Hey nazara, thanks for the reply!

I'm glad you brought this up, this is a concept a lot of players seem to struggle with. You see, believe it or not there's actually a difference between the team leader and the individual players on his team. If you take this into account and then use a useful tool called "nuance", it becomes easy to understand how this kind of thing can happen. In this case, you can utilize "nuance" by going past the ESEA team front page and clicking on the "Roster History" tab, then comparing the roster changes with match performance. If you wanted to do more than due diligence, you could even cross-reference roster changes with scrim performance by using logs.tf!

I hope you found this information helpful :)

how are you gonna claim you're mid IM if you've never played an open playoffs match?

https://i.redd.it/xkkniat6zv401.jpg

Hey nazara, thanks for the reply!

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.

Hey nazara, thanks for the reply!

I'd like to preface this message through making you aware of the fact that I am a high IQ player. Some of the things I'll do this game may seem irrational at the time - but I can assure you, every action that I take has a greater meaning, and unless you also have high IQ you'll probably not understand the "questionable" things I do this game. In conclusion, do not speak to me like we are equals and there will be no problems, thank you.

I'm not claiming I'm "mid IM", I'm claiming I could feasibly play for a team between the range of low to mid IM. There is a significant difference between these two.

As for making open playoffs, yeah that would be possible if I didn't have roster problems over the past two seasons. It'd be nice if I could go a whole season without having to cut a player for suddenly becoming unreliable in the middle of the season and missing matches left and right, or having the keystone of my team join a friend team in W2 with no suitable replacements to be found, to name just a couple brief examples. There's nothing I can realistically do about this sort of thing, so I don't think conflating the team's performance with the performance of any individual player on the team is particularly fair, especially if you don't go and look at individual performance.

Bro you can't just blame your team on everything you gotta take responsiblity for yourself. Maybe the fact that you've had an almost completely different roster every season might be at least partially your fault. And you keep talking about your individual preformance and how that's different from your team's when your individual preformance isn't at a low-mid IM level either. Just take the L bro.

https://youtu.be/X7YvKdMx-CQ

L

Muddy, as a former teammate,
Stop.
Please.

This isn't a battle you're going to win.

https://youtu.be/Q0CbN8sfihY?t=1m44s

I was going to post a reply to grape last night but elected to go to sleep instead. Luckily i saved the relevant part of my post

Let me stop you right there. There is nothing you can do as a team leader when somebody makes the decision to leave your team, regardless of what their reasoning is or however much I may agree with this statement in principle. People who have run teams before will understand this stuff very intuitively, but I honestly think this ought to be common sense. Just because you're a team leader does not mean you can force people to stay on your team. Likewise, if you have players who consistently have problems that hinders the team's performance (such as not showing up to matches, not practicing outside of scrims, or throwing matches), it's the team leader's responsibility to cut these players.

That's plainly false, I never said anything about our lack of success being the "team's fault," both I (and Grape Juice) correctly cited the lack of roster stability as the problem that crippled our performance. The roster problems we were experiencing were inherently unforeseeable, and as I've mentioned above, unless I had the power of mind control I'm not sure how I could possibly be responsible for the actions of other people. That's obviously not to say that I never made a mistake at all during the last season, but my mistakes don't even hold a candle to the keystone of your team walking out in week 2 in terms of impact.

Same as what I said above, this still isn't valid criticism. Saying "Player X will not perform well because his team didn't perform well last season" is a valid heuristic estimate—a shorthand guess—of someone's skill, but to use it as the end-all-be-all is incredibly lazy when you can just go and look at any given team's roster history and compare it with their performance throughout the season. It doesn't take more than 5 minutes to do this, and anybody can do it from pretty much anywhere you have an internet connection.

As for whether any of the roster problems are my fault, if you can somehow prove that all roster changes over the last 2 seasons were voluntary and were the result of something I was doing wrong as a team leader or player, then I'll concede.

I'm curious how you came to this conclusion. I'm hoping you're not just repeating what other people are saying without looking into this by yourself.

=

when your pedantry knows no bounds

this is what happens to you when you watch my little pony even though youre a grown adult

banny jr,

Hey man I barely know you, but this is definitely not the way to do an lft thread.

The only 2 reasons you'd keep trying to argue that your low-mid IM is because you're either super sure you are, or just can't handle the fact that you're wrong and feel like you need to keep posting until everyone agrees with you and you can win the argument.

Assuming it's the first one, you have to look at yourself realistically. It's really easy to blame roster issues for holding you back, but if you were really as good as you say you are, then you would be a super standout player especially on pocket in open where you can easily put out 400dpm games on the regular. Prove to people you are as good as you say you are instead of trying to convince them in a thread.

And if it's the second one, get a grip man. You're not going to get along with anybody that isn't a complete pushover and that personality trait makes you act so irrational, kinda like how you have been in this thread (and I really hope it isn't this one, because from what grapejuice said, it kinda makes it seem like you want to be right, just to be right).

Hey nazara, thanks for the reply!

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand prograde. His map reviews are extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the pushes will go over a typical open player’s head. There’s also Muddy’s nuanced outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Grant Vincent streams, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these 6-10 results, to realise that they’re not just his fault- they say something deep about his teammates. As a consequence people who dislike prograde truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the humour in his’s existential catchphrase “LFT pocket high open/low-mid IM” which itself is a cryptic reference to wolsne's lft from s24. I’m smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as muddyfudger’s genius wit unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools.. how I pity them.

And yes, by the way, i DO have a My Little Pony tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It’s for the ladies’ eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they’re within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid

muddy pls stop.

the reason why players like hayes and drp go straight into lowmid im teams without playoffs experience is becase they could PROVE themselves even in a sea of inexperience/incompetence/issues. You have nothing to prove yourself with. please.

please stop tring to be right. you'd literally keep changing your argument whenever b4nny agrees with the opposition just to not have to be wrong about something

please this attitude will hurt you so much. especially when you're not, and are not remotely close to, the best player in the world.

as someone who actually cares, stop

alright, hold the phone buddy. I DID say that roster issues are a credible source of poor performance, but I only meant over a short period of time. (that's on me, i worded that differently than i intended)

Here's another anecdote:
s25, week 8, fygg went to Minnesota for a week and was unable to play for us during that time. We moved Ambroon to demo and picked up n3 to fill ambroon's spot. the first few days of that week of scrimming we were having difficulty adjusting to the lack of calls that fygg usually provided, as well as Phantom and Megaboy needing to get used to an entirely new combo scout. by the end of that week we had an extremely close match against Space Helicopter (Unskilled, mak, jaguar, slicerogue, kohly, legit), a team that, correct me if i'm wrong, stayed the same all season, and a team that we did pretty decent against in scrims throughout the season.

in this story, we bounced back and got our shit together in a span of an entire week of scrimming.
you're claiming that your roster in s26, that was different from the one in s25, did about the same as the one from s25 because it was different. unless every single week shit goes wrong then your story does not make sense, and judging by your roster history you had a roster change an average of .5 times a week, or, once every 2 weeks.

If everyone here hasn't convinced you yet, I hope this shitty analogy will.
Let's say you think that your looks are about an 8/10.
You anonymously poll 1000 girls and ask them to rate you /10.
90% of girls say that you range from a 6-7/10.
10% say 7+/10.
guess what buddy, you're a 6-7 out of ten.

If you want to take this awful analogy into TF2 let's do it
You think you're around a low-mid IM level
an overwhelming amount of people around or above a low IM level call you mid open.
guess what, you're not low IM.

If you don't learn this now, you never will. Please drop the b.s. and get real with yourself.

not IM,im not even IM

https://pastebin.com/FWKKdev2

prograde exposed!!??

I feel like I dont need to say this but I'm figuring this will help you further understand.
If you are consistently getting fatkidded in what IM players consider a "rat pug", you probably aren't an IM level player (or at the very least, you haven't proved yourself)

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/avatars/e6/e6239ddab8b550323b70987532f983e9d8cac0af_full.jpg

Hey nazara, thanks for the reply!

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand prograde. His map reviews are extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the pushes will go over a typical open player’s head. There’s also Muddy’s nuanced outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Grant Vincent streams, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these 6-10 results, to realise that they’re not just his fault- they say something deep about his teammates. As a consequence people who dislike prograde truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the humour in his’s existential catchphrase “LFT pocket high open/low-mid IM” which itself is a cryptic reference to wolsne's lft from s24. I’m smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as muddyfudger’s genius wit unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools.. how I pity them.

And yes, by the way, i DO have a My Little Pony tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It’s for the ladies’ eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they’re within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid

https://i.redditmedia.com/tcAGW4hB5EDRk-Cn-k5kVddwr-VOBBP0XbPrLbQn10A.jpg?w=1024&s=b19f0bd1e21745db31504ee7e25d6ebd

I agree with the stuff said here. my side in the spoiler.

Overall I think muddy is dedicated, and I think the way he organizes resources for his team to learn from is nice as well. He doesnt tilt. I just think he needs to be more open minded especially when players other than B4nny are giving him criticism. Id say hes more fit for a bubble team trying to break into playoffs.

I think prograde is nice.

https://i.imgur.com/5oZ2e9n.png

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/256/183/9d5.png

played on his team for 2 weeks and watched him die as pocket more times than i thought was possible