@22 Really? Faceit games just became balanced less then a week ago. They made an improvement so yay. That doesn't change the fact that the system still has lots of issues like, getting player subs, long queue times, we still have games that are unbalanced and like others have said no way to pre-pick classes. So sorry but no the system is not better then anything else we have, at best it is on par and more realistically it is slightly worse in its current state.

As for prizes and ESEA. You still have to pay a monthly membership to faceit to get any prizes or any rankings in their system so unless you pay its just a slightly worse pug system right now, and even if you do pay you wont get much because of the amount of points it takes. Secondly if i remember correctly it was actually sezco that tried to get ESEA pugs to be a thing, and I actually played those when we tried to get them going. It really was not that bad, it showed what skill level people played in, it was usual ESEA rotation maps and we where already paying for it anyways. You might have done something but you did not say that we should let pugna/tf2mix die to replace it so calling for the services we have now to die is absurd.

Also no where have I ever said that I am ok with only having TFTV do everything for the scene. I actually very much dislike it because it creates large amounts of apathy in the community and it burns people out. I would be happier if we had 2 or 3 solid casting orgs rather then just 1. But we are stuck where we are because the vast majority of the talent in the game has left because they see with writing on the walls.

Finally to anyone who thinks that another pug system will just spring up if faceit does indeed go to shit I have 1 question for you; who will do it? Sure as fuck wont be TSC or erynn with how you have treated them, regardless of if it is valid or not the fact that they haven't told you to fuck off yet and just left is baffling. God knows they have constant shit thrown at them for all the effort they put in, and when all they get back is hate and ridicule it is beyond me how they put up with it. So if its not them doing it will it be you? Do you have the coding knowledge to create and integrate a pug system into automatic servers, hell if need be do you even know how to code a IRC bot that would even work like pug.na? I highly doubt it because if you did you would already be helping.

Truthfully I am fine with faceit, hell I do think they are possibly the best hope there is to keep this game on life support, that being said it is fucking retarded as all hell to tell the rest of the community that we have to throw literally everything we have into this single option, a option that has no guarantee of working, a option that offers nothing that we already don't have, a option that at best will keep the game going for another 2 or 3 years and at worst will kill it right after ESA. Truthfully that might be the best option, the game is dead for all intensive purposes and anyone who says otherwise is delusional and doesn't see the game for what it is.

we don't need more divide in this already small community :/

since this thread turned into a 'demise of TF2' thread, i'll throw my 2 cents in. For those that don't know me, Im a washed up cevo-p player from way back in the day. due to the military and family stuff, i missed the colossal change in the meta that occurred i believe somewhere around s2 or 3 of esea. When I came back around 2010, I didnt have the time that i had before, more military and family stuff, and to be honest, I just never really adapted to the new meta.

I have several friends from back in the early days that still play this game but only pub now or play low level UGC because they have run into the same situations I have. The competitive community right now (as a whole) is not very accepting to new/returning players. This was the downfall of all the old Team Fortresses (ive played them all at high level since Quake1). TF2 has reached a point where the skill gap, as I believe b4nny mentioned, has gotten pretty sizeable. My last few attempts to come back and play for any level of open team to attempt to get my feet wet have been huge failures as have my friends. The story is always the same. Either we don't get picked up so we quit again for x amount of time or we get picked up because someone remembers us from ~7-8 years ago and has too high of expectations so we end up getting benched for another player.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The only way to get better at this game is to devote the time to DM and scrims/matches. I didn't mention pugs because in my, now, 21 years of competitive gaming experience, pugs have not been all that helpful for myself.

Just like in every other TF, the only way these returning players are going to be able to come back and make a huge impact is if you stick with them and let them learn it again. DM ability is muscle memory, but game sense is not. For new players, you have to have the mindset that it is an investment in the future of the game and the team. You bring a player in and teach them to play to the styles of your team. i.e. circa 2008 when St Patrick, Myself, and cringe took on 3 new players in forlorn, drone, and boogz and stuck it out and eventually became a cevo-p/invite team.

tl;dr it's in the community's hands. Don't talk about it, be about it.

Long queue times will be eliminated if people embrace the system, this is why the consolidation issue is so important. I've had nights where games go back to back and nights where I wait 20 mins between them, so as things are now, it's really not too bad. Sure I can grab players from my stream or whatever, but I feel like everyone can get other people to queue up. If the system was promoted more heavily through streams, youtube videos, reddit posts, twitter posts, in discord, etc then I could see there being low wait times at almost all hours of the day. It takes time to catch on and for people to get in the habit of queuing up. You are right that there are no player subs or predestined classes, but I just don't think it needs those things to offer a solid pugging system.

In the end, no one platform is perfect. It's about choosing the one with more pros than cons. On TF2Center you have their ads and awful corrupt admins to deal with. On TF2Stadium you have an indefinite beta ghost town of a website. On PugChamp/MixChamp you have barely functioning servers and an inability to end pugs or add players. On FACEIT, you have no subs or fixed classes. Maybe I just weigh getting a reputable large third party company supporting TF2 and offering prizes (which you in no way have to pay in order to earn, you can simply earn more FACEIT points by joining the paid leagues) more heavily than having to play soldier instead of scout a couple times a day.

The point is, for the greater good I think it would benefit the community to move over. Everyone in the community would probably rather see more of things like the FACEIT Opening Cup than things like the TF2Stadium Winter Brawl, which is what I hope evolves out of this relationship between FACEIT and the TF2 community. Anyways, the other platforms dying off is more of an idealistic thing, it's pretty unlikely to happen fully, but I'm going to try my best to make it happen. I get that you might be good friends with your TFTV buddies erynn and tsc who made Pug/MixChamp, but for me this is as far from a personal conquest. While some feelings may be hurt, if I believe something will better the state of the TF2 competitive community I'm going to promote it and there is actually nothing you can do to stop me. Luckily, the one advantage PugChamp still has is the captain system, so it will remain popular at least until FACEIT properly builds a captain system for TF2.

im sure tf2center has helped the tf2 community in many ways, but it's also a shitshow that most people wouldn't really mind leaving behind. And as yeehaw said, I'm pretty sure the creators of pugchamp, despite the time and money theyve put in, would prefer tf2 to prosper than for their service to continue existing.

That basically means "if you want to ditch pugchamp that's fine" and "if you ever need to remake pugchamp you can use the source code".

Good guy erynn saving the day.

I know this is dumb but I don't feel like reading
Is there a mumble/discord that both teams are required to join?

no required voice program, but people do use the discord from time to time. Also ingame voice should be decent with the codec update and people use that too

B4nny there's no problem with you being a FaceIt salesman but you might want to hold back on publicly announcing your campaign to destroy the hard work of community members when you're also asking the same community members to run FaceIt cups for you in the run up to Rewind lan, even if they have conspicuously appeared to take the moral high ground previously.

You might find this kind of thing has a negative affect on their morale.

TF2Stadium and PugChamp are open-source projects, which means that creating yet another pug system will be quicker and easier because the codebase is already done. Seeing how people are engaged in doing such projects, there will be no problem in finding coders, I'll happily help if there is a need.

I agree that making one, solid and ideally global pug system is something that we should go for. Place where all competitive-oriented players can meet, newbies learning from more experienced players. I see ranks being the best approach towards it - you start playing competitive, learn, gain rank and you play more as you are tempted by eventually meeting prem/invite players on the same server.

What I disagree with, though, is that FaceIT is our only and best option. TF2 showed more than once that it's strength is the community, not big companies. I'd rather let players choose the pug system on their own, not force it because it is "the one with more pros than cons".

It doesn't matter how hard anyone worked. They should be proud of their websites, but their time has passed. This goes way beyond all the personal grudges and hurt feelings that everyone in the TFTV illuminati insists on bringing into every single possible project that they don't have complete control over. Eventually you guys will have to accept that I'm not the bad guy. Zzz

It's got nothing to do with any specific outspoken personalities you may have a problem with, these are people who have been quietly getting along with helping you right now.

Go fuck yourself.

That's probably the most perfect demonstration of exactly what I was talking about lmao

https://media.giphy.com/media/26tPoyDhjiJ2g7rEs/giphy.gif

So you ask to be taken seriously in a position of leadership, ask for people's help, publicly shit on their work, tell them they are irrelevant and then it proves some kind of point you are trying to make when you receive a single, albeit terse, negative comment from an affected party who literally a couple of days ago was feeding you excellent promotional ideas you have said you intend to implement.

If I could see it coming why couldn't you? Just something to think about

It is so very sad to see someone completely dismiss the hours people have put into creating free services for TF2 and call for their death in favor of a for-profit company with a lower quality service than most of them. Because yes, FaceIt has some potential, but their system still has flaws. The community right now expects some things from a lobby/pug site, mainly subs, class picking, being able to pick your friends or your teammates...

What do you think will happen if all these services disappear? Right now, the community has a fallback if FaceIt ends up not being up to standards. If they decide to charge money to play, you can go back to TF2Center if that's what you like, or you can keep playing pugs in PugChamp. But if those don't exist, you're out of luck. And I'm not saying they'll charge money, but their service isn't going to be inherently better than those sites, because those sites fill specific community needs.

B4nny, you're probably never going to get captaining in FaceIt. It's my opinion that they won't ever implement that because it goes against the idea of a matchmaking algorithm. I'm even more certain that you will never be able to pick classes. So are you sure you want to give up that just for the sake of sometimes being able to buy items from their shop?

And how in earth is having more possibilities worse? Does anything forbid you from queuing up in two of those sites? Some people want to play a pug sometimes, but other times they just want to pick a class and go in a much lower pressure enviroment, without joining mumble. I think having the option to play either is superior to not having it.

Faceit is godtier and thats the only service that has motivated to play 6v6 again.

TF2 center is a clusterfuck and anyone who defends it is a shill. This is the common tf2 center experience
- log in
-no open lobbies with 200 people online
- lobbie opens but is highlandee
- doesnt start because no one wants to be a boring class
- finally a 6s lobby opens
-Fills up quickly
-Doesnt start because no one wants to be medic
- more 6s lobbies open
-Same situation
-Guaranteed stacks
-Guaranteeds unbalanced matches
-Somehow this is a service better than FaceIt

And Faceit listens ! and not only that, they respond quickly!
It is an early service so obviously it s gonna have long queues and a terrible substitution system but it is in beta, if you let them know they listen! i have been harrased by their emails and it was intoxicating how attentitve and caring they were. Not even the fucking devs are like that.
I am a just getting started into 6s and if i were a complete new player and go to either mixchamp or tf2center. i would probably say fuck it and go back to pubs.
People need to realize we need to stay together rather than spread thin. The competitive community isnt big at all. this is true just go to fucking reddit where it s the cesspool of tf2 players and of you do a poll, rhousands of people will say they dont give a shit about competitive. Divided we falll, my friends #tf2centerplzdie #iam90yearsoldandistillcantgetintopugchamp

The sad truth is that time invested doesn't equate to utility to the community. Stop confusing that statement of fact with a personal attack. You can cry and pout all you want and tell as many people to go fuck themselves as you want, but do you really want people using your site out of pity or because you are offering the service that best serves the community? I have a lot of hours in TF2, does that make me immune to criticism as a player?

I've already acknowledged the flaws with FACEIT above, please read it. You can play with your friends, there is a party system. It has been explicitly stated by FACEIT admins that the party size was limited to two because of the lack of players queueing, so this is yet another aspect that is hindered by fracturing of the community. However, you can still queue with full parties of friends in the cups. Conversations with FACEIT staff have also led me to believe that captain systems are not out of the realm of possibility (seeing as they have them for CSGO, this is quite reasonable), but again the development of it would be a higher priority if their platform was more populated (and out of Beta...).

FACEIT's current business model seems to be working so I don't really see them making any changes that would prevent you from playing whatsoever. But if PugChamp will supposedly be around forever, then why not take this opportunity to take a chance that could potentially benefit the community more than any community run project ever could? If it were all to fail you can happily go back to PugChamp and live in your pug utopia. Operating with all of these hypotheticals just slows things down, I want us to take action now, not sit around pondering "What if?"

Does anything forbid you from queueing up into both of those sites? Actually, yes. The more sites that are considered viable options, the fewer people queuing into each one. With a community as small as ours that is a huge problem, and the place from which this entire thing stemmed (Again are any of you actually reading this thread? lol).

The only reason to play tf2center is to play some bball if youre not a part of a group of friends that plays bball together.

Also for pugchamp, I can't keep track of how many times we were 11 players waiting for someone to join, only for the old pug with all the high level players to end, they re-add and up pick almost all of the same players and then we are 9 players waiting for a pug.

There's not exactly an easy way to say to someone "there are other sites like yours that have more potential, you could be using your time better by helping site X"
TF2Center, TF2Pickup, TF2Stadium, Pugchamp and Faceit all offer a similar service, and some were created with the "we can do it better" motivation, but I guess you could say "too many cooks spoil the broth".
Would time spent creating Pug site 100 be better used working on site 1-10? Or are 1-10 dead and buried?
Were some destined to fail from the beginning due to coding/ownership (masternoob)

So you let people create their own sites and projects because

They could grow into the next greatest things.

I don't think it's right telling people to abandon all the work they've put into a project but I can see b4nnys point which is 100 different pug sites ran by someone different isn't helping anyone.

Ideally we have one pug site that everyone is happy with but I doubt anyone will just stop working on any other pug site.

First of all there is already a captaining system in faceit csgo and if tf2 becomes popular on faceit. i dont understand why they wouldn't add it? if that is a request by all the "pro players".

http://i.imgur.com/LDwiyUD.png?1

over my 137 games on face it i have not played a game where any of the teams didn't have a medic.

I have a feeling you haven't played faceit or understand the potential future.
On faceit even if you have only played few games or have checked out the faceit discord, you will quickly understand that there are so many new people from csgo/world of tanks who play on faceit tf2 thinking thats the only 3rd place party where you can play tf2. Its also in Open beta so imagine how many more people will want to try out tf2 once its out of beta. Even i have been trying out some of the games displayed on faceit.

http://i.imgur.com/nAZZyuT.jpg?1

If we are able to increase the number of people playing tf2 on faceit we can help get tf2 more recognition from gamers and organisations.

Thats pretty ironic, your complaining that the system has a long queue time yet you dont want people to move over from tf2center to play on here. And the only reason the games are unbalanced atm is because people dont have the right elo placements because they havnt played enough games. The only way to fix those is to play on it.

I don't really understand how you can think people are not going to take it bad when you say not only that PugChamp will or should die, but also that you are going to actively try to kill it, but to be honest, that's erynn's comment and I don't really have any real insight of what she was thinking. Even then, do you really have that little sensitivity? Don't you realize that telling people their time is worthless makes them feel bad? Even if it's true -which obviously isn't.

As for the other reasons, I think your logic is flawed, so let me explain it. You seem to think that this situation is comparable to ESEA/CEVO when in reality it isn't:
- They are leagues while these are lobby sites. Leagues are very similar to each other. They might only change a couple of weapons, maybe a map or two, maybe the winning conditions. The time you put into a league is pretty high because you're committed to a team. You scrim several days, you play several games a week. This makes it rather hard to play two leagues at the same time, since you have to schedule more games, especially if you're in different teams.
- When that situation happened, I believe it was close to the ESEA bitcoin fiasco, which could've been a pretty good reason for people to leave ESEA.

When you talk about FaceIt and TF2Center (or other sites), the time commitment that you make is so much smaller in comparison that it might not take players from one or the other, especially because people like _options_. Some people only want to play one class, some people only like one map, etc. To give you an actual example: how many players did PugChamp/MixChamp take away from TF2Center? None, because people who play in each site are looking for different experiences.

More importantly, b4nny, if you believe that having several different sites is bad for all of them, should we take away the leagues? Correct me if I'm wrong, but your thinking seems to be "If a player plays in site A, he won't play in site B". Don't leagues _actually_ do that? Because if I'm scrimming with my team, I'm obviously not playing in FaceIt. This is an exaggeration, but I hope you understand what I mean by this: saying "all sites should die now that FaceIt exists" (in quite a primitive way) is very far-fetched.

You also say that I'm talking about what-ifs, but I can also say that about you. You center your entire discourse on "What if FaceIt had a lot of players?", and the fact is that it doesn't. And I would like that it did, because some of the flaws in their system are due to this (the parties being restricted). But your way of making players use it isn't correct.

Lastly, my opinion of FaceIt is the same: if it becomes better, people will play in it. It has the best incentive there can be in a game like TF2, which is money. It has all the potential it can have: TF2 community members working for them, a company behind it, etc. Let the people decide what they like best, let there be options, but don't try to kill off pillars of the community that have existed for years just because something shiny came about. There are ways to go about this that aren't disruptive for either the sites or the community.

Your just plain wrong. Please do some research before creating an argument.

faceit used to have serverside AC; I wonder why they decided to create a client.
Every time I think about installing a client I think of esea's buttcoin scandal

If you don't have a medic then go medic is it actually that hard?

The quality of their client will probably make or break the service, other commercial efforts have gone down to their free alternatives in the past due to a shitty AC client

I don't understand this statement at all. New players will never learn anything on pugchamp except who the assholes in the community are.

First, new players will likely never get picked because pugchamp is a circle jerk and there are no fat kid rules. Capt picking is a popularity contest and nothing more. (better to use mixchamp but that is still not much better)

Second, if they do happen to play, new players will likely have shit performances and get yelled at in mumble. (I occasionally addup for pugchamp but even in my limited time playing there, this has happened often in mumble)

I have yet to use FaceIT but I will be giving it a try to avoid using pugchamp and mixchamp

If the other sites were so great as people claim, people wouldnt even be thinking about going to faceit at all. They had their chance and at this point they are just holding back progress.i can only talk about tf2center and mixchamp, and i know zero about pug champ. As a low level player, Faceit is the best outlet not to only unify the competitive playerbase, but to bring new players to the game.

Also choosing classes beforehand has only proven so far that games wont start because nobody wants to play medic. i honestly hope that either faceit doesnt add it or place a nice incentive for those who play medick.