discord does go down once in a while. you cannot host your own discord servers, and depending on discord for the faceit hubs is probably not a good idea. faceit can definitely afford to host mumble servers in the same fashion as tf2center, so i suppose that's the better way to go about it

maybe a choice between faceit-hosted mumble and ingame voice? ideally tf2 would have per-user volume functionality but since it doesn't...

Why not have the teams vote between mumble, discord, and in game voice when getting matched together? and if there's a split decision defaulting to the in game voice codec can always work. All that's needed at that point is a message to have everyone's voice_enable value set to 1

It sounds interesting but I feel like this system will just disproportionately stack bad players and people with slower hardware/server join time onto med which will turn them away from faceit (if its goal is to be an all inclusive pug service). Also not having a sub system is a pretty tall order since it's common place for pugging at this point.

http://cleanvoice.ru/free/mumble/en.html

???

even if this weren't around faceit can just host their own appropriately sized mumble servers https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble

also probably not a good idea to rely on someone else's free hosting

I feel like role queue and (maybe) role ranks could be a solution to this

As expected most people seem very concerned about the lack of a substitute system. I wouldn't count on a substitute system coming to FACEIT any time soon, but I genuinely think there are still ways to work around this. Yes, all of them involve cancelling the match in some form, but they all also aim to change the culture around players needing a substitute constantly. The mentality should be that if you sign up to play a pug, you have a responsibility to anticipate things that would prevent you from showing up or completing the game and will be expected to play that pug with no reliance on a sub system to bail you out. It could be argued that a substitute system actually encourages people to leave with no concern over what happens, especially when the consequences of doing so are so relaxed. This is something that we must test ourselves. Let's look at all of the situations where people traditionally would be subbed out, and ways we can currently handle them without a sub system.

AFK/No-show
Unlike other pug systems, there is no "pre-ready" that could allow people to get picked in a pug they are unaware of. FACEIT asks to accept a match at the very last 45 seconds before the pug begins picking and the pug only starts picking if every single player accepts. Players that don't accept are unqueued until they manually queue again, and then must accept their next match again. There is an option to put cooldowns on people who don't accept matches if this becomes a problem. If they do accept the match, get picked, but then don't show up to the pug within the 5 minutes given, the match is cancelled and the AFK player receives a queue cooldown. Everyone else can simply requeue immediately. Unlike other current pug systems where people easily wait 15+ minutes for everyone to show up, then wait a couple more minutes for your sub to show up, it could actually be much more efficient to just get a new match where a sub is not required at all. Cooldown durations for no-showing can be made to be quite severe to emphasize punctuality. For example, if you don't show up for a pug you readied, I could set it so that you get a 1 day auto ban right off the bat. If you serially no-show to pugs, you can be indefinitely removed from the Hub.

For all other situations that need a sub, here's what you need to know: When a player disconnects from the server they have 5 minutes to rejoin the game. If they do not rejoin the game in those 5 minutes they will automatically get an abandoner cooldown (which again can be made to be extremely severe). Once those 5 minutes have passed, the remaining players on team that had the abandoner can initiate a vote to surrender the match by typing !gg into the chat. If the surrender vote passes, the match will end and the they will be issued a FFL. FACEIT Hub admins (myself and anyone I appoint) have leaderboard editing power so that if you were forced to play out a match down in players or had to !gg and take a FFL, an admin can at the very least undo the effects of that to your scoreboard position and perhaps even compensate you with a bonus in scoreboard points for having to deal with that. We will also have the ability to cancel any matches that are live if you can report the situation while it is happening and an admin can investigate and handle it. Admins will also have control over removing bans and cooldowns, but that would only happen on a case-by-case basis on appealed bans.

Underperforming/No comms/Trolling
Far enough down the line, if the Level and division system works properly, there should not be a situation where players are able to be in games far outside of their level, so needing to remove a player for underperforming shouldn't be necessary. In general, people shouldn't be punished for having bad games anyways. However if people are trolling, or deliberately throwing, or refusing to comm, they should be reported and they can be removed from the Hub indefinitely.

Lag out/Legitimate Reason
Leavers with a legitimate reason can appeal their ban to have the punishment be reduced.

Ragequit/Illegitimate reason
Leavers who ragequit or offer no legitimate reason for leaving can receive an indefinite removal from the Hub.

If we create an orderly system where each player takes their responsibility to show up and play seriously, I really don't think we NEED a substitute system for this to succeed. What do you guys think?

Mumble all the way
And i feel that being able to pick pepole rather then asigned

This is not good. The reason other games don't do this is because if a game goes bad 1 person will take the fall and leave so everyone else can get out of a losing pug without losing Elo. And that happens occasionally when 5 random people meet each other, imagine how frequently it could happen when players who know each other well match up in a small close-knit community like ours. What I suggest is that if someone is afk or leaves within the first 5 minutes the match can automatically be cancelled with no Elo loss like the way dota 2 does it. Losing Elo when someone leaves is going to suck but it's better than Elo becoming inflated as a result of the winning team getting Elo and the losing team not losing any (or even gaining some as you mentioned.)

I also disagree with making the punishments for leavers severe, it's pugs bro I'm not trying to get banned for a week or some shit cause I had to go suddenly.

There could easily be a guideline for matches being cancelled only if someone leaves at a certain point in the match, but I figured people would be upset regardless of what time people leave. Perhaps we could start with cancelling matches if people leave in the first 5 minutes and then adjust from there.

As for people colluding to kill pugs and take the fall for their friends, that would be grounds for indefinite removal from the Hub so I don't really see people risking that. If they do, it's not going to happen more than once obviously. Punishment for legitimate leaving wouldn't be as severe as unjustified abandons, but there would have to be something otherwise people would do it all the time.

An important aspect of this is that the rules will be enforced regardless of who breaks them. I'm tired of unqualified admins giving special treatment to their friends or caving to peer pressure, so if you get a justified ban save your "bro it's just a pug" line, it's not going to work.

any planned au/oceania support?

How will you know whether someone left because they had to go or because they wanted to save Elo? Will you just assume it cause the leaver's team was losing, or because friends happened to match up?

There will be reporting/appeal systems in place and I'm sure the other people in the game can testify to whether you had a valid or invalid reason for leaving. It's not that complicated and it doesn't happen that often.

I like the idea of creating a culture where people take responsibility for being able to play the full pug. Something like this exists in the CoD WAW Zombies community for custom maps due to the fact that once a game launches, if someone leaves it's impossible for them to join back or for anyone else to join. A general rule of thumb that most people try to follow is that if you know for a fact that you can't at least play for a hour or more, don't play in the first place so you don't waste other peoples time. And I think something like that could exist for TF2, it somewhat does like how most decent people won't join a pug 30-40 minutes before they are supposed to scrim.

But I think even if people did that, I feel like being able to FFL a game could lead to a team of people who are getting rolled to FFL the game out of anger, and try to get elo back. Of course if reported they would be punished for abusing the FFL system, but again it ruins the pug for the other team. And that's really my main concern is the quality of the pugs, if a substitutions system isn't the route that they want to take, I think having something where a player who is trolling or leaves can be dealt with, without having to cancel the pug would be good.

If someone leaves, maybe there could be a command that people can use that would say "we need a X class replacement", and then it would check to see if that player was in the server and if they were gone longer than 5 minutes, if so then someone could take a substitution for the class, if the player was still in game or was rejoining the server/ the 5 minutes wasn't up, it wouldn't sub them out of the game. It's still a substitution system, but it would only sub out players that abandoned the match. Doesn't fix the problem with trolls, but at least a whole pug wouldn't have to be ruined by 1 person leaving.

I do very occasionally have trouble with discord. Sometimes my push to talk key stops having an effect, and i have to tab back into discord to get it to work. I don't have any experience with mumble, so I can't comment on that. In-game voice i don't see any issue with. I've never had a problem with it personally, and I don't see any of the cons affecting the other 2 options applying to in-game.

I think the levels should be Beginner (1-3), Amateur (4-8), Advanced (9-10), Professional (Invite only). I think Advanced might be to few players though, depending on how much traction this new feature ends up getting.

A current problem with faceit is players playing an offclass 100% of the time and a potential problem is players choosing a class that someone on their team can play better. Maybe a class-picking system like other pugging services, but it somehow may have to be enforced. It's too easy to make an alt account and throw matches for fun. The reporting system needs to be strict and well enforced.

A substitute system is a good way to ensure that people don't get upset or discouraged with the hubs. Abandoners definitely receive cooldowns, and there should be a record for how many times someone abandons, eventually affecting their rank.

At the beginning, players should be placed in matches with their faceit level heavily in mind. Playing placement matches with players of a lower skill on your team could end up affecting where you place.

I think the divisiions should start out how they will continue to be.

I have a question. What will happen to players new to the website entirely, after this update hits? Their faceit level is at the bottom, even though they may be highly skilled.

I think that's all i have to say. Thanks, and have fun \ bannyCat

I agree that we could manage without a substitute system, but it would be a nice luxury to possibly have in the future.

As for penalties in my opinion 1-2 hours should be enough. I don’t agree with severe punishments like 1 day bans for a new pug system. Shit happens sometimes; power goes out, internet goes out, computer blue screens, fire drills in dorms etc are completely out of the players control.

Just to clarify, when you mean cancelling a pug if someone leaves in the first 5 minutes you don’t mean an immediate cancel the instant someone disconnects right? If so I don’t think that is a good idea. After a match has started and someone disconnects for the full 5 minutes required for a ban, if it is within a certain start time of the pug i believe cancelling it would be beneficial. (maybe 10 minutes?)

Now lets hope they can keep up the good work :)

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for the initial feedback in regards to this post I just wanted to comment and state we did see this and have written down some things to forward to our operational team and product management team here at FACEIT to discuss as well. Can I say that everything discussed here will be implemented I do not know but nonetheless I appreciate the positive/negative feedback always as it is a great help to us in deciding what direction to go with TF2 on our platform.

I would also like to thank b4nny for making this post and letting everyone know about the current features we have on the hub system. There is also more in the works here so expect more updates for sure like today we just released an auto ban system for the captains who fail to actually pick a player during the captain/team picks phase. Granted most of our feedback is from Dota2 and CSGO, but I think that you will all be very happy with the upgrade to the hubs once we move TF2 into it.

I would also like to say that I appreciate the positive feedback that b4nny has also done in regards to playing devil's advocate for us as well in trying to come up with alternative methods in regards to things that are not quite perfect with the system and what you would expect or are used to as players in the community. Props go out to him big time.

Some other things we are looking to make changes to are adding more maps and items in the shop and also looking into making some changes to the current cup system based on feedback within our discord.

I look forward to talking with and chatting with everyone a whole lot more.

Cheers

thank mr easytarget

for the voice discussion. idk if its possible but could you just force voice_enable 1 on everyone? not the most ideal comms as far as delay goes, but it would be the most reliable IMO

I feel like match cancelling is not suitable for tf2. This is how it works in the actual tf2 matchmaking and someone on the would-be losing team just leaves every time they lose mid. I've played a fuckton of mm and that happened to me like half of the time if I won a round within the first few mins.
I feel like it works better for dota because if you fuck up and give first blood that counts as a late leave (iirc, I don't play) and you could do the same thing here where if a rounds gone, it counts, but you just leave when you wipe on mid in that case and I don't know how you'd check for that.

I would personally suggest that the leaver takes a fat elo hit, absorbing some of the damage done to his teammates, so a percentage of each remaining team member, say like a third for examples sake. so if each player would lose 100, they lose 66 instead, the leaver takes his 100 + the 165 total from the remaining people. That way the elo stays uninflated and people still aren't punished as hard

I agree that it sucks losing elo to leavers, but if I see that I get to essentially take elo from the leaver, then I reckon I'm
feeling way happier about that. Your average person isn't going to want to leave too many times when they take a huge hit, but if you don't care about pugs that much maybe you don't mind your elo tanking?

In my personal opinion, if I'm someone that wants to leave, I'll unplug my internet, go make a sandwich, take the elo hit I would from losing and then appeal my ban by saying my net went off. That barely feels like a punishment for me, whereas chunking my elo does.

In terms of handling subs, I think that cancelling if noshow is a good idea, and I think that subbing people in, in general, is a bad idea. If someone full abandons the game, you should just be able to leave with no punishment and requeue. By the time the leaver has abandoned (5 mins?) you already lost a round or 2, and probably one more in the time it takes for someone to sub in anyway. I don't see the point in trying to salvage pugs- 9/10 times a player in any game leaves because they're losing, just play tf2c/csgo and you'll see that, winning team members barely ever leave. If you want the system to be used by the majority, that's something that's gonna happen.

According to banny an illegitimate reason punishment for leaving for the 1st time (im assuming it will have a scale system like pug champ that will go back down eventually) will be a one day ban. How does that sound? To me when he said severe punishments i was expecting like 3 days for your internet dropping so that doesn't sound that bad to me

why is faceit so toxic and aids now, out of 8 games i played only one of them didn't have any throwers

I have several updates for you all.

First, the TF2 Hub project is now going to operate under the banner of “TF2 Pro League” or “TF2PL” from here on out (keep in mind it is not an official FACEIT pro league… yet). Here’s a current look at how the divisions page is organized:

https://i.imgur.com/0FsyU8b.png

Current logos and banners are placeholders - I’d like to get original branding for this and will be reaching out to some designers soon. If you are interested and have graphic design experience and SFM experience please contact me.

Second, thanks to twiikuu we have a Discord bot in development that will handle automatic joining of voice channels. We will be doing some private testing soon so that it can be ready upon full launch.

Third, many have asked if this project will include other regions. To begin, it will be an NA focused platform, but if things go well expansion to EU is certain. Unfortunately beyond that I can make no promises.

Finally, I am working on fleshing out the rules but am ready to start recruiting admins for the hubs. I’d like to have about a dozen or so admins for each division. Admins will ideally be active players on the platform as well, but that is not entirely necessary. At the bare minimum all that would be asked of admins would be to be unbiased and objective in enforcement and upholding of the soon-to-be-established rules.

All interested admins please fill out the form below and submit it in the admin application channel in this discord server: https://discord.gg/nseXWaB

Alias:
FACEIT profile:
Which division would you like to admin (Beginner/Amateur/Advanced)?
What would make you a valuable admin to TF2PL?

We’re getting close. Expect the platform to open in the next couple weeks. Thanks!

As b4nny and I create the new faceit rules for the upcoming hubs. We need some admins to help run the groups. Please apply here: https://discord.gg/nseXWaB Thank You! Also any questions and concerns you may have post them in this thread.

As alluded to above, more progress has been made on the TF2PL project. I've assembled a group of Head Admins consisting of myself, sandblast, Jarrett and Nursey and we have also narrowed down our candidates for Division Admins and are just waiting to receive more division invites from FACEIT before we appoint them.

For now, we have been working to finalize the TF2PL rules and would like to share them here and collect some initial feedback. Read the rules here: https://goo.gl/os2aRg. If there is anything you think should be adjusted, please let us know.

Beyond that, there are a couple remaining tests we need to run, but we are aiming to launch the TF2PL the first week of January 2018!

imagine using the rules google doc to promote your own video series lmao

unban me

DM me on TF2PL discord.