Its not just Atlanta, though that is the worst offender, all of the servers go through this stuttering a couple times a match. Never happened to me on any of my NFO servers and especially not now that I rent a VPS from them, always buttery smooth.

Not sure what to say. They are all individual nfo servers and get restarted every day. I used to have a VPS back in dec - march from them and you can ask pretty much anyone how shit it was.

I think product is fine just because in most pugs people aren't complete idiots and have the dm to back up playing on that map. Most of the product pugs I've played have actually been fun or at least have been close games. With that said, I don't think reckoner should be in the pool just because its not in an offical rotation. It may be an offical rotation in etf2l but if people don't actually play it in ugc/esea (for NA) I don't see why it's in the map pool in the first place. I remember circa getting picked as demo for a reckoner pug today and he asked something along the lines of "if someone shows me how to rollout I'll play this map". That shouldn't be an actual thing people ask when playing on an offical pug website who are atleast playing at an open level.

What about having some way of ending the pug with both captain's consent in order to let them both captain again and not be banned for 5 minutes or whatever? So if a situation arises where one of the first picked players says in chat "shit i gtg sorry" in the middle of picking, they can both be like yea this ruins the game we're starting over. Don't see any problem with it if both of the captains are cool with it (unless a pug ends in the middle of the draft and all the people who were picked would be fatkidded in the new pug because all the better players in the other pug would be picked over them, but that can still happen if one of the captains is willing to sacrifice their ability to captain for a higher level pug so its hard to say what could be done there)

wall of text incoming:
I'm definitely in agreement with you that it can be an issue when people all swap to their mains and suddenly start rolling the pug, however, there is a fine line between this and the other (more common) case in which, for whatever reason, one team is clearly worse than the other (usually because of a bad captain), the losing team switches two players so that they don't keep getting rolled. Though this techincally ruins the 'sanctity' of the pug and in the eyes of the pug system and elo, unfairly changes the outcome of the pug, I feel that most of the time this actually makes the games more enjoyable to play.
Sure it's definitely frustrating, but even in the most extreme scenario possible, your team is up 4 rounds and then ends up losing because the other team switches to their mains, the switching of classes undeniably makes the game more competitive. Looking at it this way it's clear that people will never swap to classes they are worse at, aside from the stand out cases of people throwing. Even then, what's to say it's so bad to swap classes if you're up 4-0 and there's still 15 minutes left in the game? Even in the absolute worst case, you keep rolling them and the pug ends with the losing team (understandably) more salty, it clearly doesn't make much of a difference. What I feel is the far more likely outcome is that instead of being no fun at all for the losing team, they at least get a chance to get a round or two and come back.
The only real problem I could see is if the captain who picks the better team ends up losing 5-4 because all of his players switched classes and threw to mess with him, but I have full confidence that admins will be able to deal with this situation if it does end up arising. From the developer side I know it's definitely tough to deal with this because in an ideal world the elo system should perfeclty reflect who gets picked and its kind of lame for people to switch around to avoid losing elo, but my personal feeling (and hopefully people agree with me here) is that having an actually enjoyable, competitive game is much more important than sticking to the drafted teams and knowing full well that you will lose because your captain fucked up.
Of course it's hard to manage with the amount of games that happen every day, but I remember in the old pug systems (pug.na on irc for example) if you picked a team and got 5-0 rolled, you would 100% get captain restricted if there was an admin around, no questions asked. It seems to me that with this new system this happens a lot less frequently which can lead to more shitty captains and less balanced games, which is fun for nobody. So instead of trying to scapegoat the players switching to their mains and 'ruining' the pugs, you have to at least acknowledge that this doesn't come out of nowhere and more often than not the root cause is the captains (who pick bad teams, leading their players to want to switch in the first place). I know people definitely have differing opinions on this and I may be biased as a frequent captain and player who has done this in the past, but I don't really see it as too much of an issue. Something I didn't address here, something that should be obvious, is that a lot of the time people just don't want to play certain classes. If you get picked on a class you're not good at or you don't want to play, I think it makes perfect sense for people to be able to switch.(for example, when I get picked on a combat class in a high level pug as a medic main I'm likely to want to switch because, whether the pug captain knows it or not, I suck at combat classes)

As for possible sollutions, I'm not sure if this is possible, but if there were some way to get the site to check the logs and verify which class people played and adjust accordingly, that could at least help fix the issue with the elo being skewed (though afaik there isn't elo for specific classes, but maybe that's something worth adding, idk). The far simpler option would just be for admins to investigate any complaints about this on a case-by case basis and determine if people switching classes did in fact ruin the pug, because at least in my mind, it makes no sense to ban people if nobody who was actually in the pug had a problem with it (applies to offclassing too, if people don't have a problem with it why does Big Brother need to step in)

imo this should all be looked at case-by case instead of automatically (or at least, if the system auto bans people it should be more leniant)
dunno if people will agree or disagree with me here but I feel like it matters more for what reason someone had to leave to get a sub than how frequently it happens
if in the middle of a pug your internet randomly goes down that's a lot less reprehensible than someone just dipping a pug because they feel like it
to address the issue of frequency of needing subs, I feel like this also changes drastically on a case by case basis, because some people pug a lot more than others and if someone does actually dip like 50+% of the games they play but the only add up once every two weeks I feel they should get much more of a punishment than someone who shows up to 95% of their games but in a one week period has to leave 3 pugs to help their roomate with stuff, or for whatever other reason
I'm probably biased here because I recently got banned for this and was very salty about it, but I feel like there is a huge flaw with the system in that there is virtually nothing telling people that they will, or for how long, they will be banned if they need a sub
I understand the parallels to the cs:go matchmaking system, but there is one key distinction I'd like to make. When you queue up to play matchmaking, in the top corner of your screen is a big warning sign and in big yellow text it says

Though to be fair it doesn't say exactly for how long you will be banned, it sure as hell makes clear that there are penalties for leaving. Another difference is when someone leaves a cs:go match, they are replaced with a bot. Now, it's tempting to make the joke that because captains have no choice over who gets the sub, whichever open bot you get stuck with may as well be an actual robot, but the difference is there is a hope of getting an actual sub and continuing the game as normal. Anyways, from my experience most players are somewhat ignorant about how the sub system works and even people who play on the site super frequently are surprised when they are banned for more than the duration of the pug they're currently in (for example I remember hearing how surprised laz was after he got banned for 2 hours and expected to be able to add up after the pug he was in was over). I think it would make a lot of a difference if people knew what the consequences were and if, for example, someone was going to be banned for an entire week for getting subbed, they probably would be a lot more hesitant to request one unless it was an actual emergency. I know this has been talked about many times before but if the sub system were a little less broken perhaps it wouldn't be as big of an issue esp if people knew they could definitely get an adequite sub themselves (you know, from the archaic long forgotten method of messaging people on your friends list?)

Honestly the way most of this stuff works should probably be rethought, the current system doesn't account for nearly enough things and imo punishes people far too much. It may be a futile task to get someone aliased "The Supreme Commander" to stop being a control freak and constantly over-reaching in hopes of Making Pugs Great Again, but my feeling is that things should be a lot more laid back and imo we're moving in the wrong direction by adding things like ELO and all of these convoluted systems for automatic punishment and stuff. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, I feel that most people who actually played back then will agree with me in saying that the way things worked in the days of #tf2.pug.na and even to an extent tf2pug.me were fine.

We can look into having a captain veto(?) vote to end a draft. There are definitely times that ending a draft is warranted. It might take a while to figure out how to do this though (and the best way).
Also we are open to discuss the class switching rules (and rules in general). Complaints in the past have come from higher level pugs when not everyone was on their main, but one team may have had the higher skilled players. Pugs were fairly even, then the one teams switched to their mains and just dominated. This has happened on more then one occasion and multiple admins have had to deal with complaints.

Leaving it up to a case by case basis would allow for more room to be flexible in the cases that are acceptable but we (admins) are not going to be perfect and there will be decisions (as has already happened) that people do not agree with. It is also difficult as you have your old pug players who have been pugging since before the internet that know whats up combined with the mass of newer players that are starting to pug.

I agree that we can be harsher on captains who reliably pick 0-5 roll teams. tsc has been working on having an auto crestrict feature that if you pick a bad team you would get a cooldown. Not sure of the status of it but I know it is in the works.

I am really tired and not sure if I sound coherent but I am down to talk more about how we can improve/review on the rules that we have if you want to add me.

http://imgur.com/IqcljVs.png

can someone help me with this?

it doesn't show anything when i click any of the tabs, i don't get why it won't let me do anything

Assuming its to do with the http top left being red, it should be green

i talked to erynn earlier it'll be fixed by tomorrow their certificate just expired tonight

Ok thank you. I just want to play pugzzz.

*hoping for an answer from admins/staff this time*

The intention for the auto-penalty system is to catch players who are obvious detriments to the pug experience. Even with the penalty system for off-classing as it stands now is fairly lenient -- the intention is to catch players who clearly have no intention to play as the class they were drafted as. While overly aggressive player restriction would be bad and generates a lot of noise, not handling alot of these obvious cases (i.e. a person who off-classes more than half of the pug) in an automatic fashion results in a lot of operational workload for admins.

I'm interested to know the thought process of why someone would add up on a class that they actually don't want to play. I'm inclined to think that the scenario where two players can swap to turn the tide of a very one-sided match is if they switched from a class where they had very little impact to one where they had significant impact. But if that's the case, why wasn't that particular player drafted in that main position to begin with? Did the captains just fail to pick that person on that class and explicitly chose to pick them on a weaker class?

Personally, I'm in favor of flexibility and free-form gameplay. But I do feel that because we have an ELO system in place means that players often will bias their decisions with the interest of winning/gaining rating, rather than pug balance. To that effect, by preventing players from playing classes they're not selected as, the onus is on captains to pick the right teams but at the same time both captains can pick players comfortably without having to think, "Did I make a bad choice because I didn't pick that player who added up on demo and not soldier, but is actually an invite soldier?"

I looked through some of my recent games and while I'm not 100% positive this was the one I wanted to find it probably is. I don't remember the exact picking process but I think it was something like: delpo added to med and captain to get the pug going. He was designated as med because he was one of the only two meds. But then some of his bros on the team were like "naaaaah we're not gonna make delpo play med, haha!" and they swapped around. It was pretty annoying and I'd say it had a profound impact on the pug.

https://na.pug.champ.gg/game/572829e45299f0a91d5f15ed

http://logs.tf/1383858

I get what you're saying in that you shouldn't add on a class you don't want to play. One example that comes to mind for me is if two non soldier mains are both added on pocket and roamer and get picked on the same team and for whatever reason one of them wants to pocket more than the other one (perhaps its a scout main who likes using hitscan). Another case would be people like rick who frequently add up on every class because they don't really care what they play. Before one of the games started in mumble he asked me why I always pick him on pocket, and someone else who was good at multiple classes asked if he wanted to switch to scout. At the time I didn't consider the thought that it would be 'unfair' to switch the two because both players can play any class and if one of them thought they'd have more fun playing one than the other I wasn't going to stop them.
But in some cases things can get iffy, when players who are good at every class are picked early in drafts and then captains later realize they would be more suited playing another class. For example, a few days ago I first picked b4nny in a pug on scout and then once a few rounds of picking went by, realized that there were more good scouts than good roamers so I picked a scout main (vari) on roamer and asked if they were cool switching. There are lots of mind games and things that went into my first pick and had I predicted that all of the good soldiers would be gone I would have done my first pick differently, but since there were 3 mainclassing invite scouts (cyzer slemnish and b4nny) I figured it would be smart to get at least one of them (so as not to let the second pick get the other two and win the pug off of his scouts carrying). Also some people like rick often add up to multiple classes and prefer to play one but think they may not be picked if they only add on that class.

i wish there were a seperate tab for the ongoing game updates, or at least a better way to show them in chat

they look super spammy as they are now and it makes it hard both to read chat and to read the game updates

EU site having some issues, can't launch a game.

any chance a "Live on Twitch" tag could be put on people so that you know if someone on your team or someone that is in the pug is streaming? just gives the players in the game and mumble a heads up

what do dominance score and predicted quality indicate?

Not the dev, and no clue what dominance score might measure, but predicted quality is usually a metric of how close the combined ELO of the two teams are. Because the goal is fun, close games, the closer the two teams are, the higher the predicted quality.

can you remove the 'blue/red turn to pick' voice lines? theyre totally ridiculous and are so extra and un-needed. like i know the volume slider is a thing but idk every other sound is fine except that shit going off every 10 seconds, maybe a better way to do it would be to be able to pick and choose which voice lines play in settings or something

yes please let us pick and choose which sounds to play, the x turn to pick lines are really annoying and useless

To block the sounds in the meantime, if you use chromium, get http request blocker. Firefox has requestpolicy, or firebug or any other similar addon should do it.

Add 4 patterns:

https://na.pug.champ.gg/assets/snd/draft/10_seconds.mp3
https://na.pug.champ.gg/assets/snd/draft/5_seconds.mp3
https://na.pug.champ.gg/assets/snd/draft/red_pick.mp3
https://na.pug.champ.gg/assets/snd/draft/blu_pick.mp3

You can browse around here if you want to block any other sounds.

or maybe only enable those sounds for captains.

Can we get a Pugchamp UK now?

It sounds like it's from the Trueskill bayesian rating system. My experience is that it doesn't work very well, ymmv

Some sounds have been reduced. Going to change the rest of them back tonight or do something about them.

no sounds on eu when a drafts ready up period begins. layout also looks super buggy during active drafts. (firefox/chrome)

http://image.prntscr.com/image/b62521dfcc1841f2ae0a0a544fe784c0.png

whitelist is broken on mixchamp (you can run whip and shit) please fix

please give us our sound back

17:01 - Jonouchi-chan: NotLikeThis
17:01 - greenrab: I dont get when it decides to fully restrict players
17:01 - greenrab: like i was perfectly happy picking you and playing med but it just wouldnt let me

Leaders can't pick a restricted player even if they're ok with playing med themselves and both ME and the picker (greenrab in this case) is added up on both combat classes and medic.

EU