About $75 a month for the tier I'm on. If the speeds weren't so completely inconsistent it'd be worth it.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2176100665.png

Plat pugs would be cool. Although probably 90% of the people in pug.nahl are technically platinum players right now. Platinum doesn't exactly mean much, but I get what you mean.

We're getting there. We haven't been able to play as a full team for weeks now due to our increasingly hectic schedules. Until we can do that regularly we won't be able to compete with the upper-tier.

Another team to watch is Team Player. Big Puff does tons of work on that team and they have a lot of talent to back him up. Also, the rumor is the Looking aren't coming back. And regardless of the talent on Gorgeous Gamers, it seems like nobody even knows what classes they're going to be playing. They probably wont take it serious at all. They'll be good, but less of a threat for off-classing and not practicing.

That said. Please god make platinum smaller. It's so easy to get fucked over and not make playoffs just by having a tough schedule. It happened to us in Season 6 and in Season 7 (though it didn't matter) we got 4th by fucking around and losing a couple. We ended up not having to play many good teams. Go back and look at about half the teams that made playoffs in season 6, and you'll see they almost entirely played the bottom ten teams during the season.

The only way to make Platinum anywhere near fair is to have as many teams play each other as possible. It's way more acceptable to get last knowing we played everyone in the div than to get knocked out of playoffs because some team we could crush didn't play anyone competitive.

The Game Broadcaster still uses your CPU to encode. It's mainly meant for consoles from what I've read. Using it with a two pc setup means the 2nd pc does the encoding, but if you only used one you probably wouldn't see much benefit. The Live Gamer does encoding itself so you can use it on one PC with minimal frame drops.

I've been researching the two a lot lately. Gonna be ordering the Live Broadcaster later this week. From what I understand you can stream with the ReCentral program itself, but the visual results aren't amazing yet (bitrate is locked). Whenever xsplit 1.1 is released you will be able to use the Live Gamer's hardware encoding with xpslit's expanded streaming features (namely the ability to set up different scenes) and have much better results. When that happens Live Gamer HD will be the best out there.

Missing Google Fiber by about 30 miles :(
Feels bad, man.

You actually have to go to Settings>>>Teams to find invites. Doesn't come through like a PM does.

I'd love to represent the highlander community!
http://www.twitch.tv/hueylewistf2

Getting an avermedia card soon to help boost my quality soon as well. Would love to get partner if possible, or just be a part of this group!

Badass quote of the year.

There seemed to be a trend of maps too small or too cramped for many classes to do anything.

Barnblitz suffers from every point except one being completely enclosed. Basically a series of terrible chokepoints that many classes can't maneuver around.

Vitalism highly promotes turtling, which is obviously the most fun you can have in this game. The spawn time really needs to be increased from 5 seconds and this map will flow a lot better. Also having the spawns able to completely swarm around the intel room is idiotic. Otherwise, it's an interesting idea that's just poorly implemented.

Borneo was better, but still just wasn't very wide and accommodating for 18 people at a time. Defense on payload is often about giving up certain areas and falling back before you get wiped. It felt really really easy to do that on this map because you had a lot of cover, whereas other payloads have long, open areas between points that make it a bit harder to retreat and set up another defense. Like barnblitz, there was a lot of overhead cover which make attacking difficult sometimes.

I actually enjoyed Standin quite a bit. It's a pretty strategic map that still has a lot of action. It's frantic, but large enough that its not just a clusterfuck. Plays better in 9s than 6s, imo. Every class has something important to be doing, but not necessarily all at the same spot. Reminiscent of cp_steel, in a way.

Canalzone is like standin on steroids. Our team wasn't even interested in playing it based on things we were hearing from other teams scrimming. The nail in the coffin for me was when Bonus told me they won scrims by simply avoiding fights and only capping points. Sounds pretty lame for a shooter.

Waste wasn't terrible, but again was a bit too small. Too many blind corners. It was really easy to get gayed on this map, not to mention it's basically sniper heaven.

I enjoyed both 5cp maps, but that also might be because of the other maps surrounding them. They were more standard, and large enough for every class to actually function. They have their own issues, but were pretty much the best maps available last season.

I'm cautiously optimistic! I hope that there will be teams able to compete with a 9-invite player team, but realistically there will only be a couple who can. There are a lot of solid teams that have trouble competing with the top three right now. And I just can't imagine many teams being able to get 9 together often enough for the practice necessary to take down invites.

That said, if the invites don't practice, a few teams have a pretty fair shot, on certain maps at least. See the USA nations cup team. We had better players for sure, but just got slightly edged out due to not knowing map strategies. Ping was obviously an issue too, but the games were close enough that I felt we could have won easily with a better plan.

You said it, not me ;)

Not sure if the Syndicate name is staying, but I do know I was asked to join a "dream team" with stabby and vhalin. They definitely have something in the works.

The 3-invite limit is rumored to be removed, so we can expect at least one team (maybe lead by m4risa?) of top-level players. Will be interesting to see if the already established teams change up their rosters to accommodate.

Our team (Tangerine) has picked up djc on engy and (possibly/most likely) powah sniping as mustard said.