esea team:
usually play over 3 times a week for over an hour
everyone you play with and against is near your level for fair games
fun and serious

whats wrong with making friends?

I am still traumatized about the time i joined a "low open" team and when it was time to try out, we got destroyed by a silver ugc team, and the team captain thought they were garbage. after we lost, he screamed at us during and after the match and proceeded to ban us from his mumble.

Nothing wrong with that, did i say anything about making friends being bad? good for you if you find a bunch that arent autistic or backstabbers :)

idk what pug groups you were playing in that were worse than tf2center.

pug groups are the best way to get into circlejerks and make friends and get on teams and stuff.

edit: it seems like you don't want to put yourself out there to make friends which is gonna make it hard for you to have fun

Faceit should be fun once it fixes its shit.

faceit has prizes unlike literally every other option that you can win by grinding matches. if faceit advertises this more then it'll get a lot of new players. but if the elo system works properly it should actually be great

iron pugs
newbie mixes pugs

fatkidded 90% of the time
and when playing, nobody ever took it more than 20% seriously. it was as if i was in a friendly server

is faceit different in EU or do europeans have to play in NA?

yeah, thats why the current stackers are always online.

There are no lobbies on TF2C cause, if i'm right, you have to donate now on serverme? idk i heard that.

I miss Pickups... people could actually improve with them. Now pugchamp doesn't help at all those players who already know and play comp but aren't at the top

I added you

For anybody else in NA who's desperate for some decent games, I run a pug group that kind of began organically among friends. Judging by your description of other pug groups you've played in, ours is about 100x better. The downside is we only get pugs going a few times a week at best. The more people I know and add to my "pug" tag on steam chat the more often they'll happen, though

the general skill level is around low open, with some players above and below. Anything above mid open and you don't really belong playing with this group. So yeah, whoever wants to get a message and discord notification whenever we're pugging is welcome to add me. The rules are pretty simple to follow and if you're aids to play with/against I'll just ban you.

I personally think MixChamp is by far and away the best place to play 6s regularly. There's no reason at all to ever play tf2center if you can play mixchamp instead.

Pug groups honestly aren't as bad as you're making them to be. Also just having good DM will get you noticed easily, or at the very least asking better players in a pug mumble for advice in certain situations will get you labeled as someone on the come-up

Also there's always going to be an asshole in esea that thinks he's a god but is utterly awful. Don't let that one experience ruin things for you. If it's an issue of your team not being capable enough to handle higher levels of play when you know for sure that you can, then it's a little bit more on you to find a team that suits your skill level better.

tf2c, in game matchmaking, and pugchamp to an extent are counterproductive if you're looking to get better fast. Work on your fundamentals when you're not in a chance to play actual competitive tf2. Jump/surf maps and mge/DM are what build your fundamentals. But too much isn't good. Watch demos of yourself and higher level players that play your role and develop a better sense of how the game works. You'll be surprised at how fast you rise in skill.

You dodged a bullet joining a team with an immature and toxic captain o.O Nothing to be traumatized about. If you want to play competitive a lot and play consistently, joining a team is BY FAR the best option. You can take your pick of looking for a SUPER SRS BSNS team that scrims 5+ nights a week or find a more laid-back one that's only like 2-3 nights a week, according to your personal in-game goals and schedule.

Yo just play steel on a low commitment team if you don't want to worry about getting verbally abused. You got pretty unlucky to have that happen to you, and I understand its hard to try to put yourself in the position for that to happen again, but just playing a season on a crap ugc team with no expectations will make you way more comfortable in a team environment and you'll probably meet some cool dudes along the way who you can play open with.

Oh wow. I was expecting the worst but this thread is not toxic at all and has tons of useful suggestions. Thanks everybody.

The issue with pickups is no one plays them because no one is playing them, as with most dead PUG systems. I dont see anyway pickup can get the pugchamp players to come back as the circlejerk captain system is good for those in the circlerjerk but not for newer players or people outside. The best bet is to try get mixchamp to be active in eu.

At least pug champ is being worked on unlike pickup which seems to only be dm servers now.

you are trying to get things easy way but that doesn't work ever, if you want something worthwhile you gotta be ready to fail, it's the most basic rule of life and thinking that 'social rules', for lack of a better word, don't work in an online video game is naive if not delusional

but if we talk teams you either apply yourself and practice and try not to miss out on things or find more easy-going people that don't want to try hard or just too nice to kick you out

edit: i just checked op's history and feel like im being rusefully tricked

People just need to start playing FaceIt.
It has the greatest potential by far, most support, frequent updates etc.
It might not be the best yet, but if enough people would use it it could easily become far better than the current options.
It's kinda sad that FaceIt is such a huge chance for comp TF2 but the community has to act like whiny children and ruin it.
Obviously there's gonna be some problems in the beginning and obviously it's gonna take a bit to find matches if everyone says "there's not enough players there, not gonna use it".

I'd play faceit if the skill level was higher...

Well if all the good players would play instead of complaining about the skill level that would no longer be a problem

there are not enough good players who want to play mixes/pugs lol

you guys atleast have options to play 6v6, tf2center is pretty convenient in my experiance