The UGC forums are shit. It might be worth giving it a go and see.
We want to encourage folks, not drive every new person who comes by interested in comp TF2 to some other website.

Not to mention that a fair amount of people here play HL, why not make it easier for folks to try HL with people from this community?

My lifestyle coaching sessions start at $50/hr.

It might be worth considering doing a bit more segmentation this time around so folks with some idea how things work are together and true newbies are in separate ones that can spend some time on basics like rollouts and location names if that's what those players need.
Normally we try to draft a mix of experience to balance them and get beginners alongside folks who have a couple ugc seasons. If this is going to be bigger maybe that's not so necessary. It definitely has a lot to do with why so many seem to take forever to start.

An old teammate of mine used to practice shotgun in MGE solly v. scout by having a little game of it where they'd start with rockets and as soon as they got any damage with one, they'd have to try and finish the scout off with the shotgun.
It made it a bit more challenging/worthwhile for the scout while guaranteeing they always had to use the shotgun for at least one hit to get a kill.

I've been getting home later than usual Friday's lately, but I'll try to get on as close as I can to 9 this week to help. I can draft or coach. Not sure how many/if any folks from the team is free on Friday nights but I love the idea of the team sponsorships for coaching.
I really like the idea of having combo and flank coaches- as long as we have enough to keep them going!

I really like the idea behind 559. It would need some fleshing out but it's actually the first semi-reasonable method for doing pick/ban in TF2 I've heard of.

562 I would like if valve could give us group limits instead of class limits. Say you could have up to 4 offense, 2 defense (or maybe 1!) and 2 support, for example. You could give flexibility but always require that teams decide to give up a valuable class option to run an engine or heavy.

I think I'm having the same issue as well. If a fix is out there, I'd love to hear about it.

The window size is not the issue, the page that loads within the window is super tiny up in the corner and the rest of the window is empty.

At this point I'm not sure I'll ever have the time/inclination to start a new game in competitive again, but if I do, will probably be Reflex or Overwatch.

Heroes of the Storm has been kinda fun to putz around with, but I still can't get into MOBAs.

Great name.

He can only drive when the car isn't moving.

This is exciting.

I'm sure there will be a million imperfections but, really it's probably best to get it started with simple, intuitive stats that are easily accessible now and get people started. As it goes on, little improvements will start to be obvious and maybe it can evolve.
I remember playing Fantasy Football when it was just points for touchdowns and yards. So many advanced statistics are widely available now because of the interest from fantasy led to the development of tools to satisfy more complicated fantasy leagues.

Maybe a fantasy league would generate enough interest that people would get interested in finding ways to do advanced logs/demo file parsing that could give us better information about how a game went - tracking events by advantages and situations, for example, would be awesome. Finding a way to quantify uber forces or wasted damage or something like that would be extremely cool.

bad link, never mind!

less than an hour to decide, 45 teams paid and 25 more pending. Looks fairly healthy.

Blue and Navy have to get consolidated but Cyan gets it's own listing?

I'm 38 with a 5 year old, a job and a 2-hour commute. . .
Doing this is really hard sometimes. It's a decision I made, as terrible as I am at the game - it's my reward for putting up with the rest of the bullshit work/life puts me through.
I can say that because I still have a ton to learn and it's fun for me.
Anything short of that and I'd be over it in a heartbeat. I can't blame anyone with some combination of work/family/job for not putting TF2 at the top of their list.

I wish we could have signed up for the Dead map event, but the team was/isn't settled. It's awesome it's happening and if you need help doing more things like it, whatever it is, hit me up.