https://tf2center.com/lobbies
https://www.tf2stadium.com/
https://tf2pugs.com/
(These all take awhile to fill)
https://newbie.tf/ (Only runs Fridays I think)

Not sure about other Discord groups that might be running.

EDIT: Found out about TF2 Coaching Central. I've never been in the group, but heard from a couple of friends that it's a very active group (Sometimes as much as three pugs running simultaneously) with lower-level players.

Overview page
https://disboard.org/server/727627956058325052

Invite link
https://discord.com/invite/HmVuUxZcrk

scout

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

https://youtu.be/PbzP_EUQzl0

Suggesting RGL should extend their authority from their league to policing the entire TF2 competitive community by creating new rules that retroactively gives them authority to ban people in the off-season is just not the solution.

When attracting new players to 6's comp, it's always going to be a rare moment when a pubber decides to join a league. When you play CS:GO right from the start, the instant you queue up, you're learning CS:GO. Standard matches are the same as competitive and all you can do is understand it more and get to higher player.

When you play TF2 for several hundred hours or a thousand hours, you still know nothing about 6's. The only skills that translate are your ability to aim and what the buttons do. You don't learn what a main caller is, a roamer's role, what the strat of a midfight is, how to roll out to mid, or the heal order while playing TF2 casually. So naturally, there's always going to be a barrier where it takes someone determined to make the decision they want to go into competitive and do the research. Streams and content creators can help. b4nny gets randos into competitive just like Lazy Purple or Uncle Dane gets randos to try out TF2 in general. I like what Fireside Casts are doing a lot, I hope more casts for lower games inspires people to check out 6's.

I think it's better to examine how many competitive players fall off from league play and at what div. What is the drop rate for players who join NC or AM and then leave after one season? What is the drop rate for IM players, and then Main players? Trying to figure out why a scene is dwindling goes into three aspects you need to examine:

• Is it a community problem?
Do people not feel welcome? Are there too many circlejerks? Is there a lot of friction between low-div and high-div players?
• Is it a service problem?
Do people quit because they hate the current league? Are there not enough PUG services to keep one's interest? Is the prize pool or financial cost just not worth it for some for the time invested?
• Is it an accessibility problem?
Do people not know HOW to get into competitive TF2? Is there too much research that needs to be done on the player's end just to learn 6's?

If an individual or a group had enough time and interest in their hands, finding players who dropped comp and asking them why with this kind of format...

...and compiling giant list like this to glance over would provide better insight for everyone else who is active.

I opened the thread and this popped up in the corner of my browser and was very confused.

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

Now that I'm here at the bottom of the thread, it all makes sense.

You run into a "rich get richer" scenario where people who have uber ad get to utilize it more consistently if snipers were banned. Lots of mid-to-last pushes where defenders are at full disad are hoping for a sniper-out-of-spawn clutch play who can get OHKO picks without having to commit. If the sniper doesn't get the med but still makes a pick, that can still change the tide of the last fight by making it 5v6. Even his presence can cause a team to pop earlier than they wanted, and a few seconds of wasted uber can be huge for a defending team.

I think without sniper, we would just see the teams who are winning win even more.

https://i.ibb.co/PNHy1WL/6c7.png

What if he mistook "TF2" as being Titanfall 2? Both games have an engineer class.

To play devil's advocate, a soldier who isn't calling his bombs or damage in pugs after three rounds in could be considered throwing, which is what pissed off b4nny. People don't to hear someone complaining and prefer he doesn't hold down push-to-talk, that's understandable. But you're saying, "I want to play pugs where people don't throw" all while the discussion is centered around a specific pug where soldiers weren't calling their bombs or damage. b4nny could stop playing pugs tomorrow, you're still going to get pugs with subtle throwers like that.

You want pugs that are high-level, you don't want to be fatkidded, and you don't want to play with malders. That doesn't exist, and wouldn't exist even with several active pug groups. So I don't know what the end goal of this thread is other than to dunk on b4nny.

I had a pug group where I personally invited you to join every time I announced for people to add up and you denied it 70% of the time to play PugHub. The group also had strict fat kid rules where I made it so you only got fatkidded once a day and you couldn't get fatkidded again-- but you still often picked PugHub over them.

I'm going to guess you denied it because it was mostly Main with some Advanced players, and you wanted to play with mostly Advanced+top level players, and that's fine, you can choose to play with higher level players. But a lot of Advanced want to play with Invite players, and Invite plays with b4nny.

I'm not even in PugHub, and I'm betting that he's at least 65% of the reason why pugs fill up so frequently at night. You can't just ban him without the trickling effect of, "Now less Invite players join, which causes less Advanced players to join, which means the group needs to pull in Main players just to fill up" and we go right back to the situation of you not wanting to join those pugs, either.

I had a conversation about American history last night with GrapeJuice, and did you know he thought the death count for WWII was in the dozens?

Typing "gg" at the end of the game is like typing "lol" in a chat when you're not actually laughing. It's just less awkward than if the entire team left the server with no acknowledgement.

The current comp scene's age group ranges from 14 to 35. It's really hard to police the language of teenagers and college-aged kids playing a competitive video game. Even if you're 26, if your entire team is 17 - 21, it becomes hard to not adopt the language and mannerisms of friends you spend hours with (unless they're not your friends, then you're putting yourself in an uncomfortable environment of the sake of 6's which is a different subject).

Groups such as PUGHub or RGL can have their own code of conduct rules to make people feel more comfortable, Twitch can have their own ToS, but if "retard" gets banned, people will just say schizo. If that gets banned, people will just say autismo. If that gets banned, people will start coining new terms like "he's clinical" or "he's neuro" or something. You can either chase down every new term and keep banning them all, or pick and choose your battles and just have a list of the most offensive ones that shouldn't be used.

I'm not including scenarios where maybe there's a single person on your team using a word you don't like and you can privately speak to them, I'm thinking more about general group settings.

I decided to just look at the numbers myself and I'm not sure where the author of the article got "68k in May" from. The average for Jan - May 2022 was around 90k. The average count in 2019 was 68k and has been steadily climbing ever since. But if we change the numbers to what they are:
= May with 90k average
+ June and July with 140k average
- Aug and Sept with 115k average

I didn't include October because of Scream Fortress and since we don't have November yet, it's hard to know if that slight increase in players is purely for the event or if some plan to stick around afterwards. Regardless, we can say there was a definite and consistent increase from May 2022 by at least 25k players. The biggest problem when talking about any of these numbers is that we still don't know how many of the numbers include bots, traders or idlers which always make it really, really hard to refer to Steam Charts when talking about if TF2 is thriving or dying.

TF2 could've gotten a boost because of an update around May that made it harder for bots. TF2 could've also gotten a boost because it was summer and school was out and those numbers were going to rise regardless of an update. Those numbers could also be because 11 new unusual effects were released in summer and a bunch of traders unleashed their idle bots so they could farm and trade for keys and unlock crates. It could be all three, I don't know.

https://i.ibb.co/8M42d6X/Untitled.png

And apparently, that wasn't even a tweet done by someone on the TF2 team. Plus, there's TFClassic's response in trying to get the mod back up and they were unable to get anyone at Valve to respond to them after getting a random request-to-takedown that further confirms they're mostly just ignoring the game and probably it's community outside of workshop submissions.

I'm a bit confused by what the article is claiming. Is it trying to say that the #saveTF2 tag is somehow responsible for getting thousands of bots banned due to increase player awareness or something? Because it feels more like to me that the cheaters got bored and started dwindling in numbers on their own, not because of an increase in reports and moderation.

I queued up the last couple of weeks and pre-Scream Fortress, you would get maybe one or two bots every 8 - 10 minutes. During Scream Fortress. there's been a consistent bot playing Michael Jackson songs every 5 - 7 minutes.