i have a total of 5 hours in queue since the last time the system gave me a game. help i just want a rank

training.tf still exists as well, it's just at a different address: http://training.tf2stuff.com/

why did they stop letting us vote for maps

It makes sense. Almost everyone who's good enough get a high rank is going to go right back to playing Faceit or whatever else as soon as they complete their placements. The only reason to play more would be to stave off rank degradation over time, but that's not gonna be enough for most people. So if you're a high ranking player queuing up, you're most likely gonna get matched off against a whole bunch of low ranks, who the system will deem weak enough that you shouldn't gain anything. Until Valve actually puts together a decent competitive system that good players will want to be a part of, that's going to stay the same.

Not all that related to actual builds, but I'm curious, how do keep up on all this stuff Setsul? I really enjoy just reading through this thread every once in a while, but I'd like to know whether you just have a couple of newsletters you read or if you religiously browse manufacturer's websites, or what. It just seems like a ton of info to keep up to date on.

I feel part of the problem is that there's no way to know if there's anything to actually watch on the stream. I'll tune in at like 7:05, nothing, go do something else for 15 mins, come back, still nothing and no one would be talking, come back an hour later, there's 2 minutes left on a 4-1 game, so on, so forth. I have no actual data, but it certainly feels like there's more downtime than actual game happening. I'm the kinda dude who will just leave the stream open whether I'm watching it or not, but it's really easy to see how frustrating that's got to be for most people.

I've suggested playing frag videos and stuff before, and that always kept my attention, but I just came up with another dumbass idea: what about casting games that have already happened that day? Like, if you cover froyo vs. svift, but blanc vs velocity is happening at the same time, maybe get the stv demo and cast it during the downtime?

There's two different versions of this. In one scenario, we remove the stock pistol and replace it with a perfectly accurate one. Here, we also have to consider how, or if, to rebalance other pistols like the winger, depending on if we want to make them perfectly accurate as well. In this case the balancing is pretty much just subjective to how powerful you want scout to be, though I'm assuming no one wants scout to be even stronger than he is now. The point of this change would be to remove an RNG element in the game, probably while also keeping scout at around the same strength.

In the other scenario, we are adding a new scout secondary. The concern there is making it a reasonable sidegrade to an inaccurate pistol. I don't want to talk specific changes, personally, but I'd imagine there would be a general consensus on wanting the maximum damage the pistol could deliver when hitting every shot to be much lower, while also not significantly nerfing the damage that, say, a mid open player might deliver, hitting around half his shots at best.

we need a very tiny turbotabs running away from something

what if faceit tracked how much each class was played during each game like logs does and displayed when was the last time each person played med

That makes sense in the context of Pugchamp, but doesn't really work when everyone in the advanced division should know what a med needs to be doing.

dang, i didnt even know thats what that channel was for. could that information be made more visible? say, somewhere a bit bigger on the tf2pl website's main page or something?

That right there sounds like it's a major part of the problem, though. Even if Faceit revamped so that games didn't start without people specifically adding up to play med, even if all the advanced league players went back to Pugchamp, games still wouldn't start because nobody would play med. Almost every time I added up to Pugchamp I would see 15 people added up with no one willing to play med. Pugchamp's liveliness has always relied on lower level players adding up to med because they'd never get picked for pugs otherwise.

On the one hand, that was actually a bit of positive, since lower level players could get a taste of high level play every once in a while. On the other, it was fucking hot garbage, because half of my Pugchamp games were played on med just because that was the only way to get a game going, when it should have been closer to a sixth. It blows my mind that people are so obsessed with "oh im gunna be the best fragger evr!!" that they'd rather sit and do nothing than just play med for a game.

No way the player base is this low, is there? Like, for fucks sake, you can queue even while playing regular pubs now. Surely there's tons of people chilling in queue.

Froyo excuses. Go Ascent!

stv dead for both games. jesus christ esea.