theres no real harm in them looking here is there? obviously they probably wont get much traction, but we dont want to make them think they're not welcome

I think it would be good to have the recruitment forum divided so that UGC people could look here since the community is getting bigger and also alot of people advertise this site this would be the first place they would come

Could be an option to have a link or a page somewhere for those new to comp TF2 visiting the website?

why not let them play in open? just correct them if they're looking for hl, but if they want to play 6's then just let their lft thread do its own thing. open means open, but you directing people to ugc makes people think there is a fucked up requirement to play in esea when there isnt

leave them alone, lets not mess with any relevant traffic regardless of it being esea, ugc or etf2l

fatswimdude I agree - it's something that I said in my default response, here it is for reference:

^this is what I mean, maybe we can make that more clear?

I don't see why we couldn't just have our own UGC section? Divide the forums to facilitate the different leagues that exist (at any given time). Seems like we're alienating that skill range a bit if we just tell them to go elsewhere. You don't have to go to the ESEA forums to make an ESEA team, seems a bit redundant to send them away to UGC to make a UGC team. Teamfortress.tv is the hub of competitive TF2 and if we want it to maintain that image we should centralize things to the website--at least in my mind.

That's what makes the most sense to me though.

A couple people have asked in previous if we should have LFT/LFP sub-boards for Highlander. The consensus every time was that those threads will go unnoticed because UGC, particularly Highlander players, circulate their recruitment on UGC.
There used to be a subreddit for LFT/LFP threads, but even that wasn't used a lot, and many of them were targeted at UGC players.
The best compromise may be linking to UGC for Highlander recruitment, or displaying a board and telling people this stuff will go probably unnoticed and it's better to post on UGC.

paddie's idea +1

why do we need to divide the forums? we dont split forums for IM vs Open looking threads, why do it for ESEA vs UGC? what would actually help us become more of a universal hub is to get more traffic from people looking to browse UGC looking threads.

Why should we divide the community? tftv aims to be the central hub for tf 2 competitive regardless of skill level or gamemode,

I don't know what enigma plans are but I think this is one thing etf2l excels at, we have an amazing recruiting section over at etf2l and it would definitely benefit the community to have a recruitment section that serves everyone playing comp tf2 over here

All I'm saying is we should have different sub-sections in the recruitment sub-forum to represent the different leagues. It would make it easier for everyone all around to find a team and or players in the proper division and league. I cannot see how that is possibly a bad idea and anything but helpful.

We're gonna be naturally divided just because the UGC lifers are going to stick over there and won't look at tftv for recruitment.

I don't think there's anything wrong with giving them UGC as a second option to check out but I agree with air. People who are gonna give a shit in the long run are going to get into esea ASAP and those who aren't will be shuffled to ugc.

comes across as really elitist tbh

I think this response is a bit off, as I believe the OP was directly about lft posts for specifically non-ESEA units. If someone says they're looking for an UGC-region team, don't just say "eh, play open anyway". IMO anyway from what I understand of the situation.

We should be saying "eh, play open anyway" because open should be where 100% of new players go to play 6s.

Open is the entry point for competitive CS:GO, and it would have been for competitive TF2 if we didn't somehow get a huge chunk of the userbase convincing themselves that free leagues are the way to have the game taken seriously, and what's worse, deriding those who DONT think that free leagues are superior. It's ridiculous.

If every team that plays in UGC 6s joined ESEA next season, we'd have one nutty season of open and then be well on our way to having 4 divisions again. We should be encouraging people to play in ESEA if we want the competitive 6s scene to grow.

As for people making LFT for HL threads, yeah let's send those guys over to UGC. That's always going to be the hub for HL posts.

In an ideal world, this would be true. But it's not.

I am going to assume that these hypothetical new players are already dedicated and will want to play in Open. Forget the UGC lifers and the exclusively HL players, because they aren't who we want to reach.

Teams and players grow best and have the most fun when they play other teams of similar skill.
No one learns anything from a five minute roll.

Anyone who has played in Open can attest that the skill level of teams in the division varies wildly, and that no effort is made to match teams of similar skill against each other for the first FOUR WEEKS. That's half a season!
Additionally, you can't create a team in any division other than Open, so there are teams there that should be playing in IM or Invite (6cuties anyone?). You can't tell me that ESEA will care enough to put in the time and change this with even triple or quadruple the number of teams playing (which would put us on par with the 160 teams in CS open). These numbers COULD be possible, as there were about 60 teams in Steel that survived last season and if we extrapolate that to Iron and Silver joining Open then we would quadruple (this is unrealistic however).

Last season, the low open teams that survived were about UGC Silver/Gold level. The average committed player needs at minimum one full season to play at this level.

It is unusual for new players to start out with this much 6s skill/experience without playing on a team, and it's also unusual for low open players to stick around or even get on another team after having a disastrous season.
It takes an unusual player (either in skill or in temperament or with experienced friends) to start off in Open and stay there. These people are the exception, not the rule!

No one wants players leaving comp because they don't believe that they're good enough.
You can't tell me that the majority of newbies who post in the LFT forum - who don't even notice that the other posts are for experienced players looking in ESEA - are the unusual player who could survive their first season getting 0-16'd open and want to come back the next. It may be elitist to tell them up front to try UGC first, but it's also honest and much kinder.

That is why tftv should have separate UGC and ESEA recruitment sections.

so basically im being elitist? fine but as owl said lfthl is a lot of what i meant - a lot of these posts are generic posts where people say they want to be spy or pyro and we should send those to ugc. and yeah pazer, i can totally see that but what else do i say? for people newer to the game? for HL players and newer players to the format or smth?

like for the most part i can totally see where im being a retard/elitist but its almost necessary to say smth of that sort

also pls tell me if im being an idiot instead of just downfragging, i need to see where my thinking goes wrong

if you flood the division with a lot of weak teams then the chances of getting a terrible first half schedule is much lower

that's how it works in CS. There's no effort made to match new teams against other new teams but the chances are that you're not gonna have 8 straight matches against playoff teams. If we got every new player into ESEA straight from newbie mixes, we'd have a much bigger division and the lower skill teams would have more competition. Stop blaming 6cuties and start blaming all the UGC players who are too damn scared to play in ESEA. They're the reason you're getting rolled.

also there are ~700 teams in cs open, not 160.

I would love it if all the UGC teams moved to ESEA, but it's unrealistic.

There are a lot of practical reasons newer UGC teams don't move to open. As long as there is an alternative to ESEA I don't see enough of these teams moving from UGC to ESEA to matter. That means the best place for absolute newbies to start out is UGC, unless you have enough newbie mixes to know the basics (but then you aren't a newbie any more, really).

I like that tftv has been more inclusive of lower level players recently. But the current LFT board isn't for them, and it's something they only discover after posting there and getting redirected to UGC. If we had a separate board for them, they might not feel like tftv is a super secret club only ESEA players can join. It's also easier on team leaders of both leagues.

OK so this site is http://www.teamfortress.tv NOT Eseateamfortress.tv nor UGCteamfortress.tv, as such it acts as a hub for competitive TF2 players. Now, when people post UGC LFT threads on here, we automatically tell them with the copy/paste retro does, because UGC players do not go on TF.TV to find players, so, we have two options to keep TF.TV inclusive of Competitive TF2 players and that is for UGC team leaders and people LFT to start using our lft/lfp board or create a UGC lft/lfp Board. as such we would still need UGC players/team leaders to join our forum while they already hang out in the UGC forums.

Yeah this isn't on tftv's population. I agree that retros post makes it seem a bit like they don't belong here though. Maybe something like: 'hey thanks for the recruitment post! It looks like you're looking for a highlander class, so you may also check the ugc forums to see if there are any highlander teams looking there'

I still think we should be encouraging ALL new 6s class players to jump straight into open.