What I don't understand is this mentality that b4nny has where he only thinks pugs are only lost due to "mistakes", but not that pugs can be lost simply because players aren't playing their best classes. For the past couple of days, I've seen it happen on his stream (top invite players main-classing against low/mid invite/IM players offclassing), and the very first thing to come out of any player on the losing team's mouth after the game is something about the classes they played being a factor in why they lost the pug. They're not wrong about that either; there's literally nothing fun about having to lose a pug because your best player is forced onto Medic because no one else wants to/knows how to play it.

TF2 is not (and probably will never be) the type of game where the current Faceit queue system is successful. Literally every pug website this game has had (pugna/tf2mix, tf2pickup, pug.me, pugchamp) has a system where people can add on classes they want to play, and that's what made them better than Faceit. Even in-houses work better than Faceit because you already know who is going to play Medic, whether it's last-to-spec, or a RNG with the amount of players wanting to play.

Also, most people who play pugs are people who play them to have fun. A lot of people don't even add to faceit pugs anymore because they know it's just going to be full of obnoxious and sweaty gamers.

Take my suggestion with a grain of salt because I do not play faceit, and I don't pug often but:
Why not just force invite players to only be able to queue in the invite division? You have high IM players in this thread complaining that they have to play with invite players, and invite players complaining about playing with IM players. 95 seems like more than enough to start invite pugs every night, especially seeing how a lot of the advanced pugs are often filled with 50-70% invite players. Invite moveups (and movedowns) based on elo can also regulate flow of players between each division that maybe don't belong (or do belong) based on how they look at each pug(fun vs try), or how good they are at multiple classes.

I appreciate the amount of effort that went into developing the TF2PL system, I really do. So thanks to everyone who contributed to that- it's a great system for Beginner and Amateur.

I personally haven't enjoyed FaceIt pugs since I started playing them. Part of it was the hit or miss servers which I think were fixed already, and another part of it was that when *I* want to pug, I want to pug, NOT play an ESEA match. There's some people who enjoy tryhard pugs for 100% of the pugs they play in, and that is perfectly okay. I'm not one of those people, and I can safely say that I don't add up to pugs so I can play with condescending people that, yes, are better than me by LARGE margins, but make it a point to make me feel so inferior that I play reactively rather than proactively. You may say people are too sensitive, you may say people need thicker skin: I will say that it's not hard to be nice and make everyone's experience positive. If I wanted to try that hard, I'd join a team again, and the chances of that happening are slim to none. I'm typically someone who tries to make mumble/discord a fun environment (in the rare even that I've ever been snappy at someone, I apologize for that), but when I have to play with people who throw infantile tantrums when something doesn't go their way, it's not going to make me pug more.

I enjoyed PugChamp because I felt the quality of pugs were not better or worse, but because they struck a balance between 'sweaty' but still fun pugs.

Some other issues I have with the FaceIt interface is that the site itself is a bit cluttered- I tried getting one of my friends who used to play TF2 started and he just gave up because the instructions were so convoluted and not straight forward. With PugChamp, the system was fairly streamlined- you had classes, and you had checkboxes. You logged in with steam, and you were set. Each system has its pros and cons of course- on PugChamp, people held the pugs hostage by going AFK in pregame, and sometimes the site just didn't let you add up. Also, the skill gap in advanced is pretty huge considering you have anyone that's high open/low IM to the top of invite. With no fatkidding and it being first come, first serve, you may end up with someone who is just not as skilled as the others in the queue and it'll really skew the quality of the pug.

I can only hope that we find a happy medium between the two systems because they both have their benefits, but for now, well, yeah.

Ya man I mean faceit is by design a worse version of pug champ.

You can't choose your class
Your captain can't choose your class (which makes captaining almost pointless)
You can't play with friends who are different skill levels than you
Less pugs happen because people are split up into many divisions

I tried out advanced for a couple days a few weeks ago and haven't played since. I had played pug champ a lot. I have friends in the same boat.

Why did we move from something better to something worse?

Faceit seems like it could be a good experience for people who are pretty new to the game, but the pug champ type of pug systems are better for more experienced players.

imo, adding up to classes is a must for a higher level pug system.

i hate captaining and getting 9 soldier mains and 1 invite scout + the other 2 players then that scout just steam rolls us the entire pug because no one I picked can play anything other than roamer

also, this same argument has been incessantly repeated, and yet it hasn't been addressed o_o

I also haven't played a pug for fun/had fun in a pug since pugchamp died. It's just been a cesspool of me being yelled at for not being able to perform the impossible tasks that my pug team's one good player requests of me when the other 4 players on the team are off-classing and getting rolled by the other team and their 3 invite players main-classing.

i'd prefer seeing the high level pugs (of which im not involved in obv) switch to a different site rather than them die in a fiery explosion

edit: condensed a few paragraphs into one sentence. ek dee

fuck these servers

please add a sub system dear god, when one player leaves and its 5v6 its the worse shit ever

Well b4nny recently begged rktking to come play in advanced so maybe that's his solution LOL

elo ruins pugs

please make an tf2center style unranked queue open to all skill levels so that i can actually have fun with my friends and not be victims to b4nnys life mission to win everything he touches

I mean the regular faceit tf2 pug option is still there without any elo, so you could try playing that instead tbh. The main issue is nobody queues for it because everyone only plays tf2pl now

yeah i feel bad about playing when i'm drunk now :/

althouigh maybe that will help me in the long run

I have a different perspective from a lot of the people posting here as I didn't play much on pugchamp, and I'm not a high level player so the advanced/invite division problems don't directly affect me. However, TF2PL has been exactly what I need from a pug/mm service, and couldn't find before apart from brief periods when mixchamp was popular.

Each service had its own problems for me.
PugChamp: I almost never got picked, and if I did, it was usually after waiting a long time to play. I don't have enough time to spend in TF2 to afford the amount of time pugchamp wasted for me.
Tf2Center: The system directly incentivizes players to form unbalanced matches. I played so many games that weren't fun because they were a roll one way or the other. This was more of a problem when I was newer to 6s, but is one of the main reasons I continued not to use it often later.
In-game MM: lol
pre-TF2PL faceit: Very few games were actually fun. Without separate divisions and predetermined moveups, the skill of the other players varied wildly.

In comparison, TF2PL has been a complete revelation. I can queue up to amateur and know that within half an hour or so at the most, I'll be in a game with 11 other players similarly skilled with (usually) decent balance between the teams. I've never had that before, and it's a lot of fun. I hope that the system can be improved for higher-level players, because no other pug/mm service has come close to TF2PL for my own experience.

TF2PL clearly has flaws, especially for advanced/invite. The system being ideal for a player like me isn't a good enough reason to ignore the issues present- while I agree with b4nny that some of the conflict is a result of attitudes, the complaints still need to be addressed as well as they can so that higher level players have a system that works well for them too.

This was basically old Faceit TF2, and the majority of players didn't like it. It failed for a reason

Amateur player here.

Overall, TF2PL has been an excellent experience for me so far, but I would like to echo and expand a bit upon the criticisms raised here in this thread.

As Mustard pointed out, the classes people have in their profile pic don't necessarily reflect what people are good at/want to play, and the problems with this are particularly egregious around medic. I've effectively been a med main ever since the Mixchamp days (RIP), but there are definitely times on TF2PL where I want to play a combat class instead, can't be fucked to instantly change my profile pic before the next PUG, and end up being expected to play med again when I really wanted to play scout or demo. Even some sort of way to more quickly and easily change the classes you're interested in playing in the game lobby would be an improvement.

^maybe a solution is to make this visible on the TF2PL page as a "casual" PUG queue? Would address a good number of these complaints IMO

Edit because I initially typed "Advanced" instead of "Amateur" xd

They didn’t like it because of other issue, such as no region locks, not many players so you would have a bunch of level 1s with a single level 10. Poorly enforced rules, and in game voice chat

And the ladder are down so you can’t even queue up for the old system

EDIT: nvm i misread your post

i miss b pugs :(

it's nice being picked much more often with no fatkidding but playing invite pugs half the time is pretty annoying and is killing my enjoyment of them

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/300539408963076097/435608511875907585/Planktopolis.png

Would like to echo Citric’s post as a player in EU Amateur that tf2pl has been great fun

My tf2pl experience: faceroll amateur and have no fun

Get moved to advanced and get forced to play lots of medic and have no fun.

https://i.imgur.com/6ROmtGH.png

https://i.imgur.com/8WhAkA9.png

good idea b4nny

I have captain priority so I can captain in amatuer pugs, if you clicked on my name and then my profile it would show im only level 6.

Captain priority role rolls over into all divisions (for whatever reason)

https://strawpoll.com/dh71sfr5

https://i.gyazo.com/15ff7c6872aba2e532c1af3893bf0487.png

https://i.gyazo.com/fa0e2deaf64971eaffdde45c3bc9eb67.png

https://i.gyazo.com/8707eacfa85b9aa07f92bd91283ba975.png

From what I've been hearing, it basically needs to happen in the advanced division. Anything less than 10 pugs a day is absolutely abysmal, and for b4nny to be claiming there's nothing wrong is willfully ignorant. Hell, even 10 pugs sounds painfully low. Something needs to be done, and it seems like there's quite a few people who would come back to those pugs if there was a guarantee they wouldn't be stuck on med every other game. It's worth a try.

As for amateur and beginner, I'm not so sure. Pugs have been pretty regular in amateur, and even as someone who has the med pic in my avatar, I haven't had to play med all that often.

Wait, I'm out of the loop. Didn't B4nny always tell everybody NOT to switch from invite to Faceit to avoid fragmenting the invite community? Wasn't this literally always his greatest fear?

Faceit isn't running a league, just the pug/lobby service. We only use ESEA for the league competition

FUCK

I meant Amateur and typed "Advanced" instead