I've posted in john's other LFT as well, but I've known him for a long time - we played HL together, then first season of 6s (back when he still played medic), and then S24 in ESEA a few month ago. He's extremely reliable - will show up to every single scheduled team thing, and will always make sure to plan around his scrims when it comes to college work. He's a pretty flexible team player and is willing to play closer or further away from medic, off-class to whatever is needed, etc. He's been grinding his DM these past two seasons so I'm sure it's not as bad as he thinks it is.

He also actually loves playing this game, which can kind of be a rare trait.

Pink is a very very very VERY nice person. Like, it cannot be overstated how nice and kind of a person he is. He also always showed up to scrims (well ahead of time, no strolling in at 9:29 for this guy), and as far as I remember made it to every single non-mandatory demo review as well. As a demoman he's also got great pipes, and he's very committed to playing with whoever gets aggressive with him.

The main thing he needs to work on is to just slow down a bit, not give in to the feeling that he has to frag/damage absolutely everything, and just focus on the frags/damage that he should be getting while staying alive. That should hopefully also give him the room to comm. If he gets a good team that lets him experiment with his pacing I think he can be an absolutely great demoman.

He also has some next-level strats!

Hi, I'm Mallory, I'm LFT multi-class sub for S27 (probably like... playoffs open-ish? Low IM if you're super desperate for a player). I've played multiple seasons of demo and med, and am currently playing demo for a team to hopefully play at rewind. Because of life stuff I can't really main in ESEA this season, but if you need someone to fill in for a week or two and I'm not working ass-late week nights, I'd totally love to.

ESEA: https://play.esea.net/users/1424524
Hit me up here: http://steamcommunity.com/id/thebunnysaur/

Professional writer and part-time librarian running my own community program about interest in sciences and creative problem solving in children.

The librarian thing I got fairly figured out, the writing... Well. I spent the last 20 years writing things I never finish (or even start). I've been seriously chopping into a manuscript since I finally got a stable job, but then I run into some panic event and abandon the whole thing for like a month feeling completely hopeless about it. About half-way done Draft #1 now.

Played with/against him a ton (mostly against). Good survivability, good decisions, is a talkative but not overbearing med. Also is really kind and tries to bring up morale/tell you you're not shit even when you're eating big piles of it. :) His luck with teams has been pretty abysmal, he ends up on teams that lose players and struggle to stay alive (through no fault of his own). He defs deserves a stable mid-high open team to improve on.

My family is Russian and I got beat.

It has not left any mental scars or anything of the sort but I also think my mother did not do it for the right reasons either. I know she almost always did it because she felt angry and/or out of control, but I also don't blame her because she was also in her early 20's, very sheltered but trying her best when she was raising me. Honestly my most memorable recollection of getting punished as a kid was not getting some cheap glitter nail polish that I was promised for good behaviour after I accidentally said "fuck" without meaning to, because it felt completely unfair.

I don't think that it's ever necessary to resort to physical punishment to raise a kid right but I also think that people who just scream that it's always abuse no matter what are greatly over-exaggerating things. I guess the real problem is that you won't know how it affects your kid until it's too late; but the same thing can be said about any number of psychological fuck-ups a parent can have in regards to raising a kid. For example while I got beat, what really got me was my grandmother telling me she will die of an asthma attack if I was ever embarrassing her in public, which means that I now have a horrific fear of being noticed in a social situation. My grandmother probably got her own social anxiety from somewhere in her childhood and instilled it into me. But that has had a MUCH more lasting consequence on me than any amount of physical punishment I got.

Things I have done as a steel 6s admin:

- Spoke to a team leader who had no idea that there was a way to play TF2 outside of league-scheduled matches. He literally had no idea that there was a way to arrange to practice against another team
- Explained to someone that 3:30-7:30 pm EST was not an appropriate time to expect your opponents to reschedule matches to, at which point I was told "well our player has bedtime at 8:30 EST so we really can't play later than that"
- Explained the concept of mentoring, what a demo is, how to record and retrieve one, and how one might review it to improve
- Moderated a bunch of matches that went back and forth in regards to whether they actually could or would play the match or not which ended in multiple reschedules or attempts at playing it
- Provided servers that I pay for out of my own pocket to some teams that were having troubles getting a server or starting their match because of connection issues.

Look, I don't really give a shit about what league ends up "on top". UGC, TFCL, NATF2L, I will happily admin for whatever league ends up bringing in fresh blood into the scene because I don't have any particularly strong ties to any organization, and I just want to see the community and the scene continue. I ran a last-minute team drive for ESEA prior to the beginning of last season while also being a UGC admin. I want new players to get into whatever league they will have more fun in and for those particular players it happened to be ESEA and so I tried my best to help them network so they could have teams to play on. But if you think a bunch of 14-year-olds with bed-times at 8:30 EST who don't have the slightest idea about how running a team works are just gonna flood ESEA the second we kill a "redundant" free community league, you're in for a bad surprise. Yes some people might jump in immediately into a 3-month, 5 night a week commitment and thrive in it, but the vast majority of people new to competitive can't or won't. Players who are too immature, young, inexperienced, busy or broke rely on the free community leagues where they can reliably spend a little bit of time developing their interest while maturing and finding ways in which they can accommodate the increased demands of their new hobby.

I have tried since I took over, to my best ability, to instill the idea that playing matches and learning from them is considerably more desireable than forfeits and rule-lawyering, and that accomodating your opponents, when possible, is the right thing to do. So far my steel matches get played any time between Tuesday to Saturday on the regular, the teams trying their best to work out a solution. A couple of teams have actually come to me this season to ask if I could reverse their forfeit win so they could reschedule their match to play it out instead. Hopefully this kind of a flexible environment will allow them to become more interested in competitive TF2, take it more seriously, and move to more competitive and demanding environments (whatever those may be) when they build up a bit more skill and confidence. Blaming it for the "demise" of competitive TF2 is absolutely unfair.

Fragger and a reliable player to have on your team (both as someone who shows up to scrims and someone who shows up in-game).

If anyone has an IM team but needs an IM roster, hit me up. My team got moved up post-mortem and Jojo no longer needs it.

I'll stay on the roster for however long is necessary, if it is at all, then back to open I go.

Bump for Grumpy, give him a tryout!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3XkuYFKbJw

Lovely smart gamer, really good maincaller who gets how this game is played.

Grumpy and I go back to a multitude of teams to the very first one I ever lead, and we've all played a ton of different classes. He introduced me to comp TF2 and team-based video games as a whole. He's a very smart gamer who has a lot of experience in competitive video games outside of TF2, and grasps fundamentals of team-play and strategy very quickly, willing to improvise almost immediately based on his understanding.

Unfortunately, and I am partially to blame for it (for dragging him on my teams), he's been experiencing pretty serious burn-out in the game for the past two seasons so his skills have definitely gotten somewhat rusty. Even still I think he can very comfortably play at a mid-open level; assuming he shakes off the rust and brushes up on his understanding of 6s gameplay, I'm sure he can make a fine addition to teams looking to make playoffs.

Also he's a really funny angry medic main. Pick him up if you want to see your medic majestically prance around an enemy soldier bomb while singing "He ain't getting shit!"

I'm sorry, I think I came off way more aggro at you than I needed to. It's honestly my complete incredulity at the assertion that there can't be any variation at all.

At least from my personal limited interaction with new-to-competitive players, what they want is a serious setting where they can choose the people they play with and then work hard knowing that they're all working towards the same goal, as opposed to pubs where they're usually one of the a small handful of people who are aware of the objective and their team's goals. There is no "it's less random" focus of attraction to anyone who is only starting out because they have no concept of what "not random" TF2 looks like (and won't for a while longer).

... Why does it have to be an "or" situation? Why can we not have multiple options for people to use their brains and choose from, depending on what they're comfortable with, and the situation at hand?

I am not for allowing as many weapons as possible just for the sake of having a tiny ban list, but I also think that the calls for banning literally everything is absolutely absurd and are based off of completely random personal preference rather than any kind of logical reason. Our whitelist should only ban things that take away a certain skill-set from a team or player because of its function, or ones that facilitate stalemates through their stats.

I played on literally the worst (surviving) open team in S23 (4/6 of our players had zero competitive experience and not a lot of in-game experience either), so I saw my fair share of all kinds of extremely creative unlock use. Banning them to coddle new players is dumb. They need to learn how to adapt and think outside of the box and how to make intelligent decisions for themselves. On my team we always made sure to control tilt when it came to unorthodox strategies and tried to coordinate together to take advantage of whatever that unlock's weakness was, and treated all of it as good practice for thinking and adapting. If someone can't deal with unlock use they can't deal with having to adapt on the spot and thus shouldn't be trying to play competitively. The whole thing is literally about whether you can make intelligent decisions for yourself based on the situation at hand, and not just copy b4nny's or some other streamer's decisions (which are most of the time bad decisions for you anyways because you don't have their full awareness, DM, or for that matter, opponents who think on the same level).

Even with a strict whitelist the competitive the majority of people play is nothing like the most publicized one (invite/prem). Invite mids are nothing like open- mids. Team pushes, sacc plays, all of that shit, isn't on the same level. So anyone who walks into this expecting to just be able to play the same game will be really disappointed regardless.

At higher levels lots of those unlocks have a one-life creative strat type of deal that's entertaining to play and fun for spectators to watch. Unlocks shouldn't be banned unless they breaks the game, lowers the skill-ceiling, or encourages stalemates (which may be relative for unlocks for certain defensive classes). But most of the bad unlocks don't do any of those things.