I got this message and I’m rostered on an Open team

figure out how to make these people

https://ugcleague.com/rankings_tf26_currentseason_all.cfm

play esea

Dear kkktookmybabyaway,

if you want to make UGC players play ESEA, the answer is pretty simple. UGC is a low committal league that provides a great introduction for newer players without them having to pay fees and commit for months. so if they wanted that, they should offer the same thing while improving upon it.

make open free and have very little (if not no) prizes and try to limit it to ugc-level players. they make a net loss on it obviously (they'd have to do the numbers) but it gets people into the system and more likely to move onto paid divs imo

its incredibly hard for new players to break into esea level 6s. what exactly are they supposed to do? get fatkidded from pugs all day?

funny because the more teams play open- the easier open gets~

dont want to get rolled by pseudo-invite teams in open? have enough of ur buds join so that theres IM and Main again!

Perhaps something could be worked out between jarrett and the esea guys for this years newbie team drive.

I talked about that in the messages with them and told him where to reach Jarrett. If you guys want i can show you our conversation. Im hoping for the best because he does seem very passionate.

an incentive to reduce sandbagging, something like cheaper league fees for first season in a higher division or maybe make that part of the prizepool of winning the div that you get free entry into next div for first season?

make their own teams with players they like to play with and register that team for esea and for those who cant pay make some sort of effort to ask around because people in this community are very willing to pay for others.

Pretty easy solution for open... no prize, top 2 win free premium and league fees for IM ONLY the following season. 3rd and 4th get free premium no fees or some shit like that

Also should restrict players who have won open from registering for open for 1 season. Alt accounting to circumvent treated as ban dodging

ye who tf is playing open for a check

Reducing sandbagging is a big one. As far as getting new players, getting people from UGC is a good plan, but you need more since a portion of the UGC players are also rostered on ESEA teams

i think the sandbagging issue should be a roster thing rather than an individual thing. teams with 3 or more players from a previously winning team should be required to move up and if they don't they shouldn't be allowed to play together for 1 season.

make esea free because it's honestly not worth a penny

Sandbagging is probably one of the biggest problems. It's not fun for anyone to get 5-0'd in 15 minutes, and there's really nothing to be learned from games like that. Open every season has like 3-4 teams who definitely could play in higher divs but choose not to. If those players were incentivized to actually move up then maybe teams would feel more open to playing Open.

For me I think the most rewarding part of playing open is this idea that if you put 1-2 seasons of practice in and work hard with your team you have a shot at winning the division. Not everyone has that drive but some really strong competitive players are gonna be born who have that vision. However, when you grind hard for 2 seasons but in playoffs get matched against 6 people who could be on a winning IM team but choose to play open so they don't have to put effort in, its super disheartening because that grind of 2 seasons now turns into a lot more and it just doesn't feel the same. Maybe this is a motivation issue from the sandbaggers and I'm not sure how to fix that.