In a team, you stick with them and learn how each other play as well as people giving a shit about your performance and will tell you what to do better next time etc so that you can improve.

the team cohesion and organization you see in pugging is nothing compared to a team of people who practice on a daily basis for months together. Learning proper roles/set plays/organized roles through demos and actual team discussion

DMing doesn't help with learning game sense, and actually playing in scrims/matches helps you practice the more applicable nuances of aim/movement you don't really learn in MGE/DM.

.

The real question is how do you find a team...

in pugs people don't always take things incredibly seriously

plus in lower level pugs you can just out DM most people, where in real matches you can't do that to the extent that you can in pugs (depending on the level that you're playing at obviously)

also just straight DM can lead to incredibly bad habits, like relying on just killing mindlessly and being able to continue a spree since you get health back on a kill

well when there is barely a season every season there is a good chance he is practicing for nothing

it's 10x more fun winning a match than winning mge or a pug.

what is he practicing for if he's not going to join a team??

Killing.

Being on a team that's participating in a league gives structure and direction to your practice. I guarantee you people on teams are dming and pugging a lot more than your team less friend. When you have matches to win and playoff dreams to chase, you will be driven to practice harder. Besides that, a single really good scrim is worth 100 pugs. Your friend won't realize that until he actually experiences it. I learned and improved more in my first few weeks of scrimming with my first real team than I did in years of fucking around in pugs and lobbies.

post in the lft forum so random people that you've never met can spread dank memes about you

I improved the fastest when I was playing with a team that scrimmed 5 times a week, even my dm improved faster than if I would just dm.
by playing with and against organized teams regularly you will understand how to position your self better so you will both die less and be able to help in fights, getting used to staying alive and being in every major team fight will naturaly improve your dm.

What the hell is he trying to improve at if he has no desire to be on a team? Does he want to pubstomp better or something?

Suppose that you purely pugged and dmed. The only thing you're accomplishing is setting yourself up in a situation where you don't have a perception of how good/bad you are, you're not applying these skills in serious format whatsoever, and finally you'll be constantly playing with new people and that can cause further frustration/lack of motivation to continue to do so.

...Therefore you SHOULD join a team, have fun, be much more motivated to improve and climb the ranks.

Seeing the green text say "Match is live"

he probably wants to improve at the various mechanical elements of tf2 & develop various 1v1 strategies because being able to 1v1 can be extremely pivotal in securing wins in many different contexts.

there's nothing wrong with enjoying 1v1s in a mechanically skillful game when you don't intend to play on a team. i don't understand why you guys are intentionally acting daft; even though TF2 is obviously designed around teams, you're all fully aware that this game has really deep & high skill ceiling mechanics which are perfect for dueling.

hell, the reason that 6's completely trumps HL and other various game modes is because 6's is comparatively heavily DM oriented. and a lot of the biggest moments in games come from clutching out difficult situations, most of which are either 1v1s or being outnumbered. don't force people to play on a team if they're not comfortable with handling those fundamental types of fights; i'd prefer to play with someone who is extremely confident in their DM abilities than someone who makes excuses to avoid practicing MGE period. it's so much easier to coordinate with teammates who readily seek self-improvement (i.e. they're not complete bitches).

unfortunately, at this point in the game, most of the remaining good players don't enjoy mgeing. your friend will probably hit the skill ceiling in pub mge fairly quickly & will be forced to play in teams if he wants to fight more challenging players.

in other words, once your friend is comfortable, he'll naturally want/need to play on a team (or just move over to a completely duel-based game if he doesn't like tf2's stagnation). no need to force it.

he's super on the fence about joining a team or taking a season off since he feels like he's not good enough for open (despite playing open med for the entirety of last season and going at least even iirc)

tell him that the best way to get good enough to play in open is to play in open

it's called open for a reason
playing on a team is definitely the best and most enjoyable way to improve as far as 6s is concerned
as someone who played pug music almost exclusively for the better half of their time in tf2 i know where he's coming from
theres nothing wrong with taking the game less seriously and just playing pugs if that's what makes you happy
but don't fall into the trap of waiting untul you've improved enough to "graduate" pugs because that will never happen and as time goes by you'll find yourself in roughly the same place you started because there's ultimately a limit to how coordinated a pug team can get over the course of 30 minutes
it can be useful to learn the basics and practice mechanics is and basic calls/gamesense but that can never replace playing on an actual team
TL;DR join a team before it's too late and you've been sucked into the black hole that is playing open pug medic

Everyone seems to have already given a good reason but to add to the fuel, if he has the mindset
I must have good DM and have some sort of merit as a player before i actually play the game then he's gotta stop there.
I've seen tons of pubbers talk about how they "want to get better" before they hop in to actually play competitively. Its only restricting you from getting anywhere. Add up to Newbie Mixes, just start and go from there. Even if you get a head start because you can hit shots its going to take longer in the long run to become a really smart player.
On a side note playing with people for more than 1 game / pug your going to end up making some friends. I've meet some really cool people in the teams I've been on and hope your friend does too.

I actually went straight into a competitive team after a few hours of pubs and watching youtube videos and streams of comp TF2, and ended playing my first season of competitive as a medic in esea open S22.

It was actually so agonizing, learning the nuances of the game by failing. For my teammates, and myself. Do I feel upset about pretty-much dropping uber 2-3 times almost every match? Yes I'm ashamed. Do I feel like I've accelerated my growth as a player immensely? Yeah, I feel like I've gotten the hang of it, for the most part, and I want to thank all the people that have had to deal with my mind-boggling mistakes and failures.(But I'm still probably pretty awful).

Take it for what you will, but if I managed to somehow break my way into it, I'm pretty sure anyone can.

They just changed their Steam name to "Quitting video games", I think the problem may have been bigger than i thought :/

Have u ever thought it might not be a problem? It's almost like u think people can't leave this game.

just that this was kinda a radical change to how they seemed like a week ago. notice how the name is quitting video games and not quitting tf2

ian :(