this is what i was told when i bitched in discord, but it wasn't b4nny who said it, so i'm not sure anyone has actually asked faceit.

add pre-ready 2 - 3 mins i dont care
been in queue for 55 mins go take a piss come back minute later match starts
pls

The winners of NA TF2PL S1 prizes have been decided! Winners will be contacted through Discord PMs to claim their prizes.

Unusual Raffle winners
Item raffles are offered to help encourage consistent play on the platform. Raffle entries are automatically earned for every 10 matches played per season.

Invite: marmaduked (11 matches played) - Orbiting Fire Bonk Boy
Advanced: Procreative (101 matches played) - Miami Nights Reggaelator
Amateur: Akin5enwa (16 matches played) - Circle Heart Valley Forge
Beginner: prlyz (222 matches played) - Circling TF Logo Tyrant’s Helm

Medic Prizes
Cash prizes are offered to the top medics to help incentivize playing medic regularly. The top 4 medics in each division are determined based on number of total Ubercharges popped per season.

Invite Division - $25
NurseyTF2 (141 ubers popped)
Sky_e (101 ubers popped)
Skeez_ (66 ubers popped)
Sandblastt (54 ubers popped)

Advanced Division - $20
Brulee (821 ubers popped)
HappyBOB (587 ubers popped)
Meyy (467 ubers popped)
Crackbabydum (450 ubers popped)

Amateur Division - $15
onfroi : (755 ubers popped)
Jaqua_: (736 ubers popped)
-Unity: (610 ubers popped)
iBreadGaming: (541 ubers popped)

Beginner Division - $10
Prlyz (809 ubers popped)
Yari_Qwerty (735 ubers popped)
14th_Eagle (598 ubers popped)
P_flare (645 ubers popped)

Congratulations to the winners! If you didn’t win anything in S1, don’t forget that S2 is open and tracking progress already, so you can get playing now to improve your chances to win next time! Maybe S2 will be your lucky season ;)

This is a legitimate issue, you can't reasonably expect people to not elo hunt every last point they can.

Hey, I was gonna nerd-post again but I ended up busy and sick because of LAN.
https://gist.github.com/ldesgoui/743c1cb5d084e7bace5334c9413f31f8

If you like numbers but not reading, here's this:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UQ7VtDTBdAtZQ7ycqlbzpTE-ToJdWINkOZrn4lkKLJU/edit?usp=sharing

do we get points from this?
if not, why not

currently playing a 6v0 in beginner. dead serious. gg.

pug champ was better hope this helps

the last match I tried to join didn't allow me to join the server
9:55 PM
so I manually copied the connect info
9:55 PM
put it in and got the message "connection failed after 4 retries"

I tried various things trying to get it to work, but nothing seemed to work. Clicking the join server button didn't even launch tf2.

-edit-
going to note, never had this issue with the client bootstrapper before. pugna, tf2c, and hlpugs all worked fine. hlpugs worked fine just 15 minutes after this

Hey Comanglia, I suggest you start a FACEIT Support ticket and get back to us if it gets resolved
EDIT: As a rule of thumb, we're much more responsive in Discord, help should definitely be asked there :)

Too bad it requires discord, looked interesting.

Does anyone know why prec wont record faceit matches? i set my prec to record all matches but it still wont work for me.

why you still using prec? just use the ingame demo recorder

because of the individual player ready up thing, need to do it manually by prec_record

just set prec_mode 3 and the delete useless demos function for prec

@b4nny why is it that first captain gets first pick, server location, map ban, and map pick...
2nd captain only gets 2/3rd pick and 2 map bans

edit: apparently server location is a random captain

Faceit advanced is in shambles. Pugs die at like midnight now and only like 6 pugs are played daily. People aren't having fun due to how the leaderboard system encourages main-classing only and is not rewarding for people who think they can just play better to rise up the leaderboard (do these ppl underlined in red deserve to be at the bottom? https://i.gyazo.com/d4988ecfd5df30d8f8955c3a860bdffa.png). A B C level pugs are also non-existant which means a lot of pugs have invite (A) level players playing with C level players which is not fun because the IM players don't enjoy playing with passive aggressive, condescending invite players (looking at you, highfive and aim) or vice versa. Being able to start pugs without people willing to play medic is also a bad thing bc 2 players are forced onto medic and the 10 others have to put up with them. I know you people love hating on rktking and others like him but he was actually willing to play medic and he was fine for pugs anyways.

Pugchamp used to have like 12-14 average daily pugs. I realize that pugchamp had a bigger player base but this is not the reason why faceit advanced has been so unpopulated. Faceit advanced has been decreasing in popularity ever since it launched. I think that overall, more people had fun more often on pugchamp compared to faceit advanced.

I won't deny the fact that faceit for the lower divs have been a success. Just to clarify, it's just faceit advanced that I think needs major work or abandonment all together.

also these hiperz chicago servers suck

That right there sounds like it's a major part of the problem, though. Even if Faceit revamped so that games didn't start without people specifically adding up to play med, even if all the advanced league players went back to Pugchamp, games still wouldn't start because nobody would play med. Almost every time I added up to Pugchamp I would see 15 people added up with no one willing to play med. Pugchamp's liveliness has always relied on lower level players adding up to med because they'd never get picked for pugs otherwise.

On the one hand, that was actually a bit of positive, since lower level players could get a taste of high level play every once in a while. On the other, it was fucking hot garbage, because half of my Pugchamp games were played on med just because that was the only way to get a game going, when it should have been closer to a sixth. It blows my mind that people are so obsessed with "oh im gunna be the best fragger evr!!" that they'd rather sit and do nothing than just play med for a game.

nah, the mainclassing thing is a pain for us lower-level players too. having to balance elo climbing with practice on our non-carry classes is annoying.

also holy fuck logs are broken like half the time

im drawing up a big positive/negative list for faceit pl vs pugchamp, from the perspective of invite and advanced (im bottom advanced for reference but i tried to think about what others want too). im ignoring beginner/amateur because 1. i haven't played them, and 2. i dont think having one platform is worth sacrificing the experience of either type of player

this is mainly for faceit devs so they know what to work on to please this audience. plz comment on these points if you want

Faceit positives:

• Pugs start quickly. They start instantly with 12, and they're unkillable which at least means someone's gotta take a fat ban if they wanna kill it. For better or worse, it forces people to captain and sort out classes to make drafts start.
  
• Shit WORKS. Pugs dont take 10 minutes to assign, the site doesnt break almost daily, shit isn't super laggy. some things still bug out, but way less than pugchamp
  
• The 5 minute join timer, pugchamp got kinda silly since people got later and later at joining because pregame with no dm or jumpers isnt very fun, and they'd rather dm or something than wait for some frenchie to take a smoke (looking at you daul)
  
• rankings and leaderboards, for better or worse (this kinda differs between how hard people wanna play pugs). in general it seems to make them more competitive but more toxic
  
• less random shitter meds that ruin pugs. it forces people to med, but at least you dont lose 30 mins of your life because some kid wants to play pugs with a prem player and can only get picked on med
  
• free car
  
• more active developers. while you definitely feel the site wasn't designed for tf2 players, faceit devs are active and receptive of what people want, even though i feel people like b4nny want something very different from pugs than what most people want. erynn and tsc are both not very able to add features to pugchamp and work on the rewrite unfortunately, and while erynn's tried sticking plasters on things for a while it's still a drain on her
  
• less of a circlejerk admin system, you can now reach them without needing them on steam and rules are clearly written out. as a pugchamp admin i felt pressured a bunch to ban/not ban someone for various things

pugchamp positives:

• play what you want. you're not forced to captain, medic or play an uncomfortable class. there's also rules against picking all the meds to force people to play odd classes.
  
• no auto captaining. honestly i dont think ruining a full pug is better than just killing the draft so we can get another one going
  
• servers seem to be less laggy without faceit anticheat. anticheat is probably needed for lower levels but its probably a detriment to advanced/invite (though didnt some popularish NA guy get detected by it?)
  
• less of a mixed bag of drafts. while faceit has divs which tended to keep skill closeish during less popular times, at peak times friends like to play together and people kill pugs to get fun ones. i keep hearing more aids recently from people who end up on teams or in pugs with people they dont like
  
• pugs were more fun and less sweaty, again for better or worse
  
• preready is super nice. i get why it cant really be a thing atm because of how captains work, but i'd like to be able to get a drink without needing to be sat at my pc constantly incase i miss a game. with a smaller playerbase like tf2 this is necessary i feel
  
• the site is simpler to use. im sure i'll get used to faceit but it feels like everything takes 3 clicks to get to and there's a lot of crap on the website for other things.
  
• logs.tf, and the fact that the site in general feels more connected to the tf2 community rather than being something completely foreign.
  
• you and the captain system naturally decide what level you wanna play at. if you're below the level of other players you won't get picked very often unfortunately, but equally it means you aren't stuck in amateur if you dont fulfill some league requirement (which isnt gonna always be accurate)
  
• mumble. discord has some benefits, but in general people either can't run discord, dont get it setup and linked, or have weird volume issues (enabling legacy audio (which is the same voice codec as mumble i believe) helped me somewhat but shit's still very weird). the entire community is already using mumble, and auto-channel shit is pretty easy to do with it. you can change volume levels for individual people with the mumble 1.3.0 dev build and have been for ages.
  
• free name changes, at admin discretion. they were annoying to do as an admin but god it's probably better than copper changing his name every day with his smaug-stash of points in a mountain somewhere
  
• ive never seen someone get banned on faceit in advanced or invite for offclassing or throwing on captain. on pugchamp admins played pugs, saw that shit, banned for it. they can also check logs quickly for offclassing. in faceit i never see thumbs down reports or whatever get answered, and there's like 1 admin who plays advanced/invite in eu (degu)
  
• pugs happen more often. in eu. invite/advanced is smaller than pugchamp and as a result you get 8 people sitting in queue when in the past you'd have a pug going

update the whitelist to allow all the new hats plz io need to show off my sick set

Hey gemm, thanks for the post, I won't respond to all right now of it but you said

Are you sure you're using TF2PL's reporting feature and not FACEIT's reporting feature? We have no way of reading into FACEIT's, I don't remember if there are any plans on letting us, I will ask again. The thumbs-down affect the FBI (in your profile), AFAIK we have no way of reading that either, and I doubt it affects anything in Hubs. Regardless, in Discord there's a #reporting channel with instructions on how to report bad actors, I do encourage adv/inv players to take the 30 seconds it takes to report someone, however I assume most just don't care enough to do so. Please do.

dang, i didnt even know thats what that channel was for. could that information be made more visible? say, somewhere a bit bigger on the tf2pl website's main page or something?

guys i fixed it

People don't want to play med because no one wants to be responsible for losing the pug, not because they just want to frag. I can't count the amount of times where I've seen newer players add up to medic just to get picked in a pug only to have the rest of the team take turns shittalking or bitching at them for almost every mistake until they inevitably lose, and then they never add up on it again.

Aside from rktking I don't know a single person who would willingly want to put themselves through that and I do not blame them whatsoever.

It's a thankless job that everyone expects you to play "competently" no matter how new you are.

I would even go as far as to say that a lot of pugs that are lost straight up aren't the meds fault at all, it's just unfortunate that the mechanical mistakes medic's make are really really easy to see (dropping uber/dropping players/getting caught out), whereas if your scouts or whatever make mechanical mistakes, i.e. missing a combined 12 shots every fight, it's actually kinda hard to tell (beyond losing the fight obviously) until after the game and you look at stats. Med's probably the only class where every other player can see what they're up to most of the time and as a result like you mentioned you'll get berated for nearly everything, like you mentioned.

Medic's are also much more likely to get micro'd than any other class and I feel like people get frustrated when their meds don't listen and execute the players requests exactly even if the med might be playing better than anyone else on their team. Vicious cycle really.

shit i didnt know that ty. i was using the thumbs down thing, i'll use and tell ppl to use the channel. i tend to just stick to the hub channels because of the sheer number of b4nny subs crawling in the joint channels

That makes sense in the context of Pugchamp, but doesn't really work when everyone in the advanced division should know what a med needs to be doing.

Doesn't this also correlate with the launch of comp MM? More Invite and IM players are playing comp MM than ever before.