the amount of scrolling I need to use the website is atrocious

why the fuck has there only been one server up for what seems like an eternity

cuz they didnt make the old site redirect to the new one that has all the servers a fairly large oversight tbh my famil

We didn't direct people to the new site because the site has no captain restrictions right now, which allows anyone and everyone to captain. After seeing the problems in the early stages of alpha, we wanted to run a closed beta to help get enough people with games played so that we could open up to the public with a captain restriction.

when you ruin someones closed beta feelsbadman
edit: you get aids captains even with the restrictions anyway so i dunno

mfw ex invite players get boosted elo on the new site

https://cdn.pajlada.se/emoticons/bttv-550288fe135896936880fdd4.png

Damn that's a lot of work for a shit post about someone better than you. Keep it up big guy!

when you lose to mustard overlord

tfw parents let their toddlers use their home computer

tfw your invite team loses to wrech's pug team with 3 sniper bots on lan
FeelsLucrativeMan

why cant we have no wars

16 year olds I guess

i don't think anyone good this season who knows shit about im thinks luc is better than bear

im 18 tyvm

tfw people can't give constructive feedback and have to resort to passive aggressive comments and memeing.

Understand that there are two people working on this site (we both have jobs/school and other things going on in life). We are not going to make everyone happy and we will make mistakes along the way. It is impossible to avoid. We are going to try out new things and see what happens because we can and this is our side project that we enjoy working on. Some features won't work, and some will. We are actively finding ways to improve the site. People seem to forget that and expect us to drop everything and make the site exactly to their image of it. We are always asking for feedback but for every good suggestion or criticism we seem to get 10 really negative comments directed to us. We have an email for those that want to remain anon (pugchamp@champ.gg), and we have a discord now so we can try and facilitate a real time discussion. This project is open source and community driven so anyone can contribute and suggest a feature. (don't like something! Make a pull request!). Right now we are asking for feedback but instead seem to be getting no feedback and just straight up "this is shit, why is this still a thing, aids, cancer, etc". If you are going to say these things, please tell us why "this is shit" with concrete examples and how you think we can improve it.

TL:DR: The only way we are going to make this a great site is with constructive feedback and suggestions, not memes.

And ffs leave your personal shit off of this thread. I don't care who lost to mustardoverlord or how your elo doesn't represent the size of your internet penis.

Jokes aside, there have been a ton of complaints about the flaws in the ELO system. After the beta testing last week, we discussed the general problems. The result was this giant wall of text that I put in the admin channel, but I’ll cross-post it here to show you guys what Erynn and TSC are trying to fix.

1. ELO can represent a player in a matchmaking setting, but in pugs, players are cherry-picked by captains. Players are not being matched up against the entire pool of puggers - they are selectively adding up to pugs of different skill levels, and being picked by captains of different skill levels. Captains already split up the skill level of players.
   
   
2. Pugs of differing skill levels happen at certain times of the day. Open pugs happen in the afternoon, invite pugs happen at night, and late-late-night pugs are made up of the same group of 13-15 night-owls. Because of this pattern, players who play exclusively late-night pugs will end up with a lower rating (playing against the best players), and players who play in afternoon pugs will have an inflated rating. Players also “farm” their ELO in afternoon pugs to artificially boost their rating.
   
   
3. The TF2 community is small enough that most players know each other – this is especially true on a pug website with a small pool of similarly skilled players. Good captains have knowledge of the players they want to pick. They know the skill division of each player, and the class they main. They know who the trolls are and the players who won’t play their mains seriously. Thus, captains generally disregard ELO in their picking process. (In fact, captains sometimes choose to pick players with a lower rating on classes like medic, so their team will gain more ELO if they win or tie).
   
   
4. Players’ obsession with their ELO makes pugs toxic. In close games, players are more likely to remain on offclasses during a last hold, instead of switching off to push out. They would rather let a five minute map timer run down than try to play the game, to ensure ELO gain. Stalemates become more prevalent as people slow the game down for the W.
   
   
5. Players are less likely to add up or captain. In scenarios where a dozen bad players are waiting to play, skilled players refuse to add up so they won’t lose ELO due to getting picked early.
   
   
6. Captains are discouraged from picking balanced teams. In the old pug systems, some captains picked players to ensure a balanced, fun game. With the current ELO system, captains must pick to win.
   
   
7. Players get locked into their rank. Losing the first few games pushes ELO down incredibly quickly and the deviation keeps players at a low rank. (Erynn pointed out that this will be easily fixed by resetting deviation every now and then.

Obviously, there are good things about the ELO system. Players who might usually troll are forced to try harder. Captain ELO is also a wonderful idea. If your captain is bad, your team is automatically at a disadvantage – your captain is your first pick. Giving good captains priority in queue makes the draft a more painless experience.

We were thinking about alternatives like a round-win ratio, or class-specific stats pulled from logs.tf, or hidden ELO for subbing. Giving invite players more ELO is a temporary fix until something better is implemented.

Captains are discouraged from picking balanced teams. In the old pug systems, some captains picked players to ensure a balanced, fun game. With the current ELO system, captains must pick to win.

People have never picked for balance, you either pick to win, pick your friends, or pick to troll.
Also why not fix the deviation instead of just boosting the people who in theory should have the highest elo anyway

In the interests of being transparent, I'll lay out some of the recent changes we've made with regards to ratings and rankings and the background behind them. We have been discussing this within the admin team for some time (as Skye posted above) and had made it available to Pro players in the Discord for discussion.

To summarize the issue, we had noticed a phenomenon where some players were getting much higher ratings than players who were considered much better than them. The issue is due to how the rating system is being applied: in a normal matchmaking system, players would be matched by their ratings, so they would quickly be adjusted to their correct rating. However, with captains picking teams without consideration to rating, it's entirely possible for groups of players to never mix, making ratings only applicable in the context of that group. That appears to be happening here with different levels of games being played. (This is a fundamental problem that will happen no matter what rating system is applied, as long as players with similar ratings aren't ever guaranteed to face each other.)

In light of this, we decided to boost the initial ratings of Invite players when they entered the system. This is only a one-time adjustment when an Invite player enters the system - after that, their ratings will be adjusted using the same processes as any other player. It's important to note that our rating system uses both a mean and deviation to represent a range for the player's "true" rating, and our adjustment simply has the effect of increasing the starting lower bound (so a regular player's rating is somewhere between 0 and 3000 to start, while an Invite player's is between 1200 and 3000 with the adjustment).

As a result, games with these players will be more highly-rated, and in theory a regular player in a high-level game will tend to gain more rating when winning and lose less when losing than when playing a lower-level game. Will this adjustment solve the problem of ratings being inaccurate? To be honest, I'm not sure there is a way to completely solve the problem, and we don't have a concrete way of figuring out whether this solution will work before seeing it live. In theory, though, it should work well enough for ratings to be generally more accurate.

It's also crucial to note the purpose of ratings: they serve as a general indicator of skill, and as a result we'd like to utilize them as one of the factors when attempting to promote players to the upcoming Pro League. As a result, we are not as concerned with the ratings of Invite players - while we'd like to get everyone's rating as accurate as possible, it's fine if their ratings in particular are a little less accurate as they have automatic qualification to the Pro League regardless, and we expect that they will spend more of their time playing the higher-skilled games there. When they do play in the Open system, however, players playing against them need to gain more rating when playing against them, as we want to promote the most competitive players.

In light of the issues that we've found with the rating system in the alpha, we are still evaluating their effects on the Pro League, especially the effects on competition within and the effects on promotion from the Open system, as well as considering possible adjustments. Possible ideas we have thrown around internally are hiding ratings for the Pro League and/or using a simpler system like the one ESEA just unveiled for its new Rank S system, but we are still very much open to new suggestions. As a result, we have been inviting Pro players to the Discord to participate in these discussions so that we can make the Pro League as competitive and enjoyable as possible for these players.

That should cover all of the recent changes and considerations with regards to rating. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to tell us here, in an email, in a Twitter DM, or in the Discord. Thanks again for your support.

You haven't played any late-late night pugs!

when you lose on LAN

that's some next level shit right there, gotta up my captain game

Can you guys please consider removing the captain limitations. We have 17 people waiting to pug because noone is allowed to captain.

GRANDFATHERING DOES NOT WORK

There is a reason why we have captain restrictions and captaining rules. If we didn't, we would have very very very unbalanced teams and newer people not knowing who and how to pick good teams. Pugme had even stricter captaining rules/requirements then what we have.

We didn't grandfather anyone. We started with no captain requirements and upped it as the site got more popular.

So ur solution to having 17 people waiting to play is to not let them play, instead of playing amongst themselves.

Its ok this is a perfect opportunity for you to now plug your pugchampmix or whatever it is, that be it how it is we still have 15-20 waiting to use your service and that you don't want to provide for them, because you don't know them well enough or they might mess up a pug.

And yes your site is the perfect example of grandfathering I can imagine actually.

A provision in a statute that exempts an activity or item from new regulations that would otherwise prevent engagement in that activity or use of that item.

footpenis just stop dude before you start looking more retarded than me

its fine i have no problem looking retarded i go by the handle footpenis just trying to make a point about the elitism and restrictiveness in the community and the parallels between this problem and the attitude of ESEA tf2 players as a whole.

I am acutely aware of the problems that come as part of having captain restrictions - it's a delicate balancing act between trying to ensure the best games and making the site as accessible as possible.

We have tried to ease the requirements for captaining by various methods, like giving added weight to captains shown to be more successful and showing stats on the draft page to assist captains, but there just hasn't been any substitute yet for ensuring a captain knows the community by requiring them to play a few games before they captain.

However, we are working towards a new system that will automatically draft games when enough players are available as an alternative to the current system requiring captains. I hope to have something to announce about that soon.

how does having a captain restriction of 5 games, something that keeps super stupid players from creating dead pugs by restricting them from doing so, show elitism and restrictiveness...
if anything its just the devs saying "hey, were trying to make fun pugs by keeping certain newer players from ruining them with blatant ignorance". which is an overall good and the only bad side effect being only good players really captaining because they know people.
some people will be ousted, it sucks to not play, but what you are saying has literally the hugest risk, and can easily kill this pug website.

link ugc/esea pages to autogive someone with a certain amount of team experience the right? the number would have to be kinda high though.