, so I have to either be drinking or in that special mood.

I mix/doublemix a lot with my friends, one side of my friendlist i play normal and on the other one everyone is always shitting around. But like someone said you need a good captain, and we always have a good one, shoutout to AMS :D

I haven't played tf2 at all in awhile because my gpu assploded but I don't remember tf2mix being that bad when I last played it two months ago. If you want tf2mix to be less circlejerky you're gonna have to man up and be a captain to keep friends from using tf2mix as an inhouse pug organizer. Circlejerkimg is not really something that can be stopped by banning people because it's a pretty hard thing to prove and enforce. If you do a good job in game you may even impress the people in the circlejerk and they may pick you the next time you play.

Not playing tf2mix won't fix it from being a circlejerk.

I'm too bad to play in anything other than tf2center :D

If I pug, I generally play tf2mix and it's ok. There is some circlejerking that goes on with people who know each other of course. This tends to clutter up comms, but then that's generally always the case be it mix or center or whatever. I've also found that unless you have a few experienced players on your team, playing the medic class is hell.

I'm not even sure if there is somewhere to pug in north america now, pug.na is dead every time I join the channel :/

ESEA pugs???

I don't like pugging at all. There are a lot of other things id rather do to have fun playing tf2.

Inhouses can be a decent time but they often devolve into silliness.

Don't be dismayed by the fact nobody's added, just add up if you feel like pugging and naturally people will follow. Somebody's gotta do it.

in house pugs can be fun depending on the group. it's really all about the people

i used to play pug.na all the time, but then it turned into a circlejerk of players at night who would pick the same teams every time, leaving around 10~ people fatkidded.

only pugs i play anymore are inhouse pugs

don tpug bad intternte help

I'll do in house pugs. A healthy blend of trying to win and trying weird things for fun (not 24/7 spy or anything like that though) is best.

Get your headsets ready

My average pug experience over the last year:

1. Sitting in an IRC channel waiting for 12 people to add up
   
2. Takes twice as long to find medics
   
3. Takes three times as long to find captains
   
4. Finally starts, people take 15 minutes to get into the server
   
5. After two rounds nobody takes it seriously, either one team is stomping and runs three offclasses or one team is upset they're not stomping and runs three offclasses

I haven't tried TF2Center yet but it looks promising enough.

Everytime I try to pug I have 0 idea who most people are and i'm usually adding as medic/captain because it's needed. Then I feel bad when I don't know anyones aliases.

I might pug as scout or something, just to do something different if I'm bored or if a friend asks me to pug with them. I pretty much never pug as medic though. I always try to put myself in a serious environment as medic (scrims / matches), but that's just a personal preference. I do suggest newer medics to pug, because it'll help you work on your positioning and other things.

I have a complete different opinion of Pugs,
Sure there is alot of circlejerk and often enough the same people get picked over and over again.
there is still tf2mix pickup system which makes sure anyone gets to play if they can wait for the "non captain" draft that consist in letting the non picked draft from the last captain draft to get picked.

Anyway, I often get in arguments when I tell people that PUGS is the greatest way to improve a player skill to a certain cap.
It mixes the DM that you would look for in DM servers,
It mixes the Gamesene and the comms that you get from scrim and matches to a certain degree.

I Mostly got all my TF2 experience from playing non-stop pugs at a certain time and I deffinatly noticed a great difference in term of skill.

The thing people don't like in PUGS is how unorganised it can get because of the different skill gap you can find in a mix of random people playing together for 30 min And how bad it gets when people use diffent loadout than the regular meta, When people don't play seriously and are out of position.
BUT thats the whole reason pugs are so great. You will never get the experience you can gather from PUGS with matches in term of gamesence and versatility. You get to make decisions when things don't just go the way it has to go. You get to make up new strategy or decide your next move with uncommon environement. It makes you practice your decision making and your flexibility.
You also get yo play with different player skills, Which makes it so you get to face people with different reactions to event and so you can't always predict the best move your opponent will want to do because each of them have a different tf2 Background.

Sure now theres so much more fucking around than there used to be when I first started pugging, but pug systems in general when the administration is good and when people play to get better I don't think theres a faster way than playing pugs to get better.

better than lobby but still significantly worse than any other form of pug i have ever done (as expected)

this has usually been the case with pug.na for the past year and most of 2013
no one adds med aside from the usual pug.na medics(ndust,mahh,skye,b0t,others i can't think of atm) or defy gets super bored and adds up med
i don't think captaining is too bad in that channel though
pug.na now is basically pseudo-invite pugs around 12:30am est usually on weekends or really late at night on weekdays so i can see why people get frustrated if they try only playing there

tf2mix is pretty good though. yeah the skill level is a lot lower than in pug.na and people generally troll a lot harder in those games but generally pugs will be rolling from 1pm est in the afternoon till late at night. It's pretty refreshing to see a whole bunch of new players who's starting to get better from tf2mix so i think that's cool.

now i barely pug nowadays since i don't really have fun unless some of my friends are there. before when I was really hungry to get into the 6s community, i was pugging my ass off. nowadays when i wanna play anything comp related i just dm or mge. i inhouse occasionally with server depop on weeknights or bosh or wood pugs on the weekends.