I'm still not entirely sure if I completely have the time for full schedule due to work, but I figured I might as well put this out there. Looking to play scout in IM/high open. Might be open to just playing backup as well.

Relevant experience:
Open S22 : Every Villain is Lemons (16-0 regular season)

http://www.steamcommunity.com/id/merepro

Valve released another update, but now ESEA client is broken

Thus far, the only actual points I've seen that argues for why an ELO system should exist in PugChamp are as follows:

1) ELO serves as an extrinsic motivator to encourage players to always play to the best of their ability.
2) ELO is used as a performance metric to gauge whether players should be promoted into the *currently unreleased* Pro-League.

For 1), why is ELO the only way to motivate players to want to win? I actually believe many players desire intrinsically to win, regardless of external factors. Many people here are naturally competitive, and that competitive spirit drives players to chase after victory. In contrast, players who simply don't care to try in unfavorable scenarios cannot be made to, even with the presence of an ELO system. I've seen many games where players simply start trolling or even dodging queues just because they've stopped caring on the "losing" side. ELO explicitly deepens the zero-sum scenario, because now there's a cost associated with losing. There are alternatives to encourage players to want to win if their own competitive drive doesn't exist. I actually extensively enjoy casual MM over competitive right now because I only gain ranks for winning, but never lose ranks for losing. I still care enough to want to win, but not enough to just do what Skye mentioned:

For 2), in its current state ELO does not in any accurate manner measure the abilities of the players in the PugChamp ecosystem. I know this because I'm 2k ELO and there are plenty of players that are better than me with lower ELO. This is because I almost never get picked in high IM/invite level pugs, so my ELO is relatively unaffected by players who would largely dominate me. Instead, I only play in lower level pugs where I know the odds are relatively in my favor. It doesn't make sense to me that I can farm ELO exclusively without ever getting matched up in a game against players with similar ELO who are actually significantly better than me. In a sense there's two separate ELO pools that are circulated -- one amongst the lower players, and one amongst the invite players. If the two groups never mix, I don't really see how ELO would ever accurately measure which players should play in a "pro-league".

In short, ELO isn't great and several PugChamp admins have already voiced their concerns about it. There aren't strong arguments for why we need it, and plenty of arguments for why it actually hurts more than it help, at least when exposed directly to players.

gg WBE, really fun game

Hey I have mad respect for Smooth McGroove alright?

You sailed away on a different boat, a dreamboat... (⌐■_■) I'll show myself out.

Also Troopo and I should be the same person because we both have flaming tosslecaps, and we're the same height.

Isn't there supposed to be like a #LetsLearnWithPaddie or something like that; does he teach spelling?

Why do people spell my name as 'emporer', is that supposed to be a meme that I'm not aware of?

The score is such a bad indicator of how close the game was given we had basically two rounds with 0:00 overtime on both sides. gg hurricane watch!

I still don't understand the novelty of getting all worked up about opinions of where individuals/teams stand in what I consider the bottom of the fish barrel. The title of "Best of Open" feels like such a low bar to fight about, but maybe that's just me.

I suggest to stop by IL Bistro which is right in Pike Place for their happy hour from 5-6:30. Grab some reasonably priced tasty food (my favorite is the mushroom ravioli and the goat cheese crostini) and a few drinks, and enjoy a nice intimate candlelit atmosphere with your fiancé if that's your cup of tea.

I'll be honest, I had way more fun playing with you, Gurge, and the others than I did playing on tragic's team with NeoRussia. (I liked Chriz though) :D

The intention for the auto-penalty system is to catch players who are obvious detriments to the pug experience. Even with the penalty system for off-classing as it stands now is fairly lenient -- the intention is to catch players who clearly have no intention to play as the class they were drafted as. While overly aggressive player restriction would be bad and generates a lot of noise, not handling alot of these obvious cases (i.e. a person who off-classes more than half of the pug) in an automatic fashion results in a lot of operational workload for admins.

I'm interested to know the thought process of why someone would add up on a class that they actually don't want to play. I'm inclined to think that the scenario where two players can swap to turn the tide of a very one-sided match is if they switched from a class where they had very little impact to one where they had significant impact. But if that's the case, why wasn't that particular player drafted in that main position to begin with? Did the captains just fail to pick that person on that class and explicitly chose to pick them on a weaker class?

Personally, I'm in favor of flexibility and free-form gameplay. But I do feel that because we have an ELO system in place means that players often will bias their decisions with the interest of winning/gaining rating, rather than pug balance. To that effect, by preventing players from playing classes they're not selected as, the onus is on captains to pick the right teams but at the same time both captains can pick players comfortably without having to think, "Did I make a bad choice because I didn't pick that player who added up on demo and not soldier, but is actually an invite soldier?"

I actually find that some people who have somehow built negative reputations are perfectly fine to play with in pugs and scrims