Bumping as our blog announcement came in!

Hello all! TF2CC is grateful to be able to run yet another Newbie Cup. Our NINTH instalment in this event series!

with sign-ups open now until December 11th! We're a 7000+ member discord focused on providing new players with an environment to learn, play pick up games and participate in events. We also run divisonal PUGs from NC to Main+ as well as late night all-div mixes.

Players with little to no competitive experience sign up to be placed on a team of six, lead by a coach who will mentor them on the basics of how to play the format and help them learn the maps. They will have three weeks to learn, practice and grow together before facing off in a tournament scheduled for the weekend of January 11th and 12th; so tell your friends!

We have a lot of players eager to play especially with our TF2 blog announcements. As always, transitioning those who range from pubbers to light experience into playing 6's would not be possible without the aiding hands of our coaches to teach these foundlings the way. If you want to help the scene grow and test your 6's knowledge, you should join the TF2CC discord and apply for Newbie Cup Coach in the linked channel!. Coaches that do well will also be given a share of the prize pool.

Requirements for coaches:

IM+ playoffs experience is preferred but will accept even seasoned amateur players (or equivalent). Our base ranges from people who are new to the game its-self to experienced pubbers and below 3rd place Newcomer who are all very new to 6's. You will be teaching them very basic concepts, how to get scrims and occasional demo reviews.

Overview:

There are three types of coaches. General, Main and Co-coach. General coaches are for everyone to provide public lectures. Main and co-coaches are part of a 3 week long commitment starting December 14th to January 11th* . You will need to be available online around twice a week, and able to answer text questions from your team throughout.

General Coaches:

If you don't have a lot of time commitment but still want to help out and participate, we are looking for coaches to do general map reviews for everyone in our teaching corner (or other concepts such as main calling, mental, making an RGL team etc) during the cup.

If you can't participate but would like to support us, we have an affiliate link with Mann Co Store you can use as well as a donation account for items.

NOTE: Based on feedback; We no longer accept out of continent players and the hour floor for participants has been increased to 500 by default.

Regular TF2CC Invite Link
Discord Channel to Apply for Newbie Cup Coach

Based on anecdotal evidence and some supporting polls like the Angus Reid Institute, most hate him and majority believe his government has performed poorly in almost every category. However, his core audience of suburban home owning car drivers would still vote for the conservative party. I feel that we can't really find out whether there has been a practical enough of a shift until the next election. Conservatives still heavily harp on "owning the libs" and "anti-woke" gibberish rhetoric.

That being said he doesn't have the same media popularity, backing of billionaires and Christian nationalists with unfettered wallets; though I think he could still win again.

It's been like that all week, just says invalid parameters on the steam error page. Did their API get changed?

Do you notice your game flashing black when you are loading into the main menu? Do you alt-tab while your game is loading in? Try not alt-tabbing.

From my knowledge, there's three main causes to this:
I) Your game starts at a different DirectX level and loads in a different one when the game fully loads in
II) Your game switches resolution when loading in.
III) You have conflicting graphics settings in your config versus VPK modules in your custom folder.

I) If you haven't refreshed in a while, I would get a new graphics config. Firstly, in any of these steps; make sure to check your autoexec.cfg (if you have one) or config.cfg. If you use Mastercomfig, double check that you followed the instructions for using an autoexec properly because it's different. You can try putting the DirectX level in your launch options:

-dxlevel 90 (or 80 / 81 if you use them instead).

You might need to put it in your config.cfg as well.

II) You can try the same above with resolution. I've had this issue when I used to frequently switch them back and forth. Just changing your resolution or aspect ratio can break the overlay. This problem is even more pronounced for Discord. Ideally, you use your native resolution and aspect ratio of your monitor. The command for your launch options is:

-w # -h #

Ex. -w 1920 -h 1080

III) Check that your config.cfg and autoexec.cfg don't have extra commands that effect your graphics settings that you've put in.

If none of these work you should also run Mumble and Steam in administrator mode to see if it persists. You can also put -safe in your launch options to launch the game in safe mode and see if it yet again, still happens.

Not really, the only reason those forums were kept alive was Mothership changing the feeding tube. Now that he's gone there's no reason for them to keep it up. Plus it's expensive af for what it is and I highly doubt anyone wants to moderate them.

https://imgur.com/a/ukN0UWC

Pretty much every format up to 16v16 has been tried before including everything in-between. If you want a more recent example, look at Faceit clan wars and what a dumpster fire that was. You know who else disliked Faceit?

Why does a competitive format need to be exactly the same as the base game anyway? TF2 having so many drastically different ways to play, community modes etc is one of the dope parts of the game. Is their utopia really just Valorant where every mode is the same (I sure don't). I honestly really enjoy that I can play 6's scrims and then goof off in pubs or go play jailhouse. I think many players do.

I think it's also important to note that the word fun and whether it's enjoyable or not is noticeably absent in that type of argument. I don't think we need to make up formats just to have pub players learn that those formats are bad. I actually think most pub players are more open minded than we think. The Newbie Cup has received thousands of applications over the years and the vast majority of players are understanding, especially when you sit down and explain.

I think our energy would be far better reserved for making the scene a better place than a fundamentally and emprically unfun gamemode.

There it is, it's just a selfish desire to run more sniper. This stance does not come from a place of education, practice or experience. Running an off-class is a team choice, not a purely individual one. I've been told many times by off-class lovers that they were thankful for the experience on generalist classes because even if you are not interested, it's very useful to understand class dynamics and how your opponents will think.

It's also very tough for a specialist one trick because when you start getting countered you don't really have much to fall back on. Not to mention, specialists have a MUCH easier time against bad players so it's very easy to get complacent and stagnate your own growth because cheesy strats can be effective. Those PUG spaces are meant to show you what's realistic and fundamental. They are definitely not setting them up for failure. Allowing anybody to off-class whenever they want, would.

Did your high school history class fail to prep you properly because they mostly covered recent history and local politics?

Why is this a problem for you anyway, are you struggling to climb out of Newbie PUGs on an alt? Newbie Mixes is meant for absolute beginners and TF2CC has 4 PUG categories. Newbies, Amateur, IM/Main and Main+ which have different rule sets. So if you want to run the funny just get good.

I don't, he's been told this a million times directly. There are ZERO items that were ruined to try to placate competitive players yet they will still cite balance changes that were done for the casual audience as being problematic. He blocks people who give him feedback. Even on streams when he does item votes, if his fans pick something different than him his reaction is "wow uh, okay". He surrounds himself with dickriders like Richter.

He doesn't want to try Newbie Mixes and definitely doesn't want a debate. Having a scape goat is pretty convenient. Even if you are not trying to make a social stand just as a general insult or takeaway for issues.

And if we are being honest with ourselves, while MyM was an utter disaster; the base idea lead to the game being in a much better and ergonomic state. Valve's balancing only got better with time, matchmaking is much more convenient now. Quickplay back in the day was pretty slow and defaulted to Valve servers, anyways. The only stinker that still remains is the Ranked Gamemode (I'm not even going to refer to it as "competitive" because it's not). This is a difficult pill to swallow but without MyM Valve may have gotten a lot more complacent than now but much earlier instead of post blue moon.

This thread is an unnecessarily complex thought experiment for people to realize that there is an absence of competitive youtubers that talk about the scene and talk TO other content creators. That requires them to be semi-active in those circles. You have to appeal to normies, they are the target crowd and you need to talk to them in their language.

This is really dope and I hope it's successful. It's definitely needed for the scene.

We're still looking for more coaches! We have enough hungry players for 24+ teams! If you are interested or know anyone that is eligible tell them to apply ASAP!

This is a great opportunity to test yourself and get an ego boost from teaching little nooblets, on-top of that coaches who do well will get a portion of the prize (even if their team doesn't win) and extra(s) if they get nominated by their team!

Doom's facemask is pretty blatantly copied from Roman Maximus gladiator helmets so there's nothing being infringed on. The name is a tongue and cheek reference at worst. Also Valve's legal team looks over workshop submissions and will ask you to change a part of your item if it is too similar to its source material. This has happened a few times most notably with the Star Board Crusader set for the heavy, referencing JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which was changed at Valve's request.

https://imgur.com/a/thtwgSw

This surprised me. NC-AM PUGs run pretty frequently, at more diverse times than IM and up. They also have Friday Newbie Mixes and Newbie Cups. Aren't you a main player? The last time I saw you in TF2CC was nearly a year ago.

A lot of people don't even know that TF2CC has PUG categories up to above main. So I assumed you were referring to higher divisional problems. It's odd to see you mention lower divisions.

Doesn't this apply to playing a PUG anywhere? What alleviates your anxieties? Especially when many servers including the ones you mentioned have rules against excessive toxicity?

It's a new feature that is going to be polled. If people hypothetically didn't want it, it wouldn't make sense to unnecessarily make the "workflow" of runners more complicated. Personally though I enjoy adding up even with friends and talking to new people or having conversations with friends where other people can join in. It feels a little dissonant when you tell high level players to pick new players they don't know when you don't even want to add up to orally interact with people you aren't familiar with. Even then a big chunk of people deafen before PUGs start so it's not that big of an issue in the first place.