pintoI found a directory of all the (relevant) pug groups https://pickup.tf/ but even the top ones seem dead. Am I just going in at a bad time (6pm PST on Friday seems fine though...)
Whats up, i'm the guy who made that directory (not the website just the list of servers). I haven't updated it since like december of 2023 so its outdated AF right now, I didn't check but I doubt the tf2pickup guy updated it either.
I'll start with US pugs. I made that puglist at a time before rgl pugs were working and so all the pug servers were discord based with the exception of Yoshi's tf2pugs and tf2center (this is also when I made my own pug server which died a while ago). Tf2center is just for EU since RGLpugs is way better.
if you have any questions you can msg me on discord, just search for cyg on the rgl server
Since RGL pugs has been working they've been more active than anything else and its not close but its open to all divisions and team's are picked by a bot. However since you've been around i'm guessing thats not a problem.
Like NoeNoeWay said TF2cc and RGLpugs are the most active. Besides those two there are probably some public or invite only servers out there that are discord based but unless you want to pug with a seperate community for some reason they're not worth looking for imo, since at best I would expect that they would run a few times a week, but these discord pug servers usually come and go since most of them won't last more than a few months.
For EU since they don't have RGLpugs they should all still be based in discord servers. For EU i'm not super familiar with their servers anymore but if you asked around it probably wouldn't take that long until you found out.
AU is the same way as EU but their community is smaller so I believe there are a small handful of discord servers where pugs are at, you'll also have to ask around probably. Bake's organized pugs and FROGpugs are two of them i know.
Honestlyyyy i'm not sure what to do about pickup.tf. I don't know if its being updated or not but i'm guessing it isn't. If so it would only give new players the wrong impression. The site developer did put work into making the site though, any thoughts?
edit: seeker said propugs is a thing so check that out ig