http://play.esea.net/teams/93688

Our team name changed. Depending on who you ask this is either the work of a genius, or a monster.

We've had a rather rough few weeks. Our matches, less one, have gone as follows: 1) We get rolled horribly, and our morale evaporates for the rest of the night; 2) We ready up in the server and collect our ffw. One outlier match where we played rather well occured on metalworks; our only "legitimate" win thus far. 80% of our wins are ffw's, all due to the other team dying. Remove those and we're 1 - 4. I hope our opponents for the next few weeks stick together, I'm looking forward to a close match from All Blue. I don't think getting to playoffs with 11 ffw's and one legit win would be very fun.

We have improved quite dramatically, I just wish we could actually test it. Scrims are fun and all, but a little bit of (somewhat) high stakes heat would be welcome. Primarily, our communication and "default" positioning seem to be the weak links for us.

With regards to ESEA, we have had some issues. One of our scouts had to endure some 300 ping through two matches, but I think that's since been resolved (fingers crossed). However, I do enjoy the competition far more than UGC, as I find teams are more willing to accommodate schedules rather than just throw up "default or ffw" in the match comms.

tl;dr -> 5 wins, 4 are ffw's, those teams died; 4 losses, all rolls; I paid for this.

Most of the new open teams are dead now, sadly

RIP donkers

We have yet to win a round of ESEA 6 versus 6 Team Fortress 2 league matches.

There are a lot of internal issues with the team but I want to wait to detail them until the "new open teams it is the end of the regular season how did you feel about it" thread for that because things will likely continue developing until then.
The long answer is a few posts down if you like reading.

I don't feel that my league fees were wasted though. ESEA pugs allow me to play in pickups with IM and Invite players in a picking system that doesn't have fatkidding, which is a very valuable thing. A huge shoutout to sezco, b4nny and truktruk for bringing them back.

im backing up on a team of weebs without a consistant roster
cant say im not happy tho

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but u are the head weeb
accept your place at the top marq

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Okay I decided to post the actual team status partly because the last time I did that it led to very tangible improvements with us and partly because I am mildly paranoid that my teammates will post about it first in a way that implies everything wrong with our ESEA experience is my fault (it partly is).

Our second half matchups haven't been great so far. We got 2 forfeit wins off of recently dead teams and 2 teams we have no hope of beating. Our only close official matchup so far this season (on viaduct vs snsf) was ruined because they couldn't get six which was a bit sad

We aren't dead yet. This alone exceeded everyone on the team's expectations. Shoutout for tsc for being so dedicated to keeping the team not dead

Not really. This is most evident in our post-mortem mumble discussions after getting rolled in a scrim or match. We would all agree that our losing stems a very fundamental thing: first it was that we had no combo cohesion--our demo overextended into everything and I didn't protect the medic enough. This took around 2 weeks to start working towards a somewhat workable fix. Then we noticed that nobody on the flank communicated anything at all during scrims. That took about 3 weeks to fix and showed no signs of progress until one of our scouts quit and the other one had football gifs posted at him. My method of trying to fix that problem was admittedly very rude but it was out of frustration that our team completely forgets what we need to improve on as soon as the conversation ends. Our currently identified problem is that we don't focus damage or call focuses. Whether this will be fixed before the season ends remains to be seen.

Hell, if I had a time machine for us to go back x months and play against them, a few of my past teams from UGC would probably beat us in a match. I was being carried on those teams but at least they had a decent reaction time when someone called a push.

Everyone on the team has scheduling quirks that rules out almost all of our available times in the week except the default match times. Tsc goes home from his dorm on the weekends and apparently doesn't take his computer with him. Dharma is on a UGC 6s team (she was on it before we got her to play for us). Me, Rhydon, DrJeremy and Hydro are all on different highlander teams. All of those ugc teams are in different divisions and have different scrim schedules, and all of us are playing different classes on said ugc teams than we are in open.

My HL team's scrim schedule is also the most rigorous out of the above--it literally follows every rule from technosex's post even though none of the other people on my hl team have ever seen that post or even browse tftv. I can't fairly prioritize some scrims for the open team over hl because it feels as though the hl team's practice is determined work towards a very real goal which isn't a feeling I've been getting from Just Wait for It at all. I think I also find my experience with my HL team more fulfilling and I would probably learn more from my experiences there than I have from ESEA so far especially if I was playing a more skill-indexed class than fucking highlander engineer.

I am not saying that UGC is a better league or that Highlander is a better game mode, just that I have been having a better experience with them in this particular season, which follows several seasons of UGC that completely failed to "make the hours count" as technosex said.

Our first match of the season was an absolute horror story with every possible ESEA-esque thing that could go wrong going wrong, but Tsc already posted about that in the last thread.

As far as the teams we've played against go, it was pretty discouraging when the Muffin Men spawncamped us with sticky traps after wiping our team on mid, while setting up a sentry on second before they capped second. Seendio was very respectful with their steamroll, though. Shoutout to Seendio.

It feels simultaneously underwhelming and overwhelming.

2 years ago, in UGC Steel back when I first started playing 6s, I was on a team led by Jinta where his magnificent autism led him to make a 20-scrims-per-week schedule, which was ridiculous for a ugc steel summer season team. He claimed it was based on HRG's training schedule. We actually went along with it because everyone on the team was either NEET or on summer vacation at the time so we had nothing better to do with our evenings. The team quickly ran into a huge problem: everyone who wants to scrim vs steel 6s teams is really bad, and we quickly outpaced that level and rolled through every scrim. But we still got mixed results in our official matches because the Steel 6s teams that actually won games were made of offclassing open players, and those teams never scrimmed, at least not vs other steel teams.

ESEA is advertised as a Mecca for teams looking to try as hard as the above one did. One that Just Wait for It has failed to capitalize on. Our attempts at finding games in #tf2scrim have gone hilariously awful. After that we decided to just add low-open team leaders instead. When I became scheduler last week, I decided to just make a thread asking about it instead of rifling through Steam IDs on ESEA team pages trying to find who was interested and had a living team that could play at the same time as us like our last scheduler did(?). Most of the teams that replied from that thread last week still rolled us 5-0.

Everyone on the team has been taking our badness in stride with a good sense of humor, which is strangely fun to see from the inside if a bit jarring to those outside the team. The many puns based on the team name of "Just Wait For It" have also been fun.

Saam's football gifs basically saved our season improvement-wise. Shoutout to Saam.

edit: grammar and phrasing

Saved your season you say

http://dunk360.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/malcolm-butler-pick.nocrop.w529.h316.2x.gif

God bless your soul Iso I love you
I am 4-6 in open things are looking up

We're 3-7 with one ffw.
The schedule was rough, we had 4 of the top 15 teams early in the first three weeks, including all our viaduct matches which is by far our best map as a team.
We got rounds on a couple of some of the middle level teams, so that helps a bit with keeping the motivation up.

We've definitely improved a lot, now that we're getting matched up with more low and low/mid teams we're hoping things go a lot better.
However, I'm not sure if we're improving as fast as we need to to keep up with mid-open teams. We don't get to scrim nearly often enough (HL murders our scrim schedule) and with a lot of our players new-ish to Open we could use a lot more. Also probably the hardest thing about being low-ish is figuring out what exactly you need to do differently - if we knew we'd already be doing it! Everyone recognizes in very broad terms where the mistakes are, but not well enough to avoid repeating them.

Aside from a too-sparse scrim schedule, comms are a big problem for us. We comm OK - but more importantly everyone is slow to react to them properly.Our DM tends to cover up those problems for a fair bit of the match, but not enough to win against many mid-level teams. Inevitably, we bleed a couple players in neutral/stalemate situations and turn them into big disadvantages.
Probably the overriding problem is a lack of a true main caller - we kind of have four little separate things going on all the time and not enough adjustment/cohesion among those little groups. There's not anyone really with the experience/authority to identify and correct those issues.

ESEA has been fine, we had the same server connection issues early but it's been a lot better lately. Scheduling has been better than I expected given our limitations. We haven't had any serious issues with other teams, a very high open team got salty with us for offclassing while we were getting absolutely pummeled, if that was the worst thing that happens for the season I'll call it a pretty big success.

2-8 with 1 ffw, after the first 2 matches of the second half we had 2 great games that we split and it felt good to get our first win, we are meeting just about all of our early season goals. the other non dead teams at the bottom of open have been improving at the same rate if not quicker.

Everything Iso said
+ Lineup changes

But don't worry, we'll get a good matchup [that isn't 6v5] and a round win, and hopefully a match win. Just wait for it.

THE BILLDOZER 'ring: bruh
THE BILLDOZER 'ring: will u do me a favor
THE BILLDOZER 'ring: and post something in the new teams midseason thread
THE BILLDOZER 'ring: im banned from tftv

Gonna talk about the half season the donkers had.
Loads of fun. i fucking loved everyone on my team, and i had a great time. Tenda leaving was a bigger problem than any of us realized. None of us know exactly what happened, but he isnt allowed to go home until after a court date, and occasionally hops online at a library. even though he didnt talk a ton, he did tons of damage, and his zoned out comments about our team and chicken wings was part of what held us together. without him, we had a lot of trouble finding a new demoman. We had trouble getting together for scrims, which came to conner leaving.
I respect his decision a lot. if you dont know much about conner, he works in a lab, as a physicist. he has a phd. as such, he doesnt have a lot of free time. he devoted a lot of it to our team, and with the way that things were poorly going, we werent really doing much as a team. he decided that if we werent going anywhere anytime soon, he was gonna peace out, because hes an old man and has other things in life.
Two hours, dreamboat quit. He said that he had lost interest in 6s, for whatever reason, and that it would be unfair for him to play for us when he wasnt putting his all into it. I talked with ulmyxx, who advised me that the team would probably die from this. I was adamant to try and save it, and asked a couple people if they could start for us. unfortunately, i couldnt find three people on such short notice, as we had 2 matches in the next three days. Team was kill.
I plan on reviving the team next season, probably with a different roster. I think i want to play demo next season, though i would be willing to pocket again if tenda clears up whatevers going on with his life. I dont know what indecency or ulmyxx plan to do, but ive told them that their positions on the roster are open to them next season.
Overall I blame myself as a team leader, but i think it mightve been a little too much burden for me to bear. Though im sad that the team is dead, it feels like a big weight off my shoulders.
I did learn a lot, and i improved a lot too, but theres a lot that i couldve done for my team as well. But, i digress. too late now.
I hope everyone elses season is good, and that playoffs will be exciting.

There can be only one donk team.

I'd say I'm the top under performer of the team, but there's definite room for improvement on my end. Been busy with schoolwork so I don't allocate enough time for dm practice as I should. But I get those cap points yo.

Iso pretty much laid it all down for us.

I feel bad as a team leader because of the fact that we're a 4-8 team that should really be 0-12 or similar when you don't count the forfeit wins and the 6v5 (we've already rescheduled two 6v5 matches this season, but I feel worse that we weren't able to do this one since it would have been a better game 6v6). At the end of the day I'm quite lucky to have kept the team alive, with our lineup being radically different now compared to what we were expecting going into the season. Hopefully I'll be able to keep the team alive without forfeiting a single match this season, which is one of my foremost goals. At the same time, I feel like I've failed in that we haven't gotten any meaningful results this season and legitimately could be called the worst team in Open, which falls upon my shoulders as a team leader. I wish there would be something I could do to help us get that first real round win, that first real match win, but we're constrained by overlapping schedules that only allow us to have two full scrim days and no time to review.

I do have to say that ESEA PUGs have been an unexpected boon (despite the fact that they wreck my sleep schedule). Thanks to everyone who keeps them going.

u r the reason i cant make playoffs

We are currently 3-7-0. It is kind of surprising how little I mind losing as I have always been the type to get salty. It's most likely that all the teams we play against are extremely nice. As far as improvement goes, I definitely notice. But, I can't say we have improved to a point I would like us to be at yet. It seems like every scrim/match, no matter how much we talk about it and try to fix it, we always make the exact same mistakes. It gets pretty frustrating when you have to work on the same issues every night. Luckily, I can focus on how the team plays now that we have Mankut as the best scheduler in the world to take care of scrims for me. Someone needs to give that kid a medal.

http://play.esea.net/teams/91568

Inco, are you going to play a game this season where the losing team gets a round?

smh i could have warned you

rip though, some good players that deserved a better season

thanks for the kind words man, especially considering some of the aggression youve shown to my team earlier in the season

LOW OPEN DRAMA !!! FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS!!!

http://play.esea.net/teams/93092
How's the difficulty of schedules and the new matchups thus far? Either really easy or really hard, only had 1 decent match.
If your team died (I know a couple have), what happened (please keep it civil)? Not dead, won't be.
Have you guys been improving a ton since you've started playing in the season? As a team, yes. Individually, no.
What has stopped you from improving, if something is? No individual practice time outside of scrims, never watch demos.
Has anything on ESEA caused trouble while playing? Nope, only ffl we had was 5-0 because we started thinking our soldier wouldnt lag out, then we had to play 5v6 so we just left.
How do you feel about playing in ESEA? I feel fine with it, it's a bit expensive and I wish there was another league I could pay to play in that other teams would join.
What have you noticed about your team that has made it very fun? We're all very fun to be with in mumble, any argument ts are about team improvement and not personalities.
Same question, but what has made you guys improve? The team leaders/callers have stepped up along with our team cohesion has helped us understand how we all react to situations in game.

I wouldn't be surprised if it happens this week.

everyone realized they liked CS and LoL more than tf2 after we lost for 2 weeks :(

http://play.esea.net/teams/93491

Franken already said a lot, but I guess I can add some thoughts. After a lot of roster issues throughout the first half of the season, we've finally settled on a consistent roster, and I feel like we're really improving. We still have work to do but we have definitely improved our coordination. Our first two matches in the second half of the season were both very close, one where we lost 4-5, and the other where we won 5-4. Shoutouts to the Petting Tzu and PlatinumLevelSpectators for the fantastic games.

WALL OF TEXT INCOMING

Let's see.. my team has had a really rough past few weeks. We've lost 1 match on Viaduct, 2 matches on gully and 1 match on metalworks. However our morale has stayed relatively high for the most part, which is good.

No johns, I won't really make excuses as to why we lost these games, for the most part it was honestly just the other team being much better than us. When we were outclassed, some of the teams were very nice and polite about it, and just finished it quickly. Others.. not so much. I won't give names as I find that just fuels the fire, but we've had a few teams be very bad mannered against us, which isn't very fun. I guess that just comes with playing a game competitively.

We're still kicking, no death in sight here. We almost died earlier this season around week 3 but I think we're good for the rest of the season now, definitely.

Our medic went on vacation to go skiing in Colorado for gully week and we had to have a sub medic this week, and he was very toxic and not fun to play with, doing things like running at the other combo w/ an ubersaw and cluttering our comms with very rude things. It's unfortunate but I do think that he had a big part in why our gullywash matches weren't very fun for us.

I can see very big improvements in myself as well as my team. The amount I've personally learned and how much better I've gotten at dealing w/ certain situations as a maincaller is astounding.

I really love my team and I love the experience of open so far, but I do really wish that teams would be more nice about things. We're all playing for the same goal in the end.

Nope! Other than the servers at the very beginning and the weird routing to ESEA servers, we've had a rather alright experience with ESEA.

It's been a lot of fun. Lots of improvement, definitely a huge step up from UGC, being the only prior competitive league I was in.

I like to make fun of Scruff. In seriousness, our mumble is a really nice environment to be in, typically we're always laughing about something or another. Scrims are fun because while serious, we also can just laugh really hard whenever something hilarious happens.

Sticking together and taking criticism well. Pretty much everyone on my team will listen for the most part if you tell them something they're doing wrong, and they fix it. I lucked out with having such great people on my team.

If anyone is interested in scrimming us, just look for ragetf_ on irc, or you can add me on steam. Always looking for scrims.