freakpugs

Wasn't the FreakPugs system just like PugChamp? It's basically what I'm trying to avoid in order to make the competitive scene more welcoming to new players.

one of the best features of tf2pickup was when a medic could choose one player to be on their team no matter what

please make this.

forcing someone on medic though could cause people to just not show up to the pug, just a thought.

So like TF2center but with good actual admins?

if the system i have in mind checks out, you'd be forced to med like one of out of 6-7 games, but yeah i get how frustrated people can get and kill a mix with that. good point

yes and no, I don't really plan on making the layout like TF2Center because:
A. site will provide servers and not users, users having control of a server is a dumb idea honestly
B. classes might not be pre-assigned (to be decided)
C. There will be systems to enforce balance
but yeah obviously the administration will be far stronger

why not make players be able to choose classes? if someone is chosen to play a class they don't want to by the system they probably will not show up

give captains for people with 50/100+ pugs like hlpugs.tf
don't force people to med, let them add up to specific classes
give people admin on a steam group so they can announce

i'm planning to make classes (but med) open to discussion though

whenever you select a class you get added to the pool of randomly drafted medics, however, meds are picked based on a random percentage and whenever you pug and dont get drafted as med your percentage goes up and once you play med your percentage gets reset, people who add up on med are given a higher percentage

just an idea

I like the core idea, but I don't want to leave it up to chance. I'll probably make an algorithm that decides who 'deserves' to play medic the most (played the least) within said mix and then rewards him (gives him 'protection' within the algorithm for future mixes).

A seperate list for 6 player teams to look for scrims/mixes. Being able to unite all mixes and scrims on an actual site with decent support instead of a vague list of posts in a discord channel would be nice

General:
Basically a list like the Community Server list, but lists teams looking for scrims/mixes

Inputs:
*Title (example: "LF scrim div2. On now. Our server")
*server IP (if there is one). Site could check once every minute if they have 6 on the server, maybe autocloses post if there's 12 on the server. Connect doesn't have to be included in the site. They can contact the leader for that
*Contact info of group leader (maybe leave it up to them to put in a comment so they can decide if they'd rather be added on steam or discord)
*Bump button with cooldown (2 minutes? idk) so people know things at the top of the list are either new or bumped recently

Yeah, frkshw and I literally copy-pasted the source code for PugChamp from GitHub and threw it up on a free Heroku instance lol. No programming knowledge required; shout-out to HANK for providing solid TF2 servers. Our goal was to make a place for UGC and low open players to pug since there was almost no way many of them would get picked on PugChamp. People seemed to really enjoy it overall, but it turns out that tsc did not like what we did (which was understandable), so he added an explicit "copyright notice" in July 2017 to restrict people from making clones: https://github.com/fwdcp/pugchamp-legacy/commit/2298c51d70c35abf71e5fe8a31979e0d834f378e

Brief history lesson aside, making a TF2 pug/mix site is very difficult when you realize that the relatively small size of the competitive scene means that you have to seriously consider the tradeoff between getting pugs running "quickly" and keeping pugs fun and evenly matched. People don't want to wait forever to play a pug, but they also don't want to finally get picked for a pug only to get rolled 5-0 in 15 minutes.

In my opinion, the "ideal" mix site would keep 4 skill ratings for each player (corresponding to skill on scout, soldier, demo, and medic) and disallow switching classes with teammates through plugins. Creating a good team balancing algorithm that takes these ratings into account is challenging if you are set on restricting the pool to 12 players for each pug, and it becomes even more challenging if you decide to implement a system where medics can choose a particular player to play with. You can simplify things by keeping only 1 rating per player, but the underlying issue remains.

In general, any mix system will produce lower quality pugs than a captain draft system due to the fact that it is very hard to establish accurate skill ratings for all players in the pool. Therefore, it's better to have trusted captains make the teams, but if you are targeting your site towards people in "low divs," they probably won't know people very well and will just pick their friends even if this would make the pug noticeably imbalanced.

I'm not trying to discourage you from working on this project, but I wanted to make sure you understand what you're getting into. Setting up a mix site worth using will take a lot of effort, and much of it may go unappreciated unless you knock it out of the ballpark from the get-go. Best of luck.

I like everything about it, except the fact people are forced to play medic which will end up in a lot of bad and inexperienced medics and ruin the game possibly, it's better to just let everyone pick the class they wanna play :)

funny idea number 2:

let everyone add up to dm classes and med, if u have 12 dm classes added but no meds, give them 20 sec to rup and then make everyone play some reaction based mini game (like https://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime but integrated, clicking too fast makes u play med too so you avoid ppl with fast auto clicker scripts) on the website, 2 slowest people to click has to med (unless 2 meds are added, if 1 med is added only the slowest person goes med) everyone gets 5 seconds to click and if everyone hasnt clicked the draft gets cancelled and if a person didnt click in order to dodge they get 20 min ban

its like last to spec but in the browser lol

Wouldn't that end up like scrims.tf though? that was a website for scrims that was very inactive

i think people would rather play unbalanced mixes than wait for enough people in their div to play. so maybe segregating people by skill level when there are a lot of people added is good, but maybe when there are less players added, it prioritizes getting a full game over a balanced one.

there would be an 'open' divsion for everyone to play in, but I disagree because I know how frustrating it can be playing with a player which is far behind your skill level. It's not anyone's fault, but a d2 player would think differently than an open player and an open medic will most likely inevitably make a d2 player mad for the mistakes that aren't really his fault since he's still in open.

I liked being able to pick a player when I was adding as medic on TF2pickup, means there is the added appeal of medic being used to play with a friend or someone you enjoy playing with. Would definitely be more interested in playing with something like this in place :)

I have time now, so I'm starting to work on this.

Here's what I have decided to work on, would really appreciate feedback:

- Sign up with specific classes you wish to play.
sidenote: I am thinking of letting people queue up to multiple classes with priorities like PugChamp, but I will have to find a system that still avoids fat kidding with this so It's not a certain.

- Benefits for med: Being able to pick a player to play with or being able to black-list a player. (Black list still a question mark)

- Draft system (no "lobbies", our own servers)

- ELO, W/L Tracking

- Division to divs??? (big maybe!):
Open (for everyone, everyone can queue)
Low (Open to Low only)
High (Mid and above)

not rowpieces

tf2pickup.net was dope affff

if theres people from different divs added up on captain, give priority to the person from the higher div, not the person who has higher hidden captain elo or whatever
basically dont let middies insert themselves into prem pugs

ingame matchmaking

If you're looking for help developing this project, make it open source! This is something I've been interested in making myself but have yet to find time to do so. So if you make it open source I'd love to PR.

Also make a Trello board or use Projects/Milestones on Github for project management so that people who are interested in what you're prioritizing can see what you're working on - and potentially comment/give structured feedback on those things!

qsd

https://discord.gg/HFygYG

Made a discord server for this.

I would not feel good about that. You would eventually have skill decantation the same way you have a split between tf2center and pugchamp. I would feel better if the system tried to create mix teams with similar total skill levels, eg 3 high players 3 mid players vs 2 prem 4 open or something

Very good Idea, I would have no problem with that

They should be able to give some kind of preference order, like 1 demo 2 soldier 3 scout 4 medic, and then the program would try to satisfy everyone, and for anyone not satisfied with what the program decided, remember that they were not satisfied to satisfy them in priority for the next mix

Probably not worth the hassle as ELO systems are fucking hard work and the playerbase is so small. Just let higher level players use PugChamp and let this be something new.

Sounds like a really good idea and the only way to keep a site like this active. Just make sure the system has failsafes to stop people being forced to med multiple times in a row

Use a preference order and have medic as a separate tickbox. Maybe something that comes up every time you ready up but you can change before clicking ready. Most classes are just random chance each game while medic looks at total games played since you were last medic (assuming two people haven't ticked medic).

A few other things

• I would really like a system that is fully randomised in terms of picking peoples teams (not their classes). It would make things quicker, remove the responsibility of being captain and decrease the circlejerky vibe these kind of sites can create.
  
• If things are totally random allow people to offer class switches within their team while waiting for server setup (similar to how you can switch champions in a MOBA).
  
• Have separate pocket and flank scout in preferences to help assign roles and improve gameplay.

I guess I basically would like TF2PL with class preferences, random teams and some kind of system to assign medics fairly.