You're getting ahead of yourself. First you need a playerbase. Once you have that you can start thinking about monetization.

Like I said before: What you're going for is more suited with the general setup mixchamp already has. You don't even have to find programmers to start your entire plan.
You can start advertising this very second to players on your stream, on youtube that you want to do this. Tell them to start playing mixchamp.

Once you have a playerbase you can find programmers to further expand mixchamp to more suit your vision, those of Erynn and tsc and most important of all: the community.
And the monetization comes into play then as well I guess. I doubt anyone would mind if there'd be a way to donate for a chat badge and/or other benefits. works for tf2center/serveme/etc. But there's no point in adding it if nobody uses the site

If its built, players will come

I can't get players to use a system that doesn't work at scale. This is the reason why people don't add up to FACEIT, why high level players don't play TF2Center, or why only users of a specific skill level play MixChamp.

The issue with MixChamp specifically is that once users fill the 12 required roles, it immediately boots up and begins the game. Because it doesn't wait for the entire pool of available players to add up, it struggles to balance games like a proper matchmaking system would.

Example:

• 25 users are available to play. 10 of them are Invite players, 5 of them are Open, and 10 of them are UGC.
  
• If they don't add up to MixChamp in exactly the right order (all Invite players first, then High Open, then Low Open, then UGC) the system will match it as first come first served.
  
• Thus the pugs would likely be a mix of Invite, Open, and UGC players, so instead of two good pugs you get two bad ones.

This is why we suggest a system that queues up the games in waves. All 25 players are available for the computer to choose from at the time that you start the picking. This is simply not available in MixChamp right now. I agree that MixChamp is closer to what we're looking for than PugChamp, though.

//

Also Option A is a way to begin monetizing PugChamp without having to change anything else. Once PugChamp gets some money coming in they can purchase servers and the like.

TF2Stadium would like to have a word with you...

If b4nny uses it, everyone else will follow

Wait I am confused Slin. Are you making a pug system or a matchmaking system? Because what you suggested was not a pug system, it was a matchmaking system.

What's the difference, a pug is a group of 12 random people coming together and matchmaking them together is kind of the same thing. Maybe I'm getting my terms confused but let me know if i'm using the wrong word.

Does matchmaking presume that you match people by skill rating?

I mean it probably differs per person but usually a pug would be a school yard pick kind of system where people decide who plays what and picks are made by people, whereas a MM system is one that is based off of rankings (either hidden or visible) and a computer would determine the teams.

The big difference being that a MM system tries to make the games "Fair" and balanced. A pug on the other hand will have captains or leaders that are hopefully trying to win with the best picks. Or just fuck around I guess, that is also an option. But the core idea is that you pick a game to win it, not to have it balanced.

So there is quite a difference between them.

Okay, if that's the case, then by definition PugChamp is a pug and MixChamp is matchmaking.

So what I'm hoping for is to expand MixChamp's capacity, team balancing capabilities, and just overall fun factor for players of all skill levels by allowing more people to add at once. By starting pugs in waves, you can sync everyone up and ensure that games are balanced as well as possible. No matter what skill level you're at you should hopefully be able to find games with players of a similar skill level.

This differs from FACEIT in that you can add on a per-class level and get a skill rating on a per-class level, something that isn't offered by FACEIT at this time.

I suppose PugChamp could be left alone so nothing gets messed up there (nothing lost). You could bring skill ratings back for PugChamp but you could also just leave it off and then only bring back a public-facing skill rating for MixChamp.

Idk for Euro PugChamp the problem is getting picked not even as a noob but a mid-tier gamer. Basically have to play med or hope someone pity picks you on roamer if the captains are (and they generally are) big names / high gamers. Things get bad if you beef in 1 game too especially with the short fuse on some people. I stick to mixes as a result of these factors tbh.

Let's go point by point here: for point A, everything already does come out of pocket or is donated. As for the paid subscription thing, I feel to see how that is different than the already established donator perks, which gives donators a badge in chat. Though your system is monthly, I don't see people spending $5 a month for a chatt badge in Pugchamp, as unlike twitch, IT WOULD ONLY BE APPLICABLE IN ONE LOCATION.

B: You've already expressed some issues with this, like the queuing as a class idea. But there's also the issue that playing with friends becomes much harder, as (and I might be wrong here as I rarely use the system) queuing as a group of 6, if that's even allowed, takes longer to find matches in solo queue areas.

C. ESEA has an established pug system, and no one uses it.

D. TF2Center has a reputation for poor admins, this combined with their decision to mandate ads and other poor decision making leads me to think they aren't ideal candidates.

E. Valve doesn't do shit. We, as a community, don't have any evidence to support the fact that they give a shit about competitive tf2, except for what you and a few others have said. I'm not saying I don't trust you, I'm just saying that this shows very little commitment and support from Valve.

F. I fail to see how this would solve the main problems of pugchamp: lack of queued meds, and lack of servers.

To address other concerns about time taken for picks etc. Pugchamp currently works such that the system for server set up is entirely linear, the glitch which causes mumble info and server info to come out so late stems from the fact that the pugchamp system requires that step 1 be done before step 2, regardless of if step 1 actually leads to step 2. So if step 1 bugs out, the system cannot advance and continue getting the server set up until the glitch is resolved. As for streamlining the picking process, I don't really see what's wrong with the actual system of picking, besides the way that overrides work. A new pug system will not fix a lack of meds willing to play. Pugchamp mainly needs more servers, for both that and mixchamp. Once we have those, we can have a look at other issues.

You have to remember that competitive TF2 is not a very profitable community as of right now. For a community-run, free to use pug site to survive, it relies on the generosity of its users. Unless Pugchamp wants to be a completely aids site like TF2C and require users to not use adblock or pay, I doubt Pugchamp will find the funds for another server without more donations.

to be honest i would be way more ok with elo if the teams are automatically picked because it means milan a bad player doesn't pick you in a pug where they are captaining against an invite player and you lose elo for DARING to add up when milan a bad captain is added due to the random(?) captain selection

though honestly i think i am one of the few people who actually likes elo so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt.

You should have asked your co-worker about the legalities, it's not polite to ask, it's legally required. The code is unlicensed and subject to all normal copyright laws. Just because you can see it, it doesn't mean you can take it or make derivative works from it.

Your proposed sources of help are several places that you already point out won't help you, or intellectual property theft if you don't feel like being polite. Nice.

This all seems a bit silly when the only arguments you actually have are the queue organisation and the number of servers available, although you did make the thread without understanding how the sites even work. You can solve one of those by donating servers or finding people who will. The suggestion for the queueing problem could use some work, one game every 35 minutes is pretty clunky.

This is the banny that told everyone to stop using those sites and switch to faceit permanently like him (a move that involved some minor private backstabbing but you wouldn't know about that), and because he is in no way a hypocrite was back playing on them within a week.

Disregarding any anomie that may exist, it would be madness to build anything that relied on the patronage of someone that is so demonstrably capricious in their behaviour and public pronouncements. You need a marketing plan beyond banny.

You're trying (and failing) to reference these posts from 5 months ago to call me hypocritical, but I plainly stated that until we have the captain system up to standard, PugChamp will continue to serve a purpose. Yes, I still use PugChamp, but don't misunderstand. It's still in the community's best interest to let PugChamp (and MixChamp and TF2Center and TF2Stadium and anything else) die in the name of consolidation just the same as it was 5 months ago. Several posts in this thread outlined further flaws of PugChamp that I never concerned myself with, but they only reinforce that idea. Thankfully our patience is starting to pay off and those FACEIT changes are nearly here (Join the beta hub btw: https://www.faceit.com/en/inv/n5WJnty). If the hubs are built the way I envision them then PugChamp will be easily replaced, but if not then it won't be, just as it hasn't yet for the last 5 months. Pretty simple. But even when FACEIT's development is complete and is proven to be objectively the superior platform in all ways it'll all be okay for PugChamp as long as they come up with a marketing plan that will treat people really nicely, right? :3

No it was

Trying your best means regularly using them apparently.

With that reliability, I'd 100% commit to this guy's patronage as the foundation of my service's promotion, particularly as he has said before he will try his best to kill it off. I can't see any problems with this plan at all.

http://i.imgur.com/S48F9sn.jpg

okay i didnt start playing until after tf2pickup was dead, is there a reason people keep posting about it like it was better than pug + mixchamp or are people just masturbating over nostalgia

Just make drafts happen on a separate page (like faceit match page) so you can have more than 1 at a time?

You don't have to lecture me, my dude. Pugchamp is fully open source.

The problem is, in order for captaining systems to really work, you really should be drawing from the entire pool of available players at any given point in time. The nice part of PugChamp right now is that if 40 people add up, the captains choose between the entire 40 people.

If you run two drafts at the same time for the same pool of 40 people, you'll run into conflicts. You could separate PugChamp into divisions, where you can add up to the division that best suits you (invite division, open division, ugc division) but I think automated picking does that same thing much better.

I think you misunderstood the concept. It's one one game per 35 minutes, it's that each player plays one game per 35 minutes, which actually starts to sound pretty reasonable. Once the first round starts, all games begin at the same time so you could potentially have hundreds of games starting all at once. The most any one individual will have to wait for a round to start is 34 minutes and some change, but after they synchronize with the other games the queue times would become significantly shorter.

was basically mixchamp but you only chose 1 class and teams were balanced by div

Then how about combining automatic ELO-based picking with captaining? Say, the system picks 12 players out of 40 based on their ELO and then two captains pick their teams. Still better than completely getting rid of captaining (that I'm sure a lot of people like).

That's a really unique idea but it doesn't solve the problem that Invite / top level players have with abandoning PugChamp: while you often see some Invite players playing pugs with IM and even Open players, some other top Invite players hate playing with people who are not competent. Thus, if 11 Invite players are added to a system, they'd oftentimes rather wait an extra 10 minutes to get a 12th Invite player than fill the pug with an Open player. A captain-only system with no automatic picking allows you the freedom to stall out the start of a pug while you get that 12th person without forcing you to play with someone you don't like.

If we could solve this problem then I think it'd be easy to design a new system going that has no captaining.

Idk, if there're 11 invite players looking to play some games, they could just ask their friends for 12th and do a dmix...
What's the point in building a system around them?

That's not a license, all you have is their description:

"understand how things work and even contribute to our code on GitHub"

So that's what you can do. You can't "rip it", you can't make a derivative work, you can look at it and contribute to their code on github. Anything in addition to that reverts to normal copyright.

e: I understand you might think "fully open source" is a meaningful phrase, but it just isn't. It's like any marketing phrase - there are hundreds if not thousands of ways in which software authors can classify their work as "fully open source" and almost all of them have significant restrictions. They have clarified exactly what they mean in the same sentence.

No I understood but worded my response poorly. Only starting games every 35 minutes is a very clunky solution and very far from optimal user experience. There are no matchmaking systems I know that work like this apart from players at the extreme end of a ranking system in a game like LoL where top players can wait for ages because they're at the long tail of the ranking curve.

Gotcha. I agree that it's not optimal but I also think it's the best middleground step between a captain-only system that runs games every 13 minutes or so (starting around 3 games in 35 minutes), and a much more scalable solution like LoL dynamic queue. It's a shame we don't have that kind of player population :\

#bringbackpug.me

HELLO I HAVE A GREAT IDEA THAT COULD POTENTIALLY FIX TF2. WHAT IF WE ADD ROSHAN EXCEPT ITS A GIANT MECHA HEAVY FOR TEAMS TO KILL AND GAIN A BUFF FROM, I THINK THIS COULD FIX THE STALEMATE PROBLEM! I HAVENT LOOKED INTO HOW DIFFICULT AND TIME CONSUMING THIS WOULD BE TO PROGRAM BUT SOME OF YOU GUYS ARE SMART RIGHT?

WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR FEEDBACK AND IF YOU'RE INTERESTED IN WORKING ON THIS KIND OF PROJECT THEN HIT ME UP

In TF2Pickup we sort of had an ELO-Rating System developed my Gentleman Jon (and I implemented it on TF2Pickup)
While it may not have been perfect and there were other problems with the website in general, all the 'higher' players wanted a captain system. so going away from that is not the optimal solution i think.
Once pugchamp started going, tf2pickup more or less died out (although there have been other reasons to that too I'm sure)
I guess NA players haven't really experienced that since we never went live with NA at that time.