That's awesome, thank you!

Donated, really looking forward to seeing International competition again!

The Unusual Raffle is off the list of perks - did it sell out already or did something change?

Just a reminder that the Season 17 team creation deadline is Saturday, Jan. 11th, at midnight, EST.

Teams planning to register for Invite or who have interest in Invite Qualifiers (if needed) may reach out directly to either me or Kitty before the registration deadline.

We will be planning to have a pre-season meeting with Invite team leaders either Jan 11th or 12th, depending on availability, to go over important details, including map pool, pick/bans, match/playoff schedules and - very importantly - the RGL Match servers beta.

I think that might be a logs.tf issue as I've been seeing that happen in scrims on a few different servers the last couple of days.

Saph's IM spreadsheet thread here.
(I suppose might as well just link the sheet)

Raising Cane's is very good. The Chik-fil-a swag cow on he other hand. . .

pulp fiction reference for us boomers.

I am glad if that's the case, I don't mean to imply it's like that now.

I really mean more that anywhere without strong gatekeeping has a real risk of being infiltrated and ruined by those folks. I've seen it happen in other sites and groups many times and so I am wary of any open access pug service, I imagine I am not alone in that, is all.

As an older, mediocre player with life responsibilities, the current situation is awful. The limited time I can set aside to play the game, waiting around 30-45 minutes for a pug that may or may not start is terrible. I would love if we can get back to having a service that I can reliably know a pug will start at any time. I don't think I've played a pug in at least two years, and it saddens me.

The current state of in-house pugs is terrible because it's fragmented such that pugs can only happen at time when a critical mass of that subgroup are on, all other times there's never a critical mass anywhere, even if there might be 20-30 folks open to play among all of them - there's no way for them to know.
Even TF2CC, which is probably the most workable for newbies -IM/Main level pugs are still running consistently only in the hours before scrims. Weekends are dead, after scrims are sporadic.

Given how prevalent trolls and cheaters are as Valve gave up on policing the game, truly open experiences like tf2center are a big risk and I have no interest in devoting time to them knowing odds are good it'll be terrible. It may be hard to ever bring them back to the old popularity because of that.

I have high hopes for RGL open pugs, but they don't seem to attract much vs. captain pugs, would love to hear why more people don't try to utilize them and what could be done to get more adding up.

You are supposed to be able to roster up to 8 players. If you're having issues with that, post your players in the cup-support channel in the Fireside Discord and we'll get them added.

In the rules, teams may also ring up to two players not rostered with the agreement of the opposing team.

As far as scheduling, group stage matches are planned for 10:30 EDT May 13-16. Playoffs at 10 EDT May 20-23.

Draft format is interesting, and will be great to hear eXtine casting again.

http://i.imgur.com/9mj6w0Z.jpg

Thanks for keeping this up, it's injected a little fun energy into the season.

But please, please replace Diop with Jaguar on scout our team so I stop hearing half my team complain about it in scrims every night.

You could probably get 95% of the way there by pulling down the paid roster for each team, maybe?

I was away for week 1, so not sure why I have scout stats on your spreadsheet.