money

Yeah, if ur on the sandbag team collecting their seasonal check

ur complaining about toxic people but ur saying that as if it was an esea exclusive thing ull find those everywehre maybe u mentioned that but i cant be bothered to read ur wall of txt of what im assuming is just u talking about ur bad personal experiences

He actually did address this if you bothered to read but given that the ratio of toxic people is the same in both leagues what about all his other points regarding people in the skill gap he’s talking about?

the esea cient is one of the worst things ever created by mankind, beating out the atomic bomb.

Half of your issues have to do with your own teammates and the other half have to do with expecting to place well in the division because you have a decent amount of highlander experience. (also who cares if their team complains because they failed to field 6 on 3 different occasions)

You're playing in a league now where you will do bad unless you are naturally good at shooting people, or actually try to improve. That means pugging, demo reviews and/or practicing DM. If you're fine with improving at the pace of a snail or just want to play in steel/silver forever without trying to get better, then ugc is probably better for you.

that prolly sounded mean tho my apologies brother

there is literally no benefit to play esea except for the fact that it is the service everyone already uses

I can (And did) do that in UGC, I also adressed this as "whats the point in playing ESEA if you arent already good". I have improved more in the past 2 seasons of UGC 6's than I have in ESEA because half my matches get ffw or cancelled. Please dont assume that just cuz I play a different leauge that I dont try to improve.

you also have according to your post, switched teams several times. in order to improve as a player you gotta stick with a team and improve in that sort of environment

If you want to improve, you will get back on the grind, and try to play against the best players you can. If you did decent in silver 6s, most the people you are playing against aren't actually that much better than you.

...Is this not what is expected of people?

Also,

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I've had many times where my team couldn't scrim because we couldn't find a free serveme server. To the point where our leader just bought premium to make sure we always had one. It's nice not having to worry about whether a server is available, just where it is.

the point of playing in esea if you're not already good is to get good. face an actual challenge that you might not always get out of a free team in ugc, you know.
people are less tempted to troll and fuck around when they're paying to play...

client is horseshit, still.

the benefit is playing against people who want to win

you face steeper competition and its a place where you learn a lot about the game fast due to said competition

If you like where you are at, and playing ugc is what you like play ugc. But if you wanna become a better player individually (the best players play in esea) play esea.

To address his main complaint though the esea client is unforgivably bad and it really sucks how prevalent it is for lower level open teams to die early in the season and then all the matches the low level teams have left to play are hard rolls.

However, if you apply yourself indivudually and put the effort in to learn the game you can get pretty far and leave that realm behind.

You lose as soon as you say it’s out of your hands and give up though, so its on you to meet the challenge of playing against the higher caliber players you’ll come across in esea.

I definitely get that low open isnt really helping you at first, what with all the forfeit wins/losses, but you want to establish yourself as someone who can rise above the players stuck in bottom open and get on a team with motivation to play the whole season and improve.

I've been ffl in esea when my team asked asked to reschedule

nowhere else to play tf2 unless u wanna play Middle School Day Care Edition at UGC

ok my bad i actually read the post now and my answer is still the same but the reason i call it daycare is because all the players in UGC ive ever met are 100x more giant babies than the ppl who play this service

So? They were jerks, you can ignore them.

That sucks, but can happen in any league. There have been plenty of silver UGC teams with players more skilled than anyone else in that division. Also, it's worth noting that your first 4 matches are going to be randomly assigned, with your win/loss record only coming into play in the third week of the season. As the season goes on you'll play more against teams closer to your level.

If the team has newer players, don't expect them to do well against more experienced players. It sounds like you lost against a team that was better than yours, which is fine.

Seems like the takeaway here is that you need to do a better job of vetting the teams you try out for. Joining a team is a two-way decision, don't join up if you don't think they're as committed as you.

You can't play because you forgot to roster, that's not ESEA's fault my guy. If your friend's team can't get 6, try and reschedule and don't make the same mistake the next time.

For most people the client works well enough.

You can have more than 6 people rostered on a team, that's the whole point of having backup players. You couldn't ring because you made a dumb mistake, not because of anything ESEA did. Furthermore, most open teams don't need ringers, some occasionally need to use their backups.

If your team's toxic, then you made a mistake when you joined that team. If the team you're playing against is toxic, then just type hud_saytext_time 0 into the console

That's a problem with the teams you joined, not a problem that most people in ESEA have.

Not surprised that you didn't face plat players when you were on a sub-open team, but if you get into silver and gold you'd absolutely run into players with experience in higher divs.

If you're unhappy with something that's a result of ESEA policy, like not having ringers for matches, then don't play the league. It's literally that easy.

Sandbaggers are a problem in ESEA, true, but unless you're on track to be a playoffs team it's pretty much not your problem.

If every team you play against is 4-5 times better than you're team, you're not ready to play in open.

At the end of the day, if you don't enjoy playing in ESEA, then don't play in it. I'd agree that if you're not at least a silver player then you're not going to do very well in open. But if you approach it with the mentality of sticking it out through a season, learning from your losses, building connections, and improving as a player, then you're going to get better faster playing in ESEA. The fact of the matter is that there aren't really the same caliber of players in UGC 6's, so the ceiling of what you're going to be able to learn, and how far you'll be able to grow as a player is much, much lower.

^this dude sucks esea weiner lol

I'm not gay I just suck dick

I am not inclined to believe your concept of demo review and improvement is very reliable considering your current stats against other steel players in 6s, and your 7 seasons in steel or lower HL. It is entirely possible your complaints are stemming from an inability to compete on the expected level of even a low open ESEA player. This isn't saying it isn't worth your time to improve, but it might be better to compete in pugs and UGC until you have reached a point where you aren't getting stomped by every team in your ESEA div.

ugc is fucking garbage thats why

how much does esea pay you to say that when the client made us lose 3 matches so far

For reference it was my team that beersy is talking about who got forfeited against. We had client issues on the very first day (Monday) and kept on telling them that we were messaging esea to get it fixed. They actually tried forfeiting us on that first day but the server expired before they could so we were forced to reschedule Tuesday. Their leader and players had been rude to me and my team even before the match and they continued it until they forfeited us Tuesday.

What pisses me off is that we got client working on that day and we just didn’t have time to join before the forfeited us. And the fact that they were the worst team in open with their only wins being a ffw and against a csgo team pissed me off since we would’ve 100% won that match

There are only a handful of players who have issues with the client in any given season, so most people who use it don't have any problems with it. Furthermore, I wouldn't say that client issues made us lose three matches. There was one match where I'd concede that having to swap out players because of an issue that may have been with the client caused us to lose momentum and chemistry, and go on to lose the match.

I'd attribute more of our losses to the fact that we haven't had a stable roster for more than a few weeks at a time, and that we're currently on our 5th medic this season, not including people who've only played scrims.

It is generally a good idea to try using the client well in advance of the first match of the season so you don't get screwed. When I played it was fairly normal for people to log on at least 30 minutes prior to a match just to make sure the game actually worked correctly - saved my bacon in my first ever esea playoff match because my cp_granary had corrupted and it took me around 15 minutes to fix my map file because of slow internet speed.

Once you're further up the ladder things change and people are expected to be a lot more accommodating (in part because everybody will know each other pretty well too). But when you're on the open grind, aren't anywhere near the top, and don't know many people, always opt for the FFW when it is presented to you. It's not your job to care about other teams and their problems. I've actually witnessed several open teams that I mentored in the past die due to certain members insisting on being nice guys about ffls. Just don't do it and your life will be a lot easier. Once you're at the top of open and playing another top open team (and higher) you'll know and probably be friends with at least some member of the other team and will likely be able to achieve a resolution more easily.

The client is a fickle master, but it generally works as intended. I think in all the time I played it only messed up for me once - and *typically* uninstalling and reinstalling will fix whatever the problem is. You'll encounter this more at lower levels of play because nobody knows anything about the client and will resort to panicking the moment something goes wrong.

As a former UGC admin, I can also confirm that the VAST majority of the complaints I received as an admin were regarding to disputes about ringers. They're just bad in general for the competitive integrity of a match/league. Sure, it's nice to be able to play a game when you're set to play a game, but there are almost *always* bad feelings about ringers being included in a game, either because the ringers over perform, or because a team refuses to allow a particular ringer in a game. Ringers are for scrims and not for matches. Granted, it's hard to find substitutes to play on a low open team, but there are definitely people floating around who would be willing to hang around, surely one of the 6 starters knows *somebody* who would be willing to be on call. Generally it's considered nice to pay their fees too.

When you're just starting out it is several orders of magnitude more difficult to enter as a relatively unknown quantity and find a good team. You should focus on getting together with people you've played with in the past, and liked, and forge your own team with them. People will come and go, but your policy should be this:

Find one other person you *really* like to play with and hang out with. As time goes on, you will either find more people that fit into that category, or will have to rush and find 4 others randoms. The goal from that point on should be either to adopt one of those four into the category of *really like* or find replacements for them at the nearest possible opportunity (meeting people you really like in pugs/lobbies etc). Then ideally you've at some point got a team with 4-6 people you really like playing with after a few months.

Other things that are generally good to have in teammates:

- Make sure they aren't children who are prone to getting grounded from the computer
- Make sure they aren't children who have an obscenely early bed time
- Make sure they have reasonably stable internet (no 300 ping pocket on the regular for example)
- Never allow players who have "friends" that must play on the team with them too unless they both are also your friends - they will both leave your team at the same time and screw you.
- Never allow romantic partners on your roster if you don't know them - they will break up and they will screw you.
- Make sure they have a relatively stable living environment (oops I lost my apartment can't play is a thing that happened to me twice)
- Always have a replacement in mind for every person on the roster.
- If somebody leaves go to the ESEA page and find dead teams and teams that are lower ranked than you and start adding the players off of those rosters and asking them to try out for your team. Eventually you'll be integrated enough into the community to also know when particular players are unhappy or their team is likely to die - ask them too.
- Everybody is shit at this game, the second somebody starts talking like they're good or that they know something shut that shit down *immediately* especially when you're in lower/mid open, because if they did know something or were in fact good, they wouldn't be playing on your team. If you don't that player will become a festering sore.
- Don't expect immediate success, plan to get repeatedly put in the trash for at least a month.

if you're asking me personally: i want to play against the best players because i think competition against challenging opponents is really fun and the fees don't break the bank.

if you're asking us collectively: prize pool and the ESEA brand are appealing, plus there was previously LAN. tradition is strong in this eleven year old game

the amount of promising teams that have died to these two reasons alone is astonishingly high