iirc the way he got it working was by running scripts that grab the stvs off the faceit website and upload them

there were no plugins installed on the servers besides what faceit currently has

What Brimstone said is true.
I do plan on providing additional stats, whether it be by generating logs for logs.tf or by proposing and coding features for demos.tf.
I can foresee that players would rather have all their logs in one website (that would currently be logs.tf) but the integration would be painful and error-prone.
I think demos.tf has more potential to be a more fitting service for us *and the rest of the community* in the long run:
- STV demos will never require a third party plugin to run (meaning ESEA demos could be uploaded)
- Additional features can be applied to older demos (whereas new logs features can't be backported)
- Intensive stats will never require the gaming server to choke
- Demos.tf software is open source, any kind of statistic can be added
- Hypothetical: stats could be generated directly from a live STV feed (granted you plug it before the match starts)
- 2d/3d Heatmaps
- Automatically slice demos for fragmovie makers

I could come up with even more ideas, the only limiting factor is my free time

There are some downsides, obviously:
- Demo analysis (without packet filter) can be quite CPU expensive
- Demos take more space
- Both meaning that stats may take longer to be available
- It's possible that STV demos are missing crucial packets to provide information to clone stats from logs.tf

Is the file format tf2 demos use known? Can we actually slice demos and retrieve particular information out of them?

File format is half-documented here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/DEM_Format
I clearly recall Icewind (demos.tf creator) mentioning that he managed to slice demos into playable chunks, as for retrieving data, it can be done using https://github.com/demostf/demo.js or https://github.com/SizzlingStats/demboyz

Season Naming Unification
A brief note about season naming schemes: the season numbers have been unified, so the current season will be referred to as S3 for both NA and EU despite it only being the second month of EU. If any future regions are added they will also share season numbers with existing regions.

New Requests Commands
In addition to the previously covered captain priority requests, all requests for region bypass and division moveups will also now be handled through the TF2PL Helper Bot in our Discord servers. Use the commands !request, !region, !moveup, or !captain in a PM to the Helper Bot and follow the dialogue prompts to submit your requests. Invalid or unapproved requests may be immediately denied through the bot, while valid requests will either be automatically fulfilled or be forwarded to our admin team in a more streamlined way. This should help to improve turnaround time on requests being handled. Please let us know of any issues with these commands, as they are new and being tested.

Season 2 Prizes
The winners of TF2PL S2 prizes have been decided! Winners will be contacted through Discord PMs to claim their prizes.

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.

NA Invite: habib_6ixGod (23 matches played) - Kill-a-Watt FR-0
NA Advanced: chadmcgowen (27 matches played) - Nuts n Bolts Conquistador
NA Amateur: Walrex (55 matches played) - Massed Flies Head Hedge
NA Beginner: -stephanie (74 matches played) - Miami Night Cadaver’s Cranium
EU Invite: alba (21 matches played) - Orbiting Fire Crocleather Slouch
EU Advanced: Amik (35 matches played) - Stormy Storm Fat Man’s Field Cap
EU Amateur: DigyB (64 matches played) - Peace Sign Elf Esteem
EU Beginner: Axel_DOC (73 matches played) - Steaming Sober Stuntman

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.

NA Invite - $25
meyy (101 ubers), NurseyTF2 (83 ubers), Sky_e (60 ubers), zilly_ (52 ubers)

NA Advanced - $20
jack200660 (774 ubers), Uplift (587 ubers), -luxor (414 ubers), crackbabydum (380 ubers)

NA Amateur - $15
prlyz (553 ubers), Corunson (551 ubers), jaqua_ (457 ubers), -Unity (446 ubers)

NA Beginner - $10
p_flare (1177 ubers), Yari_Qwerty (766 ubers), yellowcape (636 ubers), 14th_Eagle (621 ubers)

EU Invite - $25
degu_stator (168 ubers), shampain2 (115 ubers), Raptor00X (103 ubers), c0ndawg (91 ubers)

EU Advanced - $20
Maciej850 (488 ubers), Spulu (461 ubers), spadesold (378 ubers), Doughy123 (315 ubers)

EU Amateur - $15
_Gen (876 ubers), asianb0yh (531 ubers), ohy0u (508 ubers), b_fisch (409 ubers)

EU Beginner - $10
Qohen (1341 ubers), Jo-sh (873 ubers), 556pm (837 ubers), Axel_DOC (573 ubers)

Congratulations to the winners! Remember, S3 has already begun and tracking progress for the next winners, so you can get playing now to improve your chances to win next time! Good luck :)

there was a movement yesterday i think to get people back on tf2pl, which people tried for most of the day even though nothing had changed

by the evening people had moved back to pugchamp and i posted a message in the hub chat that they had, which got deleted twice. it's not a big deal but it's exactly the kind of thing people rag on tf2c about. i wasnt shouting at people to get them to go pugchamp, i just saw some people sitting in queue who werent added and they added after seeing my message

Advanced Division Region Restriction Removed
On an experimental basis, the region restriction on the Advanced divisions in NA and EU has been removed. If you meet the level requirement (8-10), you may now freely queue in either region at any time. Given that people playing cross-regionally may be disruptive to their non-native region’s games due to high ping or language barriers, we will be closely monitoring any incoming reports from Advanced division games, and will revoke access for any people abusing this privilege.

I’ll be playing more EU games these days, feel free to join in.

Chat moderation is quite relaxed, but our rules disallowing clear sabotage efforts, aggressive advertising, harassment, etc will all be enforced. We'll take steps to make sure these chat rules are more clear so you won't be confused in the future if your messages are removed.

Division Join/Queue Level Restructuring
We have made a change to the level requirements for joining and queueing in the Advanced and Amateur divisions, as follows:

Advanced
Join: 8-10, Play: 1-10

Amateur
Join: 4-7, Play: 1-7

Beginner
Join: 1-3, Play: 1-3

Basically, this makes it so that once you have adequately leveled up to earn a place in an upper division, you will be able to continue to queue there even if you lose and level down. For players that were on the borderline between levels, this should be especially helpful. In the Advanced division, this will make Elo purely a visual quantity, similar to how it is in the Invite division. For example, explicitly losing games and leveling down to 7 will no longer prevent you from playing in Advanced division. For most people this means you will only need to earn a place in an upper division once. However, obviously some players may not be able to quickly acclimate to an upper division and continue to derank after initially earning their place in an upper division. For players that are deemed to be unable to handle the upper division, they may be removed at admin discretion and have to repeat the process of releveling until they can rejoin the division. We will work on developing more clear criteria about how that process will work.

Also, this should be extremely beneficial to division moveups. We will no longer need to wait for FACEIT to adjust player Elo in order to add players to upper divisions. The unsustainability of relying on Elo adjustments was the main reason we discontinued Amateur division moveups, so we will be considering reopening those because of this change as well.

Increased Server/Map Voting Time
Captains will now have 30 seconds to ban server location and decide on map bans/picks, to match the amount of time they had for each of their player picks. Hopefully this eases some of the pressure of map voting and provides ample time for well thought out picks.

Looks like the optimal strategy is to derank to 1 so i can Q in all 3 hubs

does that mean invites can sandbag in pugs

Throwing games is still a bannable offense and players who prove they're unable to handle an upper division through losing the number of games required to delevel that low, they would probably be kicked from the division and unable to queue.

As division level ceilings are still in place at this time, you cannot queue into a lower division than your current skill level, and most invite players are level 9/10.

https://i.imgur.com/DHVftJE.png

I get terrible routing and ping to the Chicago servers.

Backstory: TF2PL comes out and it's all Dallas servers. I get atrocious 100~ ping to them (should be more like 45-50) so I commit to just playing scout in Beginner div. It's fun and as I climb out to Amateur div Chicago servers become a thing and I then have good, normal Chicago ping! (I'm in Toledo, OH). Now as of a week or two ago Chicago servers give me over 80 ping for no good reason and basically I can't pug on demo which is all I want. (I don't wanna hear how West coasters always have that ping. If I lived in 80 ping land I'd never have played projectiles in the first place).

https://i.imgur.com/ItfxVQk.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/ItfxVQk.jpg

Above is a screenshot of me doing a traceroute to one of the Chicago servers. I'm not an iT guy but at least anecdotally I can take note of some things here. Firstly 20 hops is way too many. To get to my own scrim server it takes 11. Secondly it looks like the signal goes from me to Chicago, then to Denver, more Denver, snju01-ca (N San Juan California??), the H81 address wherever that is, then Dallas, more Dallas, then 5 hops to and around Chicago. That is some seriously messed up routing.

I have come to learn that cin (the heroic player formally known as unskilled) has this same problem as well which makes sense since he lives in the same city. Does anyone else have this problem? If so, would you please post and let us know what city you're living in? It would also be great if you could perform a traceroute and post a screenshot like I did.

I'm sad that for the time being pugs are basically not an option for me and I wish something could change.

=

+1, should get five ping to chicago, recently started getting 60-70 to faceit chicago (although not every time). can traceroute when i get home, if more proof is really needed. and oddly enough it feels worse than the 60-70 ping i might get to a virginia pub, though i don't know enough about servers to tell why that might be.

edit: have only played a couple pro league games on dallas in the last month but they both felt way rougher than they should, and i know as a community everyone has pretty much decided to avoid those servers.

You know the routing is questionable when I live on the West Coast and get better ping to Chicago than people who live in Ohio lol

Pretty sure I'm being routed through Georgia and Virginia.
The ticket I opened with hiperz closed with them telling me my isp is changing routing based on the time of day.

Hey guys, thanks for bringing this up, I'll send this part of the thread to our server hosting contact, I highly suggest you take the five minutes it takes to report bad routing to Hiperz directly https://www.hiperz.com/knowledgebase/17/Reporting-high-ping-or-latency-issues.html
You should also keep in mind that the DDOS protection adds 5-15 ping to most players on average, but obviously it's not what's going on here.

Isn't it hilarious that faceit has actually done the complete opposite of promoting the TF2 community? Its killed the volume of pugs and resulted in lower quality games.

Also some virgin admin keeps banning me for not having a dweeb avatar like everyone else. The community is small as fck and you're gonna ban players for a powertrip. n1.

You only need to have the avatar on your faceit profile. It's been a part of the rules since the platform started.

Even though the community is small there are a number of players that don't know other people or what classes they main, especially in beginner. Change it, then message an admin and you'll be allowed to play.

I understand why avatars are enforced in divisions which actually have captain picking but do they really need to be forced in beginner? Feel like it’s just a waste of time for admins to even acknowledge beginners without the right avatar

because they can get moved up to amateur

If one or 2 beginners don't comply and are allowed to get away with it, other people are very likely going to jump to the conclusion of "well if they're not complying and getting punished then I don't have to because I won't get punished, right?"

It makes the admins that don't enforce it look bad and likely showing favoritism/signs of corruption. You can have your opinions about what "corrupt" actually means but all that the admin team is tasked with doing is complying with and enforcing the rules.

I tried to change my profile picture, but it's broken. :(

why do i get 5-6 elo per win but i lose 20 every loss

if you did everything right but nothing is displaying, the site might take a minute to refresh

If that's not working I'd refer you to the #help-and-support channel in the discord where someone can help you one-on-one

Edit: From what I've been told, it's an error on FACEIT's end. Not sure of an ETA as to when this will be fixed.

S1 Frag Video
The S1 highlight video, edited by Cyanic and featuring frags from all divisions, is out now! Check it out:

https://youtu.be/OFYrjuUiwPU

Increased AFK Cooldown
The cooldown penalty for not joining a game has been increased to 1 hour in an effort to further discourage dodging matches.

S28 Invite Teams/Players Admittance
All players now playing in ESEA-I as of S28 are also granted access to the TF2PL Invite division. If this applies to and you would like a join link for yourself or a teammate please get in touch with me.

https://imgur.com/a/jGcAHx2

How awesome I still got Captain and the first auto-pick was a med main

So uh 16 people are queued in NA Amateur right now and no games are starting

So in the EU right now the amateur and advanced divisions are basically dead. Amateur has had 3 games in a week and advanced even less. Beginner is still chugging along reasonably healthy. Here are a few reasons why the system failed/ how it could be fixed.

• The skill divisions are too inflexible which leads to longer queue times. If a queue has been going on for longer than 15 minutes it should try to pick up people from a division below or allow people from a division above to join with their players suffering increased ELO damage if they play. The focus should always be on getting games started quickly otherwise the system will eventually die.
  
• 3/4 was too many division for the EU which had half the player base of NA. The combination of this with other problems (inflexible divisions etc) lead to many people not being able to play.
  
• People being unable to pick their class or have their class picked for them them lead to many people not playing or helped create a really toxic atmosphere which lead to people not playing. I don't think you can have a system like this be successful without some kind of class picking.
  
• In the EU sorting out the divisions at the start took far too long and just lead to people leaving.
  
• Allowing EU/NA players to queue onto each others hubs if a game hasn't started in 15 minutes would help games start quicker.

There were other problems as well but I think these were the main ones that actually had solutions. It really is a pity to see no more games happening as for a week or two I quite enjoyed the experience and it helped me get back into TF2.