Okay I decided to post the actual team status partly because the last time I did that it led to very tangible improvements with us and partly because I am mildly paranoid that my teammates will post about it first in a way that implies everything wrong with our ESEA experience is my fault (it partly is).
How's the difficulty of schedules and the new matchups thus far?
Our second half matchups haven't been great so far. We got 2 forfeit wins off of recently dead teams and 2 teams we have no hope of beating. Our only close official matchup so far this season (on viaduct vs snsf) was ruined because they couldn't get six which was a bit sad
If your team died (I know a couple have), what happened (please keep it civil)?
We aren't dead yet. This alone exceeded everyone on the team's expectations. Shoutout for tsc for being so dedicated to keeping the team not dead
Have you guys been improving a ton since you've started playing in the season?
Not really. This is most evident in our post-mortem mumble discussions after getting rolled in a scrim or match. We would all agree that our losing stems a very fundamental thing: first it was that we had no combo cohesion--our demo overextended into everything and I didn't protect the medic enough. This took around 2 weeks to start working towards a somewhat workable fix. Then we noticed that nobody on the flank communicated anything at all during scrims. That took about 3 weeks to fix and showed no signs of progress until one of our scouts quit and the other one had football gifs posted at him. My method of trying to fix that problem was admittedly very rude but it was out of frustration that our team completely forgets what we need to improve on as soon as the conversation ends. Our currently identified problem is that we don't focus damage or call focuses. Whether this will be fixed before the season ends remains to be seen.
Hell, if I had a time machine for us to go back x months and play against them, a few of my past teams from UGC would probably beat us in a match. I was being carried on those teams but at least they had a decent reaction time when someone called a push.
What has stopped you from improving, if something is?
Everyone on the team has scheduling quirks that rules out almost all of our available times in the week except the default match times. Tsc goes home from his dorm on the weekends and apparently doesn't take his computer with him. Dharma is on a UGC 6s team (she was on it before we got her to play for us). Me, Rhydon, DrJeremy and Hydro are all on different highlander teams. All of those ugc teams are in different divisions and have different scrim schedules, and all of us are playing different classes on said ugc teams than we are in open.
My HL team's scrim schedule is also the most rigorous out of the above--it literally follows every rule from technosex's post even though none of the other people on my hl team have ever seen that post or even browse tftv. I can't fairly prioritize some scrims for the open team over hl because it feels as though the hl team's practice is determined work towards a very real goal which isn't a feeling I've been getting from Just Wait for It at all. I think I also find my experience with my HL team more fulfilling and I would probably learn more from my experiences there than I have from ESEA so far especially if I was playing a more skill-indexed class than fucking highlander engineer.
I am not saying that UGC is a better league or that Highlander is a better game mode, just that I have been having a better experience with them in this particular season, which follows several seasons of UGC that completely failed to "make the hours count" as technosex said.
Has anything on ESEA caused trouble while playing?
Our first match of the season was an absolute horror story with every possible ESEA-esque thing that could go wrong going wrong, but Tsc already posted about that in the last thread.
As far as the teams we've played against go, it was pretty discouraging when the Muffin Men spawncamped us with sticky traps after wiping our team on mid, while setting up a sentry on second before they capped second. Seendio was very respectful with their steamroll, though. Shoutout to Seendio.
How do you feel about playing in ESEA?
It feels simultaneously underwhelming and overwhelming.
2 years ago, in UGC Steel back when I first started playing 6s, I was on a team led by Jinta where his magnificent autism led him to make a 20-scrims-per-week schedule, which was ridiculous for a ugc steel summer season team. He claimed it was based on HRG's training schedule. We actually went along with it because everyone on the team was either NEET or on summer vacation at the time so we had nothing better to do with our evenings. The team quickly ran into a huge problem: everyone who wants to scrim vs steel 6s teams is really bad, and we quickly outpaced that level and rolled through every scrim. But we still got mixed results in our official matches because the Steel 6s teams that actually won games were made of offclassing open players, and those teams never scrimmed, at least not vs other steel teams.
ESEA is advertised as a Mecca for teams looking to try as hard as the above one did. One that Just Wait for It has failed to capitalize on. Our attempts at finding games in #tf2scrim have gone hilariously awful. After that we decided to just add low-open team leaders instead. When I became scheduler last week, I decided to just make a thread asking about it instead of rifling through Steam IDs on ESEA team pages trying to find who was interested and had a living team that could play at the same time as us like our last scheduler did(?). Most of the teams that replied from that thread last week still rolled us 5-0.
What have you noticed about your team that has made it very fun?
Everyone on the team has been taking our badness in stride with a good sense of humor, which is strangely fun to see from the inside if a bit jarring to those outside the team. The many puns based on the team name of "Just Wait For It" have also been fun.
Same question, but what has made you guys improve?
Saam's football gifs basically saved our season improvement-wise. Shoutout to Saam.
edit: grammar and phrasing