whenever you decide you want to try and get really good at tf2.

But ever since I've started playing competitive I've always wanted to try and get really good at tf2. I mean, I think I'm going down the right track to someday play in open or even IM, I'm just not sure how many seasons of UGC I should play prior

Next season. If you've already got a squad ready to commit, that's even better.

Unless "a couple of seasons" of Steel translates to 1 or 2.

my first two seasons were in steel and silver, then i hopped over to open last season and now i'm in IM.
i attempted my first open scrims when i was in silver, and i don't think we even won a single one until the very end of our silver playoffs (against a low open team at that). however, they also provided us with the absolute best feedback as to the efficiency of our strategies & DM abilities.

i'd honestly make the transition over to open as soon as possible, as you'll improve much quicker with esea than UGC. i committed just as much time into tf2 when i was in UGC, so it didn't feel like i had to commit more time.

also, the transition to open was much easier after i finished silver because i spent much more time MGEing than i ever did before. honestly, nailing the fundamentals of combat will allow you to tackle strategies much more efficiently than only trying to scrim. you can get away with doing so many things in UGC that are quickly rendered impossible against coordinated teams that understand and respect combat momentum and pressure.

basically, just put a hundred hours or so into MGE and you should be just fine to start tackling open. if you don't feel confident with your DM abilities, try it anyway so you can properly gauge your deficiencies.

i never played ugc 6s and after two seasons of open i'm playing in IM. play open if you want to, it doesn't require any experience (thus the name open) and you will improve faster.
edit: if you really want to get better and there's no other barriers to you playing open other than the skill difference, you're probably wasting your time playing in steel. you won't learn anything playing against steel players.

play open if you want to improve

stay in ugc if you want to be comfy

But at this point I'm with a really great team (not just good players, good people) and we work really well together, but I don't think that some of them would be ready to commit to open (you have to pay for esea as well, correct?)

Just figure out with your teammates if they're ready to make the jump to open. Sometimes, if you really want to get better, you'll have to leave some people. Otherwise, you can always play in UGC and scrim open teams to see if you can compete at that level.

If you like 6s enough to pay $30 a season, you're ready for open.

You gotta pay, but if they arnt ready now what makes you think they will be ready later? Going in to open with a ugc team most teams lose a player. Right now my open team is 1-7 and in this half of the season we improved more than any 2 ugc seasons. My biggest regret was staying in ugc for 4 seasons before moving up

Thanks for the advice, I think we're gonna do really well in steel this year (we're scrimming silver teams and doing well. After this season I think we'll move on to silver, at which point I'll suggest open

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i did iron and steel, than open.

iron is good to figure out how to play 6's, and understand very basic fundamentals of the game, but i guess its not 100% necessary, I played steel with the same guys after iron and we began to start scrimming low open teams, we won a few but lost the majority and although it's not always fun to get killed similar to josh, we learned a lot and now most of us are on the same open team this season.

I played cevo the summer after steel and this season had a mix of goldman im med/subbing for open teams on various classes.

i guess it all comes down to commitment, for most of my ugc team fees seemed to scare us away but after having played both cevo/esea the fees aren't a issue at all once you get into it so…

tl';dr : play open once you have basic exp

i would say that open is a brand new vacuum that you just bought off an infomercial and works perfectly and ends up having a few malfunctions a month after you buy it, while ugc is that one restaurant around where you live thats notorious for not so good quality of food but you go there anyway.

if you're not gonna get all pissy when you lose a lot then open is just fine

if you get on tilt really easily and you can only measure improvement in terms of match wins then you may wanna wait a lot longer

there's so many low open teams from the save esea drive / cevo dying that the silver playoffs teams I know from last season are actually hanging mid open right now. i assume thats more of a seasonal fluke than a rule, though.

i think ugc is a good place to start as long as you scrim teams that are better than you

the 2 seasons of ugc 6s i played and cared about my team consistently scrimmed teams that were on par or better than us

basically good scrims are important 4 improving as a team

as a player if u can shoot at people decently and understand ur class u can play open

you don't count as any sort of norm dolphin rider. You don't miss. Screw you. ;)

that being said I have a hard time justifying playing any UGC. If you have the time and you want to play this game play in open. If you can't find a team ring for teams and spend your hours playing dm or mge. Personally, I find that the lack-luster amount that you learn from playing in UGC just isn't worth your time. Fights are won primarily by dm and you aren't going to improve your dm very much if the teams you beat are much worse than you.

If you believe ESEA is what you want to do, start as soon as you can.
Once you have some idea of how the 6s game works, additional seasons in UGC probably aren't going to make much of a difference compared to just doing it now/next season.