https://cdn.frankerfacez.com/emoticon/204717/4

In EU lobbies are still pretty popular. Numbers are down from a while ago but there's still demand. The mic thing is partially language but I remember when I was a lobby player I didn't wanna mic partially because of anxiety and partially that I thought it was unnecessary and sweaty. I played na lobbies sometimes and they were noisy, people commed everything and a few vocal but bad people used it to flame

shit i didnt know that ty. i was using the thumbs down thing, i'll use and tell ppl to use the channel. i tend to just stick to the hub channels because of the sheer number of b4nny subs crawling in the joint channels

https://imgur.com/a/YRcSJ I took a few pics of my setup while the interviews wrapped up just now if anyone's interested. this is my home location and it's messy cause im in only here for a few weeks

https://i.imgur.com/Ast4CdC.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/SuFKzjM.jpg

im drawing up a big positive/negative list for faceit pl vs pugchamp, from the perspective of invite and advanced (im bottom advanced for reference but i tried to think about what others want too). im ignoring beginner/amateur because 1. i haven't played them, and 2. i dont think having one platform is worth sacrificing the experience of either type of player

this is mainly for faceit devs so they know what to work on to please this audience. plz comment on these points if you want

Faceit positives:

• Pugs start quickly. They start instantly with 12, and they're unkillable which at least means someone's gotta take a fat ban if they wanna kill it. For better or worse, it forces people to captain and sort out classes to make drafts start.
  
• Shit WORKS. Pugs dont take 10 minutes to assign, the site doesnt break almost daily, shit isn't super laggy. some things still bug out, but way less than pugchamp
  
• The 5 minute join timer, pugchamp got kinda silly since people got later and later at joining because pregame with no dm or jumpers isnt very fun, and they'd rather dm or something than wait for some frenchie to take a smoke (looking at you daul)
  
• rankings and leaderboards, for better or worse (this kinda differs between how hard people wanna play pugs). in general it seems to make them more competitive but more toxic
  
• less random shitter meds that ruin pugs. it forces people to med, but at least you dont lose 30 mins of your life because some kid wants to play pugs with a prem player and can only get picked on med
  
• free car
  
• more active developers. while you definitely feel the site wasn't designed for tf2 players, faceit devs are active and receptive of what people want, even though i feel people like b4nny want something very different from pugs than what most people want. erynn and tsc are both not very able to add features to pugchamp and work on the rewrite unfortunately, and while erynn's tried sticking plasters on things for a while it's still a drain on her
  
• less of a circlejerk admin system, you can now reach them without needing them on steam and rules are clearly written out. as a pugchamp admin i felt pressured a bunch to ban/not ban someone for various things

pugchamp positives:

• play what you want. you're not forced to captain, medic or play an uncomfortable class. there's also rules against picking all the meds to force people to play odd classes.
  
• no auto captaining. honestly i dont think ruining a full pug is better than just killing the draft so we can get another one going
  
• servers seem to be less laggy without faceit anticheat. anticheat is probably needed for lower levels but its probably a detriment to advanced/invite (though didnt some popularish NA guy get detected by it?)
  
• less of a mixed bag of drafts. while faceit has divs which tended to keep skill closeish during less popular times, at peak times friends like to play together and people kill pugs to get fun ones. i keep hearing more aids recently from people who end up on teams or in pugs with people they dont like
  
• pugs were more fun and less sweaty, again for better or worse
  
• preready is super nice. i get why it cant really be a thing atm because of how captains work, but i'd like to be able to get a drink without needing to be sat at my pc constantly incase i miss a game. with a smaller playerbase like tf2 this is necessary i feel
  
• the site is simpler to use. im sure i'll get used to faceit but it feels like everything takes 3 clicks to get to and there's a lot of crap on the website for other things.
  
• logs.tf, and the fact that the site in general feels more connected to the tf2 community rather than being something completely foreign.
  
• you and the captain system naturally decide what level you wanna play at. if you're below the level of other players you won't get picked very often unfortunately, but equally it means you aren't stuck in amateur if you dont fulfill some league requirement (which isnt gonna always be accurate)
  
• mumble. discord has some benefits, but in general people either can't run discord, dont get it setup and linked, or have weird volume issues (enabling legacy audio (which is the same voice codec as mumble i believe) helped me somewhat but shit's still very weird). the entire community is already using mumble, and auto-channel shit is pretty easy to do with it. you can change volume levels for individual people with the mumble 1.3.0 dev build and have been for ages.
  
• free name changes, at admin discretion. they were annoying to do as an admin but god it's probably better than copper changing his name every day with his smaug-stash of points in a mountain somewhere
  
• ive never seen someone get banned on faceit in advanced or invite for offclassing or throwing on captain. on pugchamp admins played pugs, saw that shit, banned for it. they can also check logs quickly for offclassing. in faceit i never see thumbs down reports or whatever get answered, and there's like 1 admin who plays advanced/invite in eu (degu)
  
• pugs happen more often. in eu. invite/advanced is smaller than pugchamp and as a result you get 8 people sitting in queue when in the past you'd have a pug going

gas passer is bugged since you can throw it through thin walls

iron bomber isnt a direct upgrade long range pipe spam is actually a solid tradeoff to make

wait was eLs confirmed to be the 7 mumble screamer. he was confirmed to be one of the tftv interview n-bombers but i didnt hear about that

what about loose cannon pre-pre-nerf i.e. on launch

it's basically a rescue ranger for medic (which is a BANNED weapon) so it should be banned

very active and keen team leader

exactly

i posted this on the other thread but if you literally dont hold down m1 and delay your shot by like 1 tick your spread doesn't change at all

https://youtu.be/a-6NWYX3ee0?t=7m44s

bad news everyone. after a 9 loss streak, cat has deranked to amateur. he will be sorely missed.

cause we were winning and it was dead time and we'd just had an aids 5 min pause waiting for some guy who wasnt gonna come back to come back love me some faceit professional league