my team I won open with had no player with more than one season of 6s experience and we rolled every team except the top few without even having to try in our matches

experience isn't the problem it's just called being good at the game vs not being quite as good yet

this entire thread is just an issue about morality, should a sanbaggging team be allowed to have fun at the expense of actual open players?

this post is pretty lmao xd but dont even pretend like the only reason your team fucks around is because people do shit like trying to .ffw when your players show up late. I'm remembering the game my team played against yours last season, where you guys agreed to play 5v6 without any .ffw shenanigans at all, afaik the time just came around and you all .readied on the dot. Then once we picked up a few rounds you paused and unpaused several times without warning so you could get a 6th and actually give us something interesting to play. Yea we woulda gotten 5-0'd if you'd just played the game properly from the start, but that would have been way better than making us suffer through multiple rounds of exploiting situations that would not exist versus any real team, playing against weird offclasses, and generally just making us waste our time. Honestly after the first few minutes I feel like I should have asked my teammates if we could just leave, find a scrim, and actually do something worthwhile that night. I don't understand why it's okay to completely waste the match time of new players like that. Sure scrims are useful, but matches are where the pressure is actually on, there's a scoreboard that everyone sees as opposed to the half second of happiness you get winning a scrim, and you get to see how your team performs in an environment where things actually (semi)matter.

Is the actual incentive for this bullshit the prize money??? i mean fuck its really not that much. if you are really just playing for fun, why is esea the answer? why not organize scrims once or twice a week, or just play ugc?

The only reason they sandbag is to ruin the fun of open players >:o

its never about the money unless ur name is air and u live in a shoebox in rural ohio. most of us playing have limited time and no scrim open has the highest "fun to time spent playing" ratio currently available in comp tf2. some of us play overwatch, some of us have family, some of us have real jobs (FUCK YOU UNF). no scrim + pyro/spy + no scrim is a lot more fun than playing real classes + possibly scrimming (yikes). i guess while im typing this out, i just want to point out how much scrims fucking suck and i hate all of you. getting scrims for im + invite for 2 seasons was the biggest cancer bullshit ive ever had to deal with. plus frag this post if u've ever had a team straight up leave when they are losing, double book and bail on you, leave 5 mins in for a match, not try and troll. id rather never play this game again than do scrims. did i mention i hate all of you? then bam: enter the open division, with all the benefits without scrims, trying, and if you win, you get a hundred dollars. thats a hundred dollars of extra liquor i now have. also i hate you all

what if open is actually an rpg where you have to beat the evil demon lord sandbaggers who plot to take every mid-low open teams' $30 and only the chosen open underdogs high-open heroes who have immense fortitude and perseverance can stand up to the challenge to defeat them and give rise to a new era of hope for open players

EDIT: I was operating under the assumption that esea made sense

just bring divs back (ETF2L pls)

I love diashock.

did u just compare open to dragon quest wtf...

Fuck you reflecto give me my open check

Main reason for sandbagging is to take candy from a baby sorta and see people like you get flustered

The check is just a bonus

do you not want more people playing esea? are you so entitled that people trying to get more seriously into tf2 is a bad thing because of what u remember from 3+ years ago? would u seriously rather 5 "promising" players and 100s of players scared to play open over some promising players and some worse players in open that get better because they have an opportunity to play in a league that is meant to be taken more seriously? wtf do u expect them to do, do well in a dead league (ugc 6s)? shit like this will unironically kill esea and then tf2. let them play.

So much crap is in this thread, I thought to drop some facts because I really have no idea what the open division players are complaining about at this point. I went back and looked at team rosters and player history tabs for the top open teams from Season 18 to 24. I even went as far as to lower the criteria I used for labeling a team as "sandbaggers". Instead of a season of invite experience, I also included players having several seasons of IM and IM playoffs as a requirement.

From season 18 to 24 there have been 347 Open Teams and only 10 Sandbagging teams that fit my criteria.
That is 3% of all the open teams that signed up the last 7 seasons

Even if I missed a few teams or add in the teams that barely miss the cut-off, the number can be no higher than 20 teams total since Season 18.
Even that would barely be 6% in 7 seasons

Season 24 -- 2 SB teams out of 36

1- dumb classico
2- High Altitude Dreamworld -- IMO this team can barely even be considered as sandbagging at all. Mostly everyone is not an active player and hasn't been for a few seasons but if you consider that lucrative has probably played more matches than your whole team combined, who knows. =)

Season 23 -- 1 SB team out of 38

1- el classico

Do you consider 3 IM players sandbagging? If you do then my team was the 2nd highest with experience in open.
goldfish team? he was the only player who had invite experience on the entire roster, far from sandbagging.

Season 22 -- 2 SB teams out of 48

1- malicious activity
2- Team Skull -- I hesitate to even call this team sandbaggers. Only cookiejake and demoted had significant experience under their belt by season 22 but I suppose you can make a case for it if u really try.

Season 21 -- 2 SB teams out of 58

1- strolling astronomers
2- Legalize Ranch

Season 20 -- 1 SB team out of 51

1- The Original Bugs

No other team is even close to sandbagging for Season 20 and The Original Bugs BARELY fit into my criteria for sandbagging. I feel so bad for the other 50 teams who had to endure this season.

Season 19 -- 2 SB teams out of 58

1- 6cuties
2- Clam Bake

You could almost make a case for aDRAGONWRRIOR12 's roster with ranga and mgib but its a weak sandbagging case if you ask me.

Season 18 -- 0 SB teams out of 58

The only 2 teams that you could possibly make a sandbagging clam to are Royal E-Sports TF2 with dflame/blueberryvillian and egyptian flamingos with kraka/randy.
Even these 2 examples are weak at best.

nvm im dumb

cmon bro everyone knows there has to be a gatekeeper of open to filter out the real good players from the OK players

I believe you are looking at the wrong roster. The roster that finished the playoffs for season 21 had Desca, Zilly and Purpleshirt playing in the playoffs. All of those guys had significant enough experience in Invite and IM to be considered sandbagging. In addition, Yeremy played 11 matches that season and he had more than enough experience as well.

I dont understand what your point is exactly. Nobody ever said that there was a disproportionate amount of sandbagging teams in open (at least i dont think so). I'm pretty sure that the OPs point was that he wasnt expecting to have to waste 30-40 minutes of his time facing a team of offclassing idiots in need of beer money

i feel like if everyone in this community actually liked each other and was nice, you could have invite players sandbagging in open without any problems. they would play a standard lineup so the match was relevant experience, win easily, and then afterward give a few tips in chat to the open players and everyone would benefit in some way. then i think no one would really have grounds to complain. it would be pretty easy.

NINJAed im stupid

original strolling astronomers are not sandbagging at all, they lost their first playoff match and took yompies roster in 22.

Its called open because its not specified as the low tier skill level division exclusively, then it would be called ESEA-Low, ESEA-Mid, and so on. The divisions were created with the format where top level competition is directly moved to invite (hence invite and not HIGH) IM was used to filter up higher skilled open teams that stayed together and progressed their skill level and expressed the desire to compete in a higher division, and OPEN is used to introduce new rosters to the league (be it low tier, brand new, or "sandbagging") This is the most accessible division for players with experience who don't have the time, are new to the division, or are a newly formed team, its simple as that. On top of that ESEA has rules that restrict any roster from just jumping divisions, or used to (I gather admins do move ups nowadays) but most of us are not used to that, nor do we care. The open teams complaining about sandbagging over the seasons is just a crutch for their frustration in losing, if your goal is to NOT meet competition head on, then you shouldn't be playing in ESEA. Most of these players complaining are a product of a younger generation of people who get prizes for just showing up (or losing) because they have everything handed to them and want to feel their competitiveness is validated even through failure. You want to win open? you want to be better? nut the fuck up and get better, we all did it at one point without complaining about players better than us being in our division.

Back when i started in ESEA, open teams HAD to play against invite teams because there was only 1 division, and some of us who got our shit pushed in by the top players in the game still stuck around and eventually became better players ourselves, quit making bullshit complaints and learn to progress instead of making excuses for yourself.

https://play.esea.net/index.php?s=stats&d=match&id=1134165

the bugs open team had mausy and newspeak who are both miles better than any open player
that team was definitely a sandbag team even if it wasnt all 6 players they are both fucking lords at tf2 and carried the fuck out of that team
edit:
also mgib only played for a few matches and was backing up
ranga and stoperr both had im/invite experience and i think nick had played in im with cloudmaker before but still not really a sandbag team
towards the end of that season luxor's team picked up cheesymacgyver and hivemind i think which is probably more of a 'sandbag' if u want to call it that

a) I have no idea why Sidular continued to bring UGC into this when ever since the new 6s admin team took over a year ago, we've all gone to great lengths to move teams into divisions that are appropriate for them. Last season the placing teams in steel were also low/low-mid open teams in ESEA and generally had a very appropriate level of experience for a steel team. The mentality of UGC is (for better or for worse) a coddling one.

b) Due to the nature of the league being pay-to-play, ESEA has never been run as a league that separates people by skill in any direction but up. You earn your right to play in the higher divisions, but the lower divisions are not some safe haven for low-experience players. You can't seriously expect it to be run that way either, because then they'd literally be instating a rule that demands that some people have to pay more just to play with the people they enjoy playing with. I personally don't LIKE the sandbagging mentality, I don't think it's compatible with the notion of "competitive" and I think it has some serious potential to kill the whole scene because it creates stagnation, but I can't get behind the idea of ESEA enforcing roster rules the same way UGC does just because of the payment structure.

c) I know a little bit about playing against dumb off-classes thanks to my team last season being, eh, not particularly experienced (I've seen it all, you name it), and all you do is you just continue to play your game normally and figure out how to change the way you play to be more successful. A lot of players with low experience actually have no idea how to adapt to something unfamiliar, so the easiest and most beneficial thing to do is to remember how the off-classes work, why they're not usually run full-time and adapt to play against them. Is it fun 6s time? Not even a little bit. But if you're only talking about educational value, then yeah, you can still absolutely learn a ton as a team out of a situation like that.

It's not exactly the most polite thing to do on the part of the other team because they are wasting your time rather than just taking their W and going your separate ways, but what kind of experience you get out of it is entirely up to your team.

You guys are aware that players who played in invite 2 seasons ago and lost every game aren't on the same level as froyotech, right? Especially in TF2, invite slots are more pushed onto people than anything. I think if you're getting 5-0'd by washed-up barely-invite players in open, you would've been 5-0'd by aspiring players on top open teams.

These players also don't owe anyone anything. Is the argument that just because they happened to make the prestigious invite division at one point in the past that they're stuck paying $85 every season to get steamrolled? Maybe they want to play some semblance of competitive TF2 for a fair price with their friends while they juggle other life responsibilities?

Either you're playing for fun and you find the silver lining in your losses, or you're playing to get better at the game and you welcome new challenges. Choose one.

http://puu.sh/tVS0r/35a39d4938.jpg

http://imgur.com/yVghkNM

If you say you want to improve at the game, maybe playing against random classes doesn't help. But, at the same time, playing against sandbaggers mainclassing and losing in 10 minutes wont teach you anything either. The fact of the matter is that sandbagging teams don't even really resemble real teams on the inside, everyone just spouts memes and individually runs at the enemy team. Other than the occasional kritz, there is no coordination other than what comes from playing the game for a number of years. If you're still losing to this, you probably didn't have a real shot at winning open anyway. It's important to have realistic goals when you go in, instead of getting salty because you lost your third match to a sandbagging team by the same degree in which you lost your first two matches.

There were multiple occasions last season where we stayed on offclasses, or used different players and actually lost matches, one of those teams ended up gong 12-4, the other 9-7 which are at the very least respectable records. Other matches we came close to losing, but decided to main class and try for no other reason than collectively deciding that we didn't want to lose to a guy with the name "barrycenter." If you can't take multiple rounds, win, or force this group of meming idiots to mainclass then you should either come away from the match 1: disappointed or 2: with the realization that you wouldn't have been in the money anyway. So at the end of the day, what did you really lose by losing to a sandbag team rather than losing to the numerous other open teams that are better than you?

If you make us stop running offclasses, or make us try to any degree, you should come away feeling good, not salty. At the end of the day, the only teams I feel bad for sandbagging against are the teams we knock out of playoffs, and the team we beat in the finals. However, if you come into a match with no intention of winning, but feel like you deserve to take the ffw ASAP because you had no chance of winning anyway, you have no right to complain about the outcome, or the fact that you were still losing the match to 5 players.

The real takeaway that envision crew should take from this match is the fact that -skp went 23-12 with 480dpm against "invite" players and probably deserves a better team. The rest of you should think about what you could have done to end up with double digit frags like mr. skp. If you all fragged like him, maybe we would have lost that match. Think about that for a minute.

P.S. my scout is awful and probably belongs in open on an average day, so I'm hardly sandbagging.

god shut up chris da fag