who tf is prograde i keep hearing about him

also what is this low open theory, this is a playoffs open scout

I don't care whether it's nice or mean, I just care about whether it's a fair assessment (which it totally is, I have no accolades remotely comparable to yomps, just a couple tryout periods which I consider to be proofs of concept whereby I can carry my own weight on a competent mid-IM team) and whether it makes sense.

But that's besides the point. Here's a part of that comparison that I decided to not include originally:
Likewise, if I made a LFT top invite thread and literally every person on the face of the earth were to post "yeah prograde is more than capable of playing top invite, put him on _____!" that doesn't suddenly mean I'd be able to be anything other than a dead weight on any invite team, much less a top invite team.

goddammit tristen why did you bump this thread...
For the record I'm not looking for a team, I have my own for now and I can't really see myself playing for someone else unless its for something like lan.

I had a response to the original thing written but I didn't think this thread was worth bumping so I didn't post it. Since it's been bumped anyways, I might as well set this straight. Nerd essay below

TL;DR people seem to love black-and-white explanations devoid of all nuance, and that's silly. Ask questions, do your due diligence, don't jump to conclusions, and don't believe the first thing you hear.

After my dumb shitpost towards nazara early on in this thread I've been doing pretty much nothing but replying to people's posts when something is factually inaccurate or misleading, and more than half the time I wouldn't need to even respond if folks did a little more reading or asked around a little more.

Chaos is mature for his age, has a professional attitude, takes practice seriously, and can make some decent plays given the opportunities. However, he does not play much outside of practice and is not always very consistent. I think he has enough experience to hold his own in open (especially now that the divisions are not merged anymore :D)

Give him a tryout, I'm sure you'll like what you see.

Wtf how does he not have a team by now? He makes fragvideos like every day because thats how many gigantic frags he makes on a daily basis

this meme-loving doggo could play on a Low-Mid Intermediate Team™ but he chooses to bless an open team this season. give him a tryout!!!!

Cool, calm, collected gamer with an open mind and professional attitude. I cannot say he's naturally talented, but he does have a sharp interest in improving and in my experience he's quite reliable. Give him the opportunity to play for a low-mid open team for just one season and I'm confident he'll be twice as good by the end.

I was going to post a reply to grape last night but elected to go to sleep instead. Luckily i saved the relevant part of my post

Let me stop you right there. There is nothing you can do as a team leader when somebody makes the decision to leave your team, regardless of what their reasoning is or however much I may agree with this statement in principle. People who have run teams before will understand this stuff very intuitively, but I honestly think this ought to be common sense. Just because you're a team leader does not mean you can force people to stay on your team. Likewise, if you have players who consistently have problems that hinders the team's performance (such as not showing up to matches, not practicing outside of scrims, or throwing matches), it's the team leader's responsibility to cut these players.

That's plainly false, I never said anything about our lack of success being the "team's fault," both I (and Grape Juice) correctly cited the lack of roster stability as the problem that crippled our performance. The roster problems we were experiencing were inherently unforeseeable, and as I've mentioned above, unless I had the power of mind control I'm not sure how I could possibly be responsible for the actions of other people. That's obviously not to say that I never made a mistake at all during the last season, but my mistakes don't even hold a candle to the keystone of your team walking out in week 2 in terms of impact.

Same as what I said above, this still isn't valid criticism. Saying "Player X will not perform well because his team didn't perform well last season" is a valid heuristic estimate—a shorthand guess—of someone's skill, but to use it as the end-all-be-all is incredibly lazy when you can just go and look at any given team's roster history and compare it with their performance throughout the season. It doesn't take more than 5 minutes to do this, and anybody can do it from pretty much anywhere you have an internet connection.

As for whether any of the roster problems are my fault, if you can somehow prove that all roster changes over the last 2 seasons were voluntary and were the result of something I was doing wrong as a team leader or player, then I'll concede.

I'm curious how you came to this conclusion. I'm hoping you're not just repeating what other people are saying without looking into this by yourself.

I'm not claiming I'm "mid IM", I'm claiming I could feasibly play for a team between the range of low to mid IM. There is a significant difference between these two.

As for making open playoffs, yeah that would be possible if I didn't have roster problems over the past two seasons. It'd be nice if I could go a whole season without having to cut a player for suddenly becoming unreliable in the middle of the season and missing matches left and right, or having the keystone of my team join a friend team in W2 with no suitable replacements to be found, to name just a couple brief examples. There's nothing I can realistically do about this sort of thing, so I don't think conflating the team's performance with the performance of any individual player on the team is particularly fair, especially if you don't go and look at individual performance.

I'll admit I indulged waaaaay too much in that post. Snark aside though, my advice was genuine and my point was salient; the performance or skill of any other individual on a given team should not necessarily be conflated with the performance or general skill of the rest of the team as a whole, and players should perhaps do a little legwork before posting something based on, for instance, hearsay or a single scrim against an old lineup. I guess I can't speak for anyone else, but I would certainly never shitpost on someone else's LFT thread with a comment that lacked any recent, relevant, or accurate information.

Hey nazara, thanks for the reply!

I'm glad you brought this up, this is a concept a lot of players seem to struggle with. You see, believe it or not there's actually a difference between the team leader and the individual players on his team. If you take this into account and then use a useful tool called "nuance", it becomes easy to understand how this kind of thing can happen. In this case, you can utilize "nuance" by going past the ESEA team front page and clicking on the "Roster History" tab, then comparing the roster changes with match performance. If you wanted to do more than due diligence, you could even cross-reference roster changes with scrim performance by using logs.tf!

I hope you found this information helpful :)

I've been a career team leader, but after a couple seasons of stagnation due to chronic roster problems and little luck rebuilding the roster for S27 so far, I'm going to be tentatively looking to play pocket for a serious high open or low-mid IM team. I could also play roamer or pocket scout, but not nearly as well since I have no experience outside pugs on roamer, and I'm unbelievably inconsistent on scout.

I can maincall pretty well, I never tilt (given reasonable conditions), and though I'm not very consistent with my DM I'm usually on par with the level I'm looking to play at. My background as a team leader also gives me a lot of experience organizing, scheduling, and setting up servers. Give me a tryout if you want a dedicated player with plenty of experience and a professional attitude.

Click below for my competitive experience:

Feel free to add me for tryouts
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/MuddyFudger/
ESEA: https://play.esea.net/users/1447445
UGC: https://www.ugcleague.com/players_page.cfm?player_id=76561198095919398

-rep meanie :(

But for srs now, this is what I know from witnessing his roamer during S25&26:
+Has the basics of 6s down pat, and adapts to new team dynamics rapidly.
+Receptive to criticism; if you have a problem, just have a one-on-one talk and you'll be able to work out most issues immediately.
+Very heal-independent roamer.
+Has good movement, reliable DM, but most importantly is a great playmaker if given the opportunities.
+Generally amiable, does not exhibit toxic behavior without the presence of some catalyst.
+Makes fragclips and sometimes fragvideos
?Practices in his own time frequently (from what I've seen it's mostly jump maps and rarely MGE/DM or pugs)
-Liable to tilt at times
-Has a tendency to clutter comms (ie. "What is that retard bot scout doing?").
-Tends to be strongly influenced by comms atmosphere (for instance, if you have a player who overcomms, the problem may be exacerbated).
-Can slightly juvenile at times, though never outright malicious.

My profile picture triggers all the right people :)

Looking to play pocket at rewind. I have serviceable DM and can maincall pretty decently. Biggest point of pride is that I effectively never tilt.

Click below for my competitive experience:

Feel free to add me to talk about online tryouts.
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/MuddyFudger/
ESEA: https://play.esea.net/users/1447445
UGC: https://www.ugcleague.com/players_page.cfm?player_id=76561198095919398

EDIT: I could also play roamer or scout, but I'm somewhat clueless on roamer for some maps and I'm less consistent than shade's desire to play TF2 when I scout.

Most vindictive, immature player I have ever seen in my entire TF2 career. Wastes people's time for no reason other than to troll. I've heard people say pov is toxic as well (and it would make sense), but I can't confirm it personally.

I don't like getting involved in tftv drama but for any team leaders reading this, only pick up this player if you want your team to die within the first two weeks.