Erynn's been away for a few days, she'll be back later this week to help get it going!

Running with Sezco ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

One of my favorite people! Friendly, dedicated gamer who's currently on the MGE grind.

Time to rebrand ourselves:

Running without Scizor
Running with Scissors
Feeding with Rekuso
Eating Poutine with Deathy

Pretty sure scizor and highfive are both on the team sen left for.

http://cdn.steamcommunity.com/economy/emoticon/smug

Lovely person, great player!

Add each other on steam and fight it out. Nobody cares to hear you derail the thread to defend yourself.

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198015821282
STEAM_0:0:27777777
[U:1:55555554]

Blatant aimbot on spy and sniper. He got shittalked by his teammates when his hacks weren't good enough to carry them, which was pretty damn hilarious.

Two other stacks queued into all four of you. How funny that it would match you up together multiple times.

You haven't played any late-late night pugs!

Jokes aside, there have been a ton of complaints about the flaws in the ELO system. After the beta testing last week, we discussed the general problems. The result was this giant wall of text that I put in the admin channel, but I’ll cross-post it here to show you guys what Erynn and TSC are trying to fix.

1. ELO can represent a player in a matchmaking setting, but in pugs, players are cherry-picked by captains. Players are not being matched up against the entire pool of puggers - they are selectively adding up to pugs of different skill levels, and being picked by captains of different skill levels. Captains already split up the skill level of players.
   
   
2. Pugs of differing skill levels happen at certain times of the day. Open pugs happen in the afternoon, invite pugs happen at night, and late-late-night pugs are made up of the same group of 13-15 night-owls. Because of this pattern, players who play exclusively late-night pugs will end up with a lower rating (playing against the best players), and players who play in afternoon pugs will have an inflated rating. Players also “farm” their ELO in afternoon pugs to artificially boost their rating.
   
   
3. The TF2 community is small enough that most players know each other – this is especially true on a pug website with a small pool of similarly skilled players. Good captains have knowledge of the players they want to pick. They know the skill division of each player, and the class they main. They know who the trolls are and the players who won’t play their mains seriously. Thus, captains generally disregard ELO in their picking process. (In fact, captains sometimes choose to pick players with a lower rating on classes like medic, so their team will gain more ELO if they win or tie).
   
   
4. Players’ obsession with their ELO makes pugs toxic. In close games, players are more likely to remain on offclasses during a last hold, instead of switching off to push out. They would rather let a five minute map timer run down than try to play the game, to ensure ELO gain. Stalemates become more prevalent as people slow the game down for the W.
   
   
5. Players are less likely to add up or captain. In scenarios where a dozen bad players are waiting to play, skilled players refuse to add up so they won’t lose ELO due to getting picked early.
   
   
6. Captains are discouraged from picking balanced teams. In the old pug systems, some captains picked players to ensure a balanced, fun game. With the current ELO system, captains must pick to win.
   
   
7. Players get locked into their rank. Losing the first few games pushes ELO down incredibly quickly and the deviation keeps players at a low rank. (Erynn pointed out that this will be easily fixed by resetting deviation every now and then.

Obviously, there are good things about the ELO system. Players who might usually troll are forced to try harder. Captain ELO is also a wonderful idea. If your captain is bad, your team is automatically at a disadvantage – your captain is your first pick. Giving good captains priority in queue makes the draft a more painless experience.

We were thinking about alternatives like a round-win ratio, or class-specific stats pulled from logs.tf, or hidden ELO for subbing. Giving invite players more ELO is a temporary fix until something better is implemented.

We asked each other multiple times whether we had the correct name, your profile didn't look fishy at all. Fixed!

Double vaccinator medics and 3+ soldiers with mantreads is hilariously effective. Mantreads so the headshots won't blow you into the stratosphere.

We queued into a few blatant hackers in the stress test this weekend. Most of the time their teammates were nice enough to leave so we wouldn't lose ELO (we tracked these people down and gave them beta passes!). But hackers are a pain to deal with if you're not playing with a stack, so here are their SteamIDs:

How?
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198239919420
STEAM_0:0:139826846
U:1:279653692

Flower and Bambi
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198144329654
STEAM_0:0:92031963
U:1:184063926

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198181282481
STEAM_0:1:110508376
U:1:221016753

Toxin and ???
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198276870819
STEAM_0:1:158302545
U:1:316605091

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198091919938
STEAM_0:0:65827105
[U:1:131654210]

Add to the list if you run into any more. Happy matchmaking!

Carries us in MM