The same thing happened to desi in CS:GO Invite a few seasons ago - he played for two teams and then was able to join iBUYPOWER, but the admins did not allow him to attend LAN with the team.

Metalworks will probably be one of the "experimental" maps since it's only played in North America. We weren't planning on removing it entirely.

I'm not sure that flat out banning sniper would be the best solution, but we will start enforcing offclassing rules more strictly to avoid issues.

As far as maps go, the plan is to generally have nine maps in the global PugChamp map pool: seven established and two experimental. How we'll be choosing the experimental maps is still being figured out, but Product will be one of the established maps since it is played globally.

http://www.teamfortress.tv/30381/b4nny-flavors-froyotech-with-strawberry-mangoes

From what I can tell Valve made a breaking change to one (if not more) of the APIs used in StatusSpec. The only way to properly resolve it is to get a Source SDK code update.

It appears that they patched the check to look for a Community or Self-Made item as an alternative to the beta pass.

It's reflected in stars now as far as I know.

To expand on the ruleset a bit: the games are run with a win difference of 2 and a minimum score of 5. What this means is that a team can win if they reach five rounds unless the score reaches 4-4, at which point a team must lead by two to win. This doesn't affect winning when the time limit expires - if the 30 minutes are up and a team is leading 5-4, they will still receive a win. The idea is to extend close, high-scoring games instead of ending them when a team hits five. It hasn't been a very common occurrence so far.

Hey all, just a status update for this weekend. The site has not crashed in the past week, and we've been making fixes for the minor issues that we've encountered, so we think the site is stable enough for beta.

What's holding us back right now are resources (of all kinds, including items). If you think you could help out, please be sure to get in touch.

Of course, another reminder: ratings will be rest from alpha to beta, but there is something for top players in alpha, so be sure to keep climbing the ranks. Happy gaming!

You may not be able to enter QuickPlay since you're blacklisting cosmetics:

You can have random crits disabled as long as you don't remove the nocrits tag, but then players will have to choose to play on nocrits servers for them to join your server via QuickPlay.

Just an update of where we stand: we've been working hard and resolving most of the outstanding issues. As a result, we'll be once again looking to push into open beta in the next week.

If you have any suggestions or concerns that you don't think we've properly addressed, now is the time to bring them up! We'd like the beta launch to be the best that it can possibly be.

The idea is that if there's a sizable venue already being rented out for a LAN, hosting the TF2 finals presumably does not add significantly to costs, as equipment is usually provided by sponsors, and Invite teams attending LAN have always received travel support taken from their prizes instead of as an addition.

That's the most likely reason why we had LAN finals for so long as part of the larger ESEA LAN and why the LAN finals were dropped when ESL started hosting the Pro League finals at their studios. Given that these new LANs are for ESEA Premier, are separately hosted by region, and may be hosted by ESEA instead of ESL, there's a chance that a venue that can accommodate both CS:GO Premier and TF2 Invite teams may be used, and if that happens, there's definitely an option for ESEA to host LAN finals for us once again.

Whether they do so is another question, but the possibility exists with a non-ESL division getting its own LAN finals separate from Pro League.

Hey all, we've finally figured out an issue that seems to crop up when launching drafts. Simply put, our random selection library sometimes fails to pick captains properly (certain captains, due to their current captain score, tend to trigger the issue).

I've submitted a pull request to fix the issue, but until it's merged in or otherwise addressed, be aware that the issue may continue to crop up. A known workaround is having more than two captains added, so if the issue does happen other people can try adding up to get the game up and running.

Many apologies for the issue. We hope that it will get fixed soon.

We want to try to get this issue worked out before then, so we'll be delaying the Open system at least for now.

As for an announcement: we've made a change that might (or might not) fix the issue. The new change does require a client update, so if you're not able to connect to the website refresh the website and you should be good to go.

The problem is that the issue only manifests itself after a client has been connected to the server for a long time, so we have no way of testing except to leave the website open and see if it happens again. To that end, if you can log in, leave the website open, and see if you have problems (mainly frequent disconnects/reconnects), that would be helpful.

Again, many apologies as we try to isolate and hopefully work around this issue.

We are indeed trying to figure out an issue where people are continually disconnecting and reconnecting to the server, and were restarting to try configuration and debugging changes. Sorry for the inconvenience. We're hopefully going to have the issue at least diagnosed by the time the evening rolls around.