Did this kid just say "whom" when he shoulda said "who"? Time to save lives

Personally the coaching incentives don't really make a difference to me as I already have all the items I want but if they help draw other players I see no harm in having them.

The general problems I see with the current state of newbie mixes is how different each group of people is, for example last Friday I had a person who wasn't aware he needed to use the escape plan to roll out as pocket. But then the very next mix I had a group of players who had all played 2-3 seasons of UGC Steel/Silver and I spent a good bit of time going over rollouts and callouts only to find they already knew them. At least from a coaching perspective I almost never know what my player do and do not know so I either end up wasting a lot of time telling them stuff they already know, or I incorrectly assume that they know things that they do not. I think a way to solve this would be to kind of have a better placement method for newbies into their skill groups as right now people kind of just sort themselves based on what they level they think they are at. This often leads to either stacked games or a lot of confusion and frustration between the players and the coach. If this system was reworked it could potentially save a lot of time before the mixes and after drafting as sometimes the pregame chat can end up being 30+ minutes long.

Another pretty big change that I have seen in the past 4 or 5 months of coaching is how the general "lobby" chat has gone from discussion about the game and competitive to random memes and pubs. It's gotten to the point that I normally stay in the unlinked Coaches channel so that I don't end up with a massive headache from listening to 50 people talk about Getawhales pub server and pyro hats. I remember it used to be fairly quiet and coaches/admins would just answer general questions during the downtime before and between mixes. I know this has been offputting for a few people that I have asked to come coach as most people just simply do not want to deal with it and I can understand and respect that. I think trying to make it into a generally more serious environment versus a fuckaround half the time and waste a bunch of peoples time the other half would for sure provide a better environment for the coaches and the players who do want to take this time and get the most they can out of it.

For the people who had poor experiences with coaching in the past I would recommend giving it another shot. Coaches typically do not play anymore and some people may dislike this but personally I think it is a smarter way to do it as it prevent a lot of the problems listed above. In the past year or so I have probably only played in maybe 4 or 5 of the probably 50+ mixes that I have coached and myself and most of the admins agree that is probably a better way to handle the situation overall. From what I've seen the only time that the coaches do play is when people leave before or during the game due to bedtimes or whatever (this happens probably 3 times a night cause some coaches spend like 40 minutes talking before each game).

I also really like the ideas of short YouTube videos for basic stuff like rollouts, one of the main things that I spend a lot of time going over every week is the basic heal rollout for medics (please finish these shdwpuppet) and having a nice concise video on it as well as other things such as callouts or maybe basic positioning stuff because often I recommend people to go watch Marxist's YouTube videos but doing that before a mix starts is kinda impossible as most of them are quite lengthy. Having these to quickly pass to players who ask the same question that I've answered 3 times that night alone would save coaches a lot of time and allow them to focus on more specific questions and such.

EDIT: a general checklist before playing would also be a nice thing to have, having 3 or 4 people with 75 FOV is pretty depressing as it pretty much physically hurts me to watch them play with it. Having a video or simple installer for configs would be nice as I remember when I started playing I was super afraid to do anything with my configs or HUD as I was paranoid about fucking my game up.

I'd love to help out with this.

Also if anyone knows how to setup ragdolls to disappear after 2-3s that would be great, so far I can only do default settings, insta-disappear, and never disappear. Please send me a message on how to do it, I'd really like to make a noob friendly fps cfg.

this. it's nice to have personalized advice and a relationship with your teacher but people get bored of teaching the same tips over and over. a vod presents the information he same exact way every time to people who watch it.

Official newbie mix videos are in the works at the moment, and we agree that the newbies should have at least some basis of competitive tf2. That said, tons of people are complaining about things like players with multiple seasons of UGC in this thread rather than contacting an admin and saying "this guy is probably too good for newbie mixes". There's not a realistic way to weed out the players without the coaches communicating with the admins about said players.

I'm working on the videos currently, but I'm pretty busy and at least 2 or 3 more newbie mixes will pass by before they are finished. I'm also working on a coaching guide to make it as easy as possible for you guys. The lack of these videos doesn't change the fact that we need coaches for the next few mixes, though. We're constantly trying to improve the newbie mixes for both the newbies and the coaches.

Did you try messing with these settings? Thanks for the config by the way works like a charm
cl_ragdoll_fade_time 0
g_ragdoll_fadespeed 0
g_ragdoll_lvfadespeed 0
ragdoll_sleepaftertime 0

Kevin, it's not a problem isolated to newbie mixes. In pug.me for example, you have high tier players playing with mid tier players all the time. Heck even in lobbies you get high tier mixed with low tier players.

Rather than seeing it as a problem to fix, maybe just find a way to work with it.

We let players with a season or two of UGC play if they offclass, but after that it's just silly. There's nothing you can learn if you are facing a team with 1 or 2 players who are way better than you to a point where they just run/jump in and you instagib.

This is a lot of people's first experience of competitive tf2, and we don't want it to be them getting shit on. That's neither fun or productive.

I've backed off with coming every Friday like I was and it's probably for the better. As some have pointed out, me being there trying to entertain everyone and getting the pub server up probably turned a lot of people away. I had good intentions and I think it did a lot of good, and the admins appreciated it, but just wayyy too chaotic.

Personally I don't have any issue with people who have a few seasons in the lower end of UGC/Open since it's somewhat of an awkward area since they typically have better DM than most of the people in newbie mixes but still make the same mistakes. Ideally there could be some better way of judging players skill but this is something that is incredibly hard to do as shown by basically every matchmaking system ever. I also think this would be pretty hard to implement into mumble as right now people kind of just sort themselves and I have personally seen people change the level they think they play at 2-3 times in a night. I'm not sure if this was to increase their chances of getting picked or they were legit unsure of what skill group they were in. Right now they're pretty vague as they are only defined by seasons of UGC, I have seen players like Gravity come in and absolutely roll because he played other DM games before but since he had no UGC exp he was technically a "novice". Because of how few games happen a night it's pretty hard to have a kind of placement system but I think if coaches were willing to take it on you could kind of give them a general rating that they could use in the future to better place themselves?

I do really like the idea of a FPS config installer with general settings that could be tweaked on the installer (Netsettings,Ragdolls,Gibs, ect ect). Also maybe some of the other basic stuff like P-REC and some custom HUDs as well. Since I don't really have much experience with coding outside of some small java projects for classes I probably would not be of much help but maybe building off existing things like 4plug or other installers.