Definitely Pokemon. I play it like every year.

Looking again. Hit me up.

Newbie mixes are going to happen on Friday and Saturday this week. Please come by and let me know if you wanna try anything special. I'm down to experiment but I need people to come by and actually do the things they advocate.

Use a Steam fill up group maybe?

That is a website Technosex made for us in order to alleviate the manual effort that goes into throwing the mixes. I suggest for anyone who hasn't shown up for a newbie mix to come to the mumble sometime and check out how it works.

We mostly function through this steam group:

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/na6v6newbiemix

Not through the website (or any website). Once I get back in touch with technosex we can work on making the website a HUB rather than the Steam group. Now that we talk about it though, I might talk to Enigma and see if there could be any tf.tv support for this. Maybe a tab or a stickied post in mentoring or something could help new players find the proper resources.

@Alleal - These resource exist. I watched hours of MGE videos before playing 6v6 and it helped a lot. Any player can watch a stream, cast, or the old MGE videos and start learning about sixes. They can go to SPUF, r/tf2, tf.tv, ugc forums among other places and start asking questions. We need to find a balance between spoon feeding new players resources (which takes too much effort as I've been trying to do this for months and I can barely make a dent) and having the new players be resourceful to some degree. I think both are good since the best competitive players are people who are resourceful, outspoken, and dedicated. Those are the people who hunt out the resources instead of expecting the resources to come to them.

I'll change the categories for the next set of mixes and we'll see how they go. Right now the biggest problem is a lack of statistics. I haven't been keeping track of the current # of rolls so I won't know if any measures are helping or hurting overall.

We've tried this and are leaning against it because from what we've heard back from players and coaches is that they prefer the coaches to play in the game and have a more physical presence in the game. I think it also helps when the coach can literally change the way the game is played rather than 100% relying on the newbies listening to him. This is important because new players are playing in a format that is not only unfamiliar to them, but also fairly complicated in ways that they do not yet comprehend. By playing in the PUGs, coaches can illustrate what they are trying to tell you and they can make sure at least some parts of the game go correctly. When a coach sits in spec, it's hard to expect the newbies to react to his/her advice because they are so new to the format that they don't know how to listen to the advice (if that makes any sense). Like, if you are coaching an Open team that has played a season together, and you tell how in real time how to use ubers better or get better positioning, they'll be able to use their experience to figure out what you want them to do, see why you are doing it, and then utilize it in game while combining with your personal style. A new player isn't necessarily capable of doing this. Lots of people are caught in the head lights, and for good reason; playing 6s makes you think about lots of things that most people don't know exist until they play competitive TF2. It's a harsh transition and that's why we run newbie mixes.

Continued:

On one hand you have new new players. Scouts that almost never hit shots above 50 damage, don't understand simple DM things like using jumps and ammo management. Soldiers who can't rocket jump, can't hit shotties, etc. Medics who literally just have no FPS skills (who choose medic since they can't seem to be confident on any other class). Demomen who can't rollout or use anything other than pipes (this is far more rare).

On the other hand you get people in there with similar experience and time played to me. People with over 1000 hours in the game who have over 1800 ELO in MGE servers and hundreds of hours in jump maps.

Both groups have almost zero 6s experience so they both go to newbie mix to learn how to play 6s and then they realize that maybe the playing field isn't as level as they thought. In the meantime, the coaches have to somehow figure out how to adjust a team that loses seemingly because of really simple things (and in my experience, just a difference in the mechanics of the players) while trying to keep up their own production without carrying.

Honestly, I'm a little overwhelmed with the idea of trying to realistically balance these pugs since we get literally hundreds of players in the course of a night, let alone the fact that the people who show up each week differ. If anyone wants more fair pugs, maybe they could help us in mumble? I'm very open to the idea of trying new systems and experimenting with the structure of these, but I honestly want people to sponsor and host their own mixes (I'll provide mumble, servers, players and coaches) rather than me spending 30 hours a week trying to find the absolute find the best way to host these when, honestly, my opinion on the matter is that the most important thing for newbie mixes isn't the quality of games played, but the fact that these players are getting a chance to play as much 6v6 as possible within as short a time frame as possible. Newbie Mixes are about giving people who don't otherwise have a place to play 6v6 a place to play 6v6.

@Fzero, the plan has always been to host them on other nights but I scrim most nights and I like to take 1-2 days a week off TF2 since it not only wears down on me, but also my roommate who is usually in the room while I'm scrimming or trying to host newbie mixes. I can give permissions and resources to anyone who is qualified to run the mixes on a different night and I plan to do so myself sometime, but it just hasn't happened yet.

We actually almost only play on granary and badlands to avoid the situations where we have to teach maps in addition to 6v6. This is something m0nster told me to do with the mixes. Since we only play the same two maps, the coaches and newbies learn to play 6v6 and can focus on strats and theories that apply to every map.

Honestly, my best advice for you would to be to just start playing in newbie mixes. Pick a class you like (I'm sensing soldier?) and start playing. You can post to the mentoring section here if you have questions or want to find someone to help introduce you to the game. Maybe if you are already in contact with frkn?

Second of all, for any new players reading this post, none of you should EVER be afraid to ask questions about the game on tf.tv. This is a place where the thing that brings us all together is our passion for TF2 (and stultus' stories) however corny that might sound. The fastest way you are going to learn is to start being vocal. Ask questions on tf.tv, show up to newbie mixes and ask questions! The whole point of getting coaches in there isn't to have them talk at you, it's to have them be available to answer your questions. There is no such thing as a stupid question in TF2, and you should never hesitate to ask them.

Also, while we're here, the idea for a rollout (on most maps) is that one soldier stays with the med to build uber (usually get to ~30-40% during rollout IIRC) and the other soldier uses the equalizer to take pressure off the med to balance heals and to take advantage of crit heals right before reaching the midfight. If you want to play soldier in the newbie mixes, I'd suggest learning the rollout on granary and maybe badlands (that's quite a bit harder though IMO for absolute newbies) and then when you play, ask if you can be the equalizing soldier.

Actually...we already do this. Half the mixes I organize (maybe slightly under half) are prioritized by "skill" rather than #of mixes played primarily. The problem is that most people don't know how good they are. It's very hard to create balanced pugs when the coaches don't know how good each player is. It's like saying every "mid Open" player is the same skill. This is not true. The problem is that in newbie mixes you have an extremely wide variety of skills (larger than any division I've ever seen in TF2). It's the equivalent of combining Open and IM in ESEA. Seems I've hit the post length?

I played like 6-8 newbie mixes when I first started playing and then I made a PUG group. I had a lot of people help me out too it was really fun. I think the experience from running like over 100 or so of those helped qualify me to run newbie mixes.

What about the other use of the halftime to potentially end rolls earlier? If its clear that one team is dominating another, they could either end the PUG or it would just give the losing team a chance to slow down and collect themselves before getting fragged constantly for 20 minutes.

Fucking brilliant. I'm gonna try to implement these asap.

I've been trying to be a bit Laissez-faire about letting people play in these because I don't like turning away someone who wants to play 6s but can't at the moment (how many of us were ever in a similar situation?).

If the general consensus is that we want to vastly decrease the number of people playing in newbie mixes that's fine with me. Maybe we can work with UGC to do like UGC Steel mixes and stuff like that in the future to keep that going.

@lil_nathan: Thanks for the input! That is the kind of opinion I love to hear, and that's the reason I put any time into this at all :)

@481622: I will consider this idea, but without some sort of donations pot, I don't think it's feasible. I'd rather money in TF2 go towards things like playing ESEA league fees, premium, or for players to go to LANs.

@Fzero: When and how should I post it? Gunners and Mocha announce it in the events list on tf.tv and gunners makes a reddit post every time we do mixes. I don't want to make a thread each week in general discussion because I feel like then it would get ignored pretty easily. Our schedule is fairly regular (every Friday at 9EST) if that helps?

@KL: Np. Depending on how many people we have, just showing up to PUG would even help.

Hi everyone,

Wall of text ahead, tldr at the bottom.

I just wanted to start a thread trying to bring some more attention to newbie mixes. We have a lot of new players who talk about these all the time, but I feel like experienced players on TF.TV don't really think about it all that much or realize what it's importance is and how fragile the newbie mixes truly are.

The main reason I am posting this is because tonight, like most nights that we run mixes, it is very difficult to get qualified coaches to come play for us. This really doesn't entail much, all we need is for people who have over 1 season of ESEA experience to come PUG. I ALWAYS see pugs running at the same time that we run newbie mixes, and most of the people I know who are qualified to coach are pugging privately rather than playing in the newbie mixes.

I know that coaching doesn't really sound like fun, but honestly, it's not all that different than just pugging, the difference is that you are positively reinforcing the 6v6 community to people that are potentially going to enter the community. The reason why I believe in this model is that I got into 6v6 because of the old newbie mixes. I can pretty much say that without Shwan's coaching and presence in those mixes I wouldn't be in ESEA or playing 6v6.

We always talk about getting more people into the game and how TF2 can get bigger, but I'm not seeing the kind of community support that we need to keep these going.

Just tonight for example, we had over 50 new players wanting to play and 0 coaches, so I messaged about 100-150 people on my friends list who were all qualified coaches, and 4 showed up. 4 out of over 100. I can get as many newbies as you want in there, but we need support from this community (mostly IM/Invite players, but also anyone who's played a full season in Open should be fine) to get behind mixes too.

I'd love to hear any ideas that people have to get more coaches in or come up with a new system for running these, but I think what we need to do is take personal responsibility for making 6v6 bigger. I'm giving each and every one of you an easy and convenient way to make our community bigger, give us more members and sponsorship, and make our competitive game more legitimate, let's not mess this up.

The last thing I'd like to say is to put yourself into the shoes of someone who is new to our community. They saw a "comp" post on r/tf2 on reddit and they want to check out 6v6. They have never played or seen it before. Now, they look around and see two options. The first is tf2lobby and the second is the Newbie Mix. Say they show up for a newbie mix, what do they find? They join this mumble channel that is huge, has lots of spaces, and they quickly realize that even if they stick around for 20-30 minutes, their chances of playing a single game is pretty damn small. I hate the fact that this is true, but sadly it is. There is a really simple solution. We just need more people to come and say that they are willing to spend 20 minutes that they would otherwise spend pugging with their friends to come play a newbie mix and hopefully make some long lasting positive experiences for the future of competitive TF2.

tl;dr we need coaches for newbie mixes.

We are playing now.

Mumble: chi2.tragicservers.com:64738

Join that mumble and start asking questions.