Crispix, dry.

Cereal with milk is gross.

When it comes to "useless" weapons - I think the case for unbanning them is pretty strong.
That is, it would seem like fairly big concession to Valve if all of a sudden we opened up the whitelist with a bunch more items and might help bridge that gap a little bit at essentially no cost to the game or community.

Keep the really unbalancing/broken ones out, of course.

And to be fair to our indifferent overlords at Valve, I am pretty sure it's impossible to truly balance this game for 12 and 18 and 24 players in the game at once. It's inevitable the utility of many items are going to scale with the size/compositions of the teams.

derp.

It's hard to judge since the key is how well it reached people that aren't in the community, right? And mainly for Europe?

It didn't seem to register at all with the non-competitive TF2 players I know.

We're 3-7 with one ffw.
The schedule was rough, we had 4 of the top 15 teams early in the first three weeks, including all our viaduct matches which is by far our best map as a team.
We got rounds on a couple of some of the middle level teams, so that helps a bit with keeping the motivation up.

We've definitely improved a lot, now that we're getting matched up with more low and low/mid teams we're hoping things go a lot better.
However, I'm not sure if we're improving as fast as we need to to keep up with mid-open teams. We don't get to scrim nearly often enough (HL murders our scrim schedule) and with a lot of our players new-ish to Open we could use a lot more. Also probably the hardest thing about being low-ish is figuring out what exactly you need to do differently - if we knew we'd already be doing it! Everyone recognizes in very broad terms where the mistakes are, but not well enough to avoid repeating them.

Aside from a too-sparse scrim schedule, comms are a big problem for us. We comm OK - but more importantly everyone is slow to react to them properly.Our DM tends to cover up those problems for a fair bit of the match, but not enough to win against many mid-level teams. Inevitably, we bleed a couple players in neutral/stalemate situations and turn them into big disadvantages.
Probably the overriding problem is a lack of a true main caller - we kind of have four little separate things going on all the time and not enough adjustment/cohesion among those little groups. There's not anyone really with the experience/authority to identify and correct those issues.

ESEA has been fine, we had the same server connection issues early but it's been a lot better lately. Scheduling has been better than I expected given our limitations. We haven't had any serious issues with other teams, a very high open team got salty with us for offclassing while we were getting absolutely pummeled, if that was the worst thing that happens for the season I'll call it a pretty big success.

Pugged with most of this team several times.

All really nice and eager to develop as players and as a team - definitely recommended as teammates.

We use IRC and it mostly works out.
It would be nice if a few more mid and low open teams used it so the ratio of IM nerds pugscrimming on their off nights was a bit lower, but this way we get a nice variety of teams at or above our skill level to play against.

What, exactly, is going to bring them back? Last I checked the channels and servers are still there. If people wanted to use them, they'd be using them now.

Since people aren't actually using them, it's probably a good idea to figure out the issue and look for a solution.

If you believe ESEA is what you want to do, start as soon as you can.
Once you have some idea of how the 6s game works, additional seasons in UGC probably aren't going to make much of a difference compared to just doing it now/next season.

Regular main page news/announcements on major comp events.

Browser support for streams should be a no-brainer

Definitely improve demoui and build in better support for custom HUDs

Build PREC -like settings into the game for automatic demo recording with configurable settings.

Completely overhaul the QP rules:
Loosen restrictions that were popular in good pub communities: e.g. class limits and some forms of reserve slotting (there are probably more). Or allow people to QP to 'community' servers that meet different criteria than the current QP ruleset.
Add SOAP and MGE servers to the QP options or, better, take those mods into the game itself as betas/modes.

Re-activate the beta client and do testing/balancing of commonly whitelisted items again - focusing on the 6s and HL modes (or whatever they want us to play) - to validate Valve or the community's stances on those items . Hold competitions in these beta modes with prizes to encourage top level play and bring balance adjustments into the game accordingly (ie the Valve's game event but ongoing and official).

Develop new official maps in 5CP, KotH and PL that can work in 6s/HL.

I got it a while back when I clicked on an ad unintentionally. It wasn't that hard to clean out, though.

Hey, the deadline is past and we have 13 teams entered (plus one that died). Not bad! I have a google drive doc with the rosters and will start keeping up with standings after this week's matches ends - see the OP for the doc!

If you think someone is sandbagging or ineligible - please send me a PM with the issue and I will check on it.

Remember - results will follow ESEA standings at the end of the seasons!

I've been playing medic for about six months now (2 UGC seasons, last season in CEVO-O and now ESEA-O this season with No Homers) and I recognize I have a long way to go but starting to struggle in figuring out where I'm going wrong in specific mechanics or calls. I also think I need to improve my calls (I don't main call for my team but definitely can improve here).
My team plays very flank-heavy so advice in adjusting to that would be fantastic as I think I'm surely not distributing heals and handling positioning as well as I could.

My team is relatively new-ish to Open and it's hard for me to tell where I'm going wrong vs. we're all going wrong - each requires a different approach to start correcting and I want to help us get better every week this season!

I'm looking for someone with a fair amount of experience who could review a couple demos and help me identify flaws and get on the path to correcting them. It doesn't need to be a whole ton of time at all - I really only have weekend nights free (kid, job do a number on availability), but if you can help I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks!

5-2 mad men.

Yeah, we definitely don't need any hype for this week (or next). We appreciate the effort but we're still figuring a lot of things out. We're gonna bust our butts to make games out of our matches this week but wasting space on us in these articles seems silly to me with so many talented teams up at the top of open.

If someone wants to cover new/lowish teams separately I think that would be fantastic, though.

No disrespect to Schrute (all cool guys!) but we did get 5-0'd in about 8 minutes by SYOPS already and I hope we can put up a bit more fight this week!