Season Naming Unification
A brief note about season naming schemes: the season numbers have been unified, so the current season will be referred to as S3 for both NA and EU despite it only being the second month of EU. If any future regions are added they will also share season numbers with existing regions.

New Requests Commands
In addition to the previously covered captain priority requests, all requests for region bypass and division moveups will also now be handled through the TF2PL Helper Bot in our Discord servers. Use the commands !request, !region, !moveup, or !captain in a PM to the Helper Bot and follow the dialogue prompts to submit your requests. Invalid or unapproved requests may be immediately denied through the bot, while valid requests will either be automatically fulfilled or be forwarded to our admin team in a more streamlined way. This should help to improve turnaround time on requests being handled. Please let us know of any issues with these commands, as they are new and being tested.

Season 2 Prizes
The winners of TF2PL S2 prizes have been decided! Winners will be contacted through Discord PMs to claim their prizes.

Raffle winners
Item raffles are offered to help encourage consistent play on the platform. Raffle entries are automatically earned for every 10 matches played per season.

NA Invite: habib_6ixGod (23 matches played) - Kill-a-Watt FR-0
NA Advanced: chadmcgowen (27 matches played) - Nuts n Bolts Conquistador
NA Amateur: Walrex (55 matches played) - Massed Flies Head Hedge
NA Beginner: -stephanie (74 matches played) - Miami Night Cadaver’s Cranium
EU Invite: alba (21 matches played) - Orbiting Fire Crocleather Slouch
EU Advanced: Amik (35 matches played) - Stormy Storm Fat Man’s Field Cap
EU Amateur: DigyB (64 matches played) - Peace Sign Elf Esteem
EU Beginner: Axel_DOC (73 matches played) - Steaming Sober Stuntman

Medic Prizes
Cash prizes are offered to the top medics to help incentivize playing medic regularly. The top 4 medics in each division are determined based on number of total Ubercharges popped per season.

NA Invite - $25
meyy (101 ubers), NurseyTF2 (83 ubers), Sky_e (60 ubers), zilly_ (52 ubers)

NA Advanced - $20
jack200660 (774 ubers), Uplift (587 ubers), -luxor (414 ubers), crackbabydum (380 ubers)

NA Amateur - $15
prlyz (553 ubers), Corunson (551 ubers), jaqua_ (457 ubers), -Unity (446 ubers)

NA Beginner - $10
p_flare (1177 ubers), Yari_Qwerty (766 ubers), yellowcape (636 ubers), 14th_Eagle (621 ubers)

EU Invite - $25
degu_stator (168 ubers), shampain2 (115 ubers), Raptor00X (103 ubers), c0ndawg (91 ubers)

EU Advanced - $20
Maciej850 (488 ubers), Spulu (461 ubers), spadesold (378 ubers), Doughy123 (315 ubers)

EU Amateur - $15
_Gen (876 ubers), asianb0yh (531 ubers), ohy0u (508 ubers), b_fisch (409 ubers)

EU Beginner - $10
Qohen (1341 ubers), Jo-sh (873 ubers), 556pm (837 ubers), Axel_DOC (573 ubers)

Congratulations to the winners! Remember, S3 has already begun and tracking progress for the next winners, so you can get playing now to improve your chances to win next time! Good luck :)

Looks interesting. Hopefully it leads to less monotonous daily practices and more well rounded teams, but depending on how people use it, it could easily backfire and lead to only process/gully/snake all season. Let's add an additional test map at least.

Upper Division Steam Groups
We’ve made a couple steam groups to help coordinate games in the Advanced and Invite divisions. Anyone is free to join these groups, but for the time being they will be used exclusively for announcements pertaining to filling games in the upper divisions. For those that were in the previous FACEIT Pro Pugs steam group, unfortunately I had to made this new group because it was the only way to update the name of the group, sorry for the inconvenience.

TF2PL NA: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/TF2PLNA
TF2PL EU: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/TF2PLEU

We would like to give trusted, active users the ability to make announcements in these groups so that we can fill out games more rapidly throughout the day, so please get in touch with me if that’s something you’d be able/interested to help with.

Poll Reminder
Also, reminder to respond to our captain notifications poll that will help us gauge support for new feature requests from FACEIT: https://goo.gl/forms/dQRhYYxhwKqysubF3

Looking forward to testing new whitelists, thanks for the opportunities.

Captain Notifications Poll
Today, we’d like to ask for you to take the time to respond to the following poll regarding captain sound notifications: https://goo.gl/forms/dQRhYYxhwKqysubF3
Hopefully with enough feedback on these features we can help to urge FACEIT to improve things to benefit us all.

Advanced Division Region Bypass Feedback
We’ve heard that some people are interested in playing in another region during different times of the day. To help with this, we are looking into relaxing region bypass restrictions for upper divisions (Advanced and Invite), where being qualified for the division in one region would also qualify you for the division in the other region. Keep in mind that FACEIT does have a 48 hour cooldown on region changes, so you’d be locked into each region for a short time whenever you want to swap. We would like to ask advanced players from both regions their input on this subject, would you like advanced players from other regions to be able to queue with you? If not, we would continue to only offer it on a case by case basis.

Beginner Division Level 3 Feedback
I’d also like to address the above feedback about the Beginner division, specifically levels and how they affect matches. Firstly, new players on FACEIT will always start at level 3, an inherent property of the system. This allows experienced players to be within a few wins of leveling out of Beginner, but also presents an opportunity for fresh Elo to be introduced into the pool, which can be taken advantage of by winning for an Elo boost. That said, we can understand the concerns this might cause for automatic Elo-based matchmaking where starting at level 3 may cause stacks of new players on one team. We’re looking for ways to mitigate this, such as extending the captain system to Beginner. Currently, with such a big player pool, and with concerns about the pressures of picking responsibilities for newer players, a captaining system does not seem appropriate there since it could cause even worse disparity. However, once FACEIT adds their improved captain UI, which will show more in depth player stats and match history, we are interested in experimenting with it, which hopefully will give willing captains the opportunity to have more balanced games.

https://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/7/78/150Mewtwo.png

This is a great, but unfortunate, example of how the whole boycott movement is not as simple or acceptable as people have made it seem. The up and coming players that have been on the grind to improve and level up are now being put in a very unfortunate position where they've leveled into a division that others have decided not to play in for personal reasons. It's not as simple as "we play here, they play there." Every division depends on each other, and they must coexist. By having all divisions populated, it puts all skill levels into context, it gives people goals to strive for, and it allows for new fresh talents to work their way up the divisions. Because of the extreme importance of all divisions, this is something that we want to address and we are looking to contact EU Advanced players who share our desire to improve and grow the competitive TF2 scene about how we can repair this situation for the betterment of the whole community.

I don’t minimize or discard the valid feedback that has been generated so far, and I definitely agree this is not the root of the issue, but it’s something I have to remain cautious of. I’m glad you’re able to set aside whatever personal grudges you may have formed in order to participate in TF2PL, but sadly not everyone is able to do the same. During rounds of collecting direct feedback, myself and other admins have found that some users expressly stated they would sabotage and boycott efforts for no reason other than because of my involvement. I’m used to dealing with these things personally, and you wouldn’t see me complain about if it ended there, but now that it affects the community effort and the people that are working with us, I feel it's worth mentioning that these things are happening alongside the other legitimate issues (which we will continue to work on - check the official thread for details on that stuff).

As for my mention of FACEIT’s disappointment, it was in response to these sorts of hostile efforts, which includes some posts on this forum as well as blatant efforts to disrupt the games that were happening: killing games in mass to annoy users, spamming advertisements, and pressuring people to leave the platform. FACEIT staff became aware of this while overseeing the platform simply by reading the hub chats and seeing the repeated killed games. Of course no one would be disappointed that discussion and feedback is being generated, but in these sorts of occurrences were far from constructive in nature. Take a moment and read these chatlog excerpts to get an idea of how this sort of behavior affects the perception of our community:
https://i.gyazo.com/897c02930f105a7e1b04eb414b3b3df4.png https://i.gyazo.com/a3a51c9ff16831d008f75f6549f739b6.png https://i.gyazo.com/218fa69495202c955a73e0849afd77b9.png

For those of you that like numbers, some quick stats for your consideration:
The number of properly registered unique users on TF2PL is 5296. We’ve had a combined average (NA+EU) of 136 games per day on the last week (April 17th to 23th). In total we’ve served 7527 completed matches.

I’m glad that discussions have been able to get back on track, and I hope we can keep it up.

We’re aware that we have been lacking in communication and that we’ve been slow to reply to feedback, however we assure you that we’ve been closely monitoring all feedback from the community on TFTV, on streams, and in our Discord, so we know about most of the common complaints and have been discussing them internally with our staff about how to approach them.

We want to explain exactly what is happening with our platform and its limitations but also cover some positive changes that are coming, but perhaps we’ve held some of that information back for too long. Seeing how important it is to everyone here, I will make sure we start addressing the feedback promptly and try to ensure that we are being more transparent with TF2PL related things.

I also want to make clear this doesn’t have to be an issue of picking sides. People can coexist and play what they want, but also simultaneously help these projects that benefit the scene. I am aware that some players want to see TF2PL fail and will actively attempt to sabotage it because I’m spearheading it, but I would hope that would be the minority. Though I may have had conflicts with individuals before, I’ve been sure to put all of that aside when it comes to the development and management of TF2PL, and I would hope everyone else could do the same.

Such counterproductive behavior will only hurt our scene. FACEIT may be a big company, but they do care for their organizers and their games, and they do pay attention to these things. FACEIT Mikey, founder of FPL, who has been overjoyed at the prospect of fostering growth in the competitive TF2 scene, recently expressed to me his utter disappointment with what has been going on around here lately. For those of you that have given up all hope in this scene, all I’d ask is that you don’t try to harm the efforts of those that still care.

At its core, TF2PL is still a passion-driven community effort. Our team has been monitoring games, enforcing rules, coding bots, designing graphics, editing videos, offering support, etc. all towards the goal of making a better competitive TF2 scene. It has been incredibly rewarding to see that work pay off every day with new faces entering the scene, and up and coming players making a name for themselves, both things that would have been so much more difficult to pull off before. I believe these successes could be duplicated in EU as well, but it will require any established players that want to see their scene grow to work with us.

We just made a post on our main thread addressing the main topics that have been talked about, as well as some of our new adjustments, and we invite you to follow up there if you’re interested. Overall, I am glad that people care enough to have these discussions, and I hope we will all come to a harmonious understanding soon.

We’d like to take this chance to address and clarify some things with the community. We’ll be aiming to be as transparent as possible and to reply to your inquiries in a timely fashion.

From recent feedback, it’s clear that traditional class picking and substitute systems are desired, but unfortunately those are things we currently cannot promise. I know that most of us are very used to having those features available so its been taking some effort to adjust. While in an ideal world we could experiment with those features immediately, I hope you can understand that core hardcoded features of the site are not necessarily within our control, and we have to coordinate with FACEIT to make some of these things happen, which takes time. However, we are in conversations with them daily, and it is clear that they are always working on improving their platform and solving issues for the communities that have embraced them. This is a learning process for them just as much as it is for us. Given our current limitations around class picking and substitutes, the most valuable feedback for us at the moment would respect those restraints and offer feedback as to how we can improve the system around them.

We understand the discomfort of adjusting to new things (something Valve MM is facing as well), but we also hope people can see how beneficial TF2PL is for the scene in the long run. TF2PL offers an inclusive competitive TF2 system that can appeal to new players like never before. In a short timespan, we’ve had over 5k unique players, even reaching 8 concurrent games just yesterday in NA, with new players registering daily. This month’s sponsors have invested an unheard of $1,500+ worth of prizes on top of FACEIT giving us 600,000 FP which they value at ~$1,800, just for a pugging platform. Not only that, but being a part of a family with such a strong company as FACEIT has been invaluable for us, something that was especially proven true recently when it came to facing malicious external attacks, and we can now proudly say we currently have the most secure and stable servers of any competitive platform around. Regardless of my personal involvement with the project, as someone who wants to see competitive TF2 succeed, these kinds of benefits are exactly the kinds of things I would want to see from any competitive TF2 platform. We are trying to push competitive TF2 beyond the stagnant levels people have accepted for the past several years, and we hope that’s something everyone would like to be a part of as well.

For those paying close attention, it’s clear that we are at an important moment in competitive TF2’s history. 10 years later and against all odds, ESEA has reached record signups, Rewind has set a new record for largest international LAN prize pool, Twitch has been actively sponsoring and promoting events, Valve has been tuning the game towards a more balanced and competitive vision, and now FACEIT is closely working with our community to build a competitive platform. Now is not the time to try to kill progress over slight inconveniences. Participate at your own pace and in your own ways, even if it means just a feedback post or a game played every couple days or so, etc., but let’s take this opportunity to work together to unify the competitive scene and participate in bringing competitive TF2 into a positive future.

As for the here and now, there are a few important recent changes we have made.

Captain Priority System
Starting today, you can now set your own captain priority on the fly. You can set your desired captain priority to either High (opt-in), Medium, or Low (opt-out) by using our Helper Bot. Simply type !captain in any Discord text channel or in a PM to the Helper Bot, and then follow the prompts to set your captain priority level. In order to assure that captains are of a high quality, you will only be able to set your captain priority to High if you are in the upper 50% of your division’s Elo range.

NA Server Picking
We’ve added server location selection to upper division matches, allowing one of the captains to choose either Dallas or Chicago servers. Those who have been experiencing ping/routing issues will hopefully enjoy this feature. We seek to offer fair servers for all players.

NA Advanced Medic Moveups
We recognized a disproportionate number of willing medic players in the NA Advanced division, and have recently added 2 eager fulltime medics to the division, which has significantly reduced the number of games that start without a player volunteering to play medic.

EU Server Tuning
Originally, due to external attacks, EU servers had extra security protocols enabled to avoid interruptions, which resulted in servers sometimes feeling slightly more sluggish. In response to this feedback, FACEIT devs have adjusted some server network structure settings with the goal of improving the overall feel of the game servers while still maintaining their stability. In the following weeks we will continue to experiment with these settings and will be closely monitoring your feedback on it.

NA Advanced Releveling Offer
We’ve also been made aware of concerns from players in the Advanced division about deranking, and the added pressure and resulting hesitation to queue that may be causing. As a one time experiment, we’d like to extend an offer to recalibrate people’s levels back into the Advanced division if certain positive behavioral guidelines are met. If you’ve recently deranked or are on the borderline of deranking, we might be contacting you about this offer.

If you haven’t played recently, and had a previous negative experience due to these factors, I’d strongly urge you to play again and see if these changes create a more positive experience for you.

In the grand scheme of things, TF2PL has been around for less than 2 months, and we have already made a ton of progress towards a better competitive TF2 platform. With the help of the community, I am sure that we can solve any pertinent issue in no time. I can’t wait to see where we are in another couple months, years, etc. We'll be here. Thanks for your time.

You may be right that ESEA might not want to pursue a medal, but instead of assuming that's their stance with such certainty why don't we approach ESEA about it and discuss it? They've seemed pretty interested in growing the TF2 division this past season, so it might just be the kind of proposal they'd be interested in. I will contact an ESEA admin regarding this topic and see what can be done.

Fear.

Glad to see people are still interested in the map. Phi and I actually recently checked in regarding cardinal, compiling feedback from b3 and preparing for the next version. Don't have a timeline, perhaps phi could comment on that, but as far as I'm aware it's still coming!

^ I was on RC4, should have checked for RC4A ;)

The winners of NA TF2PL S1 prizes have been decided! Winners will be contacted through Discord PMs to claim their prizes.

Unusual Raffle winners
Item raffles are offered to help encourage consistent play on the platform. Raffle entries are automatically earned for every 10 matches played per season.

Invite: marmaduked (11 matches played) - Orbiting Fire Bonk Boy
Advanced: Procreative (101 matches played) - Miami Nights Reggaelator
Amateur: Akin5enwa (16 matches played) - Circle Heart Valley Forge
Beginner: prlyz (222 matches played) - Circling TF Logo Tyrant’s Helm

Medic Prizes
Cash prizes are offered to the top medics to help incentivize playing medic regularly. The top 4 medics in each division are determined based on number of total Ubercharges popped per season.

Invite Division - $25
NurseyTF2 (141 ubers popped)
Sky_e (101 ubers popped)
Skeez_ (66 ubers popped)
Sandblastt (54 ubers popped)

Advanced Division - $20
Brulee (821 ubers popped)
HappyBOB (587 ubers popped)
Meyy (467 ubers popped)
Crackbabydum (450 ubers popped)

Amateur Division - $15
onfroi : (755 ubers popped)
Jaqua_: (736 ubers popped)
-Unity: (610 ubers popped)
iBreadGaming: (541 ubers popped)

Beginner Division - $10
Prlyz (809 ubers popped)
Yari_Qwerty (735 ubers popped)
14th_Eagle (598 ubers popped)
P_flare (645 ubers popped)

Congratulations to the winners! If you didn’t win anything in S1, don’t forget that S2 is open and tracking progress already, so you can get playing now to improve your chances to win next time! Maybe S2 will be your lucky season ;)