If they add some nice-looking skin that drops only while connected to comp MM servers and has a chance to drop that's proportional to the player's rank (i.e. fresh meats get a 0.5% chance to get the skin as a replacement for a random item drop, while death merchants have a 9% chance of getting the skin drop instead of a random item drop, then ACTUALLY do seasons and reset people's ranks and maybe change up the skin but IDK look how popular australiums still are even after all these years) their MM system will populate with people who are actually trying to rank up even in its current incredibly sub-par state and they can do plenty of their own weapons and map testing.

This will literally take maybe a few hours of their time (maybe even less because you can just outsource making the skin to the community again!)

But no I guess we still have to put in 9 hours of unpaid time a day to put on a show and get half a dozen new people interested in competitive, in the vain hope of trying to grow Valve's game for them (which is their job! Taking financial risks is how businesses work and succeed!!!).

This game is so old now that most of us are old enough to have jobs, college, personal projects, and charity/volunteering obligations, we barely have enough time to play the game, let alone do Valve's job for them. Can we at least be given the choice if we want to do their work for them? ETA: inb4 hurdur then just don't play teh game because.... that's the exact opposite of the point.

So, I'm just wrapping it up right now but so far this mixer has been a pretty big success for something so late-notice!

I think we will get three teams out of this once they finish their tryouts and grab some of the people who told me they were interested but couldn't make it today. One has a complete roster, and two other ones I am hoping will be able to pick some rosters together from the players we got.

Billdozer, tony or I will get in touch with you about sponsorships.

Thank you very much to ander, bleh, Jojo, ThorEatsWorms, Laxson, GrumpyGrampaKoala, vhnjhjh and all of Jojo's friends who came to help us out and fill in the player slots that we were missing at various times, as well as to ander, bleh, and Jojo for helping me organize the thing tonight!

Thanks to all of our players for showing up and for putting up with how disorganized and last-minute it was.

Thanks bleh. We are going to be talking pretty realistically about what this entails, but at this point we just need people to show up and see for themselves.

I'm looking to run it roughly like this:

If we have one leader and at least five players or two leaders but fewer than 10 players, they will be able to play with one another against either a scrim they find on discord, or, if none are available, a pug scrim thrown together from senior players without scrims. Hopefully the one leader will be able to pick out enough players to complete their roster by the end of the week.

If we have at least two leaders and at least ten people, we will have two team drafts and fill in the missing players from the present senior players. Then hopefully the two team leaders will be able to start building their teams from the newer players.

If we get more than 12 players who show up to this we'll figure it out on the spot, but it will follow a similar pattern to this.

The pug scrims, or the senior players filling in, are only fulfilling a function of supporting the new players in finding teams. You are not there to farm the other team or micro players or do anything else really interfering unless you want the team leaders to pick you up for your amazing skill. So be warned.

Players who are currently involved:
Bleh
Jojo
Tino
ander
Mallory
FFyg
Laxson

Please feel free to message me if you are an experienced player and want socialize with some new players and help them get on some teams. Especially you FFyg, I sent you a message but you didn't reply.

If you are a new to comp or new to ESEA player looking to play in this, post here, message me or anyone else involved, or just join mumble.accelerateservers.com port 64806

This event is going to be a little different from past team drives and newbie mixes.

The first little bit is going to be a bit of a meet and greet, where you'll get to hang out with the more experienced players who will be there to talk a bit about their competitive experience and what it's like to play on a team and in ESEA.

New players who step forward and volunteer to be potential team leaders will then (somewhat randomly I suppose, but that's not too different from new tryouts) draft from the players who are present to build temporary teams to do a scrim with on some standard maps. Once that is done everyone will be pooled again and team leaders can choose new teams again. There is no pressure or imperative that this event ends with a bunch of built teams by tonight; the idea is that the new team leaders might be able to construct a core of their new team and then finish up their tryouts over the course of this week and have a team ready to register before the extended deadline. No one is expected to commit to a team they don't like or to build one at all, this is solely an opportunity to try making one.

The senior players will not be there to coach or provide feedback to individual players. This isn't like newbie mixes where players come to learn how to play 6s and receive feedback from experienced coaches, this is for new players to play with their peers and build connections that they will be able to use to build/make it on to their first teams, while the more experienced players can provide encouragement, support and explanations about league play and team-building (that is not to say that you CAN'T provide feedback if you want to, but you are not expected to do so).

Alright, so I've been posting about this in a couple threads now and thanks to some collaboration with Newbie Mixes and other community members (who will be credited further down this post, dw) I'm going to make it an official event.

Every season there are a number of new players who develop an interest in comp TF2 and want to play in ESEA but maybe don't have the experience or the connections necessary to get tryouts or build a team. When I was putting together the spreadsheet of Open players looking for a home I saw quite a few of those players so I wanted to do something for them. I know how scary and hard it is to break into the scene and try to build a team without really knowing the ropes or knowing enough people to keep to a stable scrim and tryout schedule.

So!

We are organizing a group tryout, tonight (Monday) starting some time around 9 EST (time still to be determined, waiting on Tino to come home). We may also be doing more of these throughout the week depending on demand.

This is open to anyone who was looking to play their first season of ESEA and/or competitive and was not able to find a team.

This is also an opportunity for more experienced players to get involved with getting some new players into the community so if you know anyone who would fit the criteria or you just want to come and help out (or come and talk about how to get new players in), you’re welcome to!

Join mumble.accelerateservers.com port 64806 if you want!

Ok well. I thought I had my roster of friends finalized but then I lost my roamer today.

So I need a roamer. We're kind of a more chill team, we scrim/play matches/review STVs/etc only four nights out of the week so if you like to have free Fridays and Saturdays (Maybe Sundays, we're still deciding whether we're scrimming Sunday or Monday nights) this is a bonus. We're a mix of players who have played ESEA before and those who have played 6s but not in ESEA so in general we have a bit of an idea of what's going on. We've been told we're mid-open, IDK if that's true, but let's say it is.

I'm looking for a roamer who can think for himself in the context of his team. Our aggro scout is a talktative and creative dude so if you can work with him that would be A++

Our current roster is

Scouts: John and Grumpy
Pocket: Nic
Demo: Mallory
Medic: Green.and.Gold

Add me: http://steamcommunity.com/id/thebunnysaur/

Posting this here as well. I am more than happy to help a new team leader or two to set up their low open team from a selection of players who were new to Open and were LFT. I am willing to help you hold tryouts tomorrow night on my server and walk you through all of the team leader stuff. Message me if you're interested.

You know what I'm 100% with habib on this now.

Give demoman a really good shotgun like the reserve shooter and I'll be ok with the rest of this shit.

Yo any of the people who rated themselves as new to ESEA or Low-Mid open who are willing to lead, message me, I'll help you get set-up as an impromptu newbie team "drive" and I'm willing to help you through issues over the course of the season (I've lead something like 5 separate teams over two years, so even though I'm still bad at games I think I'm a pretty experienced team leader).

I think there might be two or three teams that could be put together from that spreadsheet and from combing through the LFT threads some more. This is gonna be very crunchy though (unless the deadline gets extended again) so, expect to have to make decisions fast.

ETA: I can provide my mumble and server tomorrow for these tryouts between 8:30 and 11:30. Can probably still give the mumble on Tuesday but I will have my own scrims so no server. I can probably find another one though.

ETA2: I want to do this because last season I played on a newbie low open team and it was the best experience I had by far so, I'd like to give other people the opportunity to play with some cool people and learn a lot.

Adding this here for anyone who prefers spreadsheets, I went through the three most recent pages of LFT threads that didn't clearly have some indication that they found a team. Sorry if I missed you.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z3aNWgEYlo2y3ArPlb8xzj37beMsdPR1ZhURx8QyVMA/

You can sort by class (or ctrl+f class, I did a derp and the people who are willing to play multiple classes will only come up as whichever one they most strongly seemed to prefer if you sort by class) or by self-stated skill. Question marks in any cells means that I wasn't sure. Anyone listed as soldier didn't specify which one so I'm assuming they're fair game for both. If it says something like scout/demo and then Mid/Low it means that they ranked themselves mid-open on scout and low open on demo.

I will check back once in a while and add people from this thread to the list or remove people if they tell me they found a team.

I guess I can pipe in as a newer player too. I started one season before universal whitelist and I have to say that was the best time I had. Not because any of the mechanics are particularly game-breaking, but because the first season I played I fell in love with how streamlined and uncluttered 6s felt compared to HL (which is where I originally came from). When the unlocks got unbanned it felt a bit more like I was playing HL again with random, minorly aggravating shit - the obnoxious cowmangler rockets and sound, people randomly being jarate'd or on fire, the mini sentry memes or the rescue ranger tanking a sentry through more than it should (though to be honest I've so far been lucky to never play against someone who actually knows how to use it properly).

Has any of it like, SERIOUSLY impacted me in-game? Not really, but it's made it less enjoyable for sure. And the thing is... I would be willing to put up with all of this aggravation if there was actually ANY sign that Valve gave a shit. They're still making millions off of TF2, they made like a million bucks off of Halloween alone. How fucking much would it be to ask for them to donate $10,000 (i.e. 1% of their earnings from this game from two weeks) to the Rewind prize pool (or hell, forget the prize pool, officially subsidize some of the expenses for teams coming from far away) to ACTUALLY show that they do care and they ARE paying attention, and that our sacrifice of our enjoyment is actually going to lead somewhere?

I asked you yesterday on stream b4nny, if Valve putting in money is what was actually going to revive TF2 and you said yes and then went on to talk about how the game needs to be fixed first. I don't think they have the luxury of time anymore. OW didn't become big because it's an amazing game, it became big because Blizzard took a huge financial risk and invested in their game, invested in advertising, invested in literally buying public figures from other games to help them promote their game as a legitimate alternative, invested in a large, responsive developer team and then continued to push their game as something to be taken seriously. It breaks my heart when I go and watch someone like War or Paulsen stream and all I hear is talk of passionate, dedicated people who took their TF2 hobby as seriously as a full-time job talking about how Rewind is their last big hurrah and that they're all leaving because after years of passion and investment, they can't do it anymore. It makes me sad I wasn't here earlier and it isn't putting Valve in a good light when they are just fucking ignoring all of the amazing people who literally gave this game their life.

Is it the developer's fault? I don't think so. I think the small developer team TF2 has is overworked and understaffed and I think they genuinely care about the game. They literally have to take scraps of code and bug fixes from the community because they just don't have time to get to all of it. But Valve, the management, don't give a shit, and the developer team doesn't have the authorization, or the funds, do this game justice. And I don't think sacrificing our enjoyment is going to reach that management that actually needs to give a shit.

TL;DR: I'm all up for changing things up and having to deal with the fallout, but at this point in time, I think as a community we've already made our blood sacrifice. The ball is in Valve's court and they need to show that they actually are listening and do care about aggressively supporting this game's success.

It comes from Signy Mallory (from Downbelow Station). She's kind of an antagonist/bad person person in the book but I was being emo about my team leadership skills and decided to name myself after an awful woman who was a respected leader.

It ended up sticking and I like the name.

I have a suggestion that might make it easier to run them. Why not have a concentrated "newbie drive" every time before the new season starts, do a bunch of mixes with coaches and other people while publicizing their existence on reddit and elsewhere, run them for a month, encourage the new players to make friends and form their own teams, and then let them run their own low open/newbie pugs during the actual season? We'd need to do it off the back of a big public event like a LAN (the weeks leading up the Rewind, with all of the hype building up around it and the next season right after the LAN ends would be a good time) or a season start. That way coaches and volunteers can know, ok, they're dedicating four Fridays in the off-season to mixes, can't scrim that time with their own team, but it won't disrupt the season.

It won't be a big deal since if someone decides that they're interested in competitive while the season is running, they'd have to wait and maintain interest for months anyways.

We can also come together to make a bunch of videos (ala updated versions of Marxist's class guides/etc) that summarizes competitive as well as everything anyone may need to know about getting started, and putting them somewhere prominent, so that the people who do develop an interest in competitive during the season can watch the guides and join something like faceit or the newbie pugs and not feel completely unprepared.

I would be willing to help out with running the drives in the off-season and I might know a few more people who might also be interested in the organizational stuff.

She is actually a really good and experienced med. Her heal order and distribution in team fights is on-point, she's confident in her arrows, counts ubers well and she survives some pretty stupid situations. Honestly her only weakness so far is that she hasn't played on a good team so things like responding to snap decisions/fast rotations will probably need a bit of initial polishing. But she is an absolutely solid medic for playoffs-capable open teams. Please finally get this lady a team she deserves.