Yeah, this seems to be the same system as TF2Pickup.net. What exactly does this site offer over that?

Hey all, we've been quiet lately working on several improvements - the main one being a nice website to represent the entire operation.

You'll notice on the website information about a Pro League, which we have decided to add after reading the survey responses and consulting with a few experts. Pro League services for NA and EU are already live in beta, with the EU one having already seen a few games played. We're also hoping to get the open system for NA up and running in beta sometime very soon.

We're also hard at work with various QoL improvements, like reducing memory usage so that our website isn't killed while under load and fixing players being marked inactive after a PUG draft expires. These have already gone live and we hope to have many more coming up soon.

As a reminder, we are entirely donation-supported - so if you'd like to help out with maintaining our massive infrastructure or perhaps providing incentives for our Pro League players, please visit our support page or contact us. Thanks again for all of your interest!

At the moment the application is designed to rely on its own pool of servers with its own control process, so it's not exactly trivial to add another system like serveme to the mix. We will look into it, though.

We're also investigating the possibility of allowing servers to be marked temporarily unavailable, so that servers utilized for other purposes could still be donated.

It's alright, some things are just not meant to be.

Quite a few people behind-the-scenes received invites today.

Many apologies for the issues last night. We deployed a patch in order to reduce RCON connection floods that would eventually render the server completely unusable, but somehow it affected our server deployment process. Hopefully the patch we made last night has resolved that as well.

We've also added captain game requirements for testing in alpha, and we are working on figuring out a way to somehow configure the requirements during the beta systems reset so that there will be enough players to captain once it goes live.

Since everything is being reset between alpha and beta, it's meaningless to impose anything on alpha and beta won't be able to have those restrictions immediately. We will add the functionality and ramp up the requirement over time, however.

Just an update on what's going on - alpha seems to be stable enough with no major bugs, so we'll be moving into beta when we can. The main thing we're looking to do is finalize our setup so we don't have to worry about doing any transitions between beta and full release.

So far, we've secured enough game servers to start off in NA, but we're looking for some in EU so that we can roll out the service there as well. In addition, we need to solve our capacity issues with the central server, which we'll probably only be able to do by throwing a good amount of money at servers. To that end, some people have said they'd like to help out with those costs, so we'll set up some way to do so. If you have a preference or suggestion for a payment method or are interested in setting up a more formal sponsorship, make sure to let us know.

As always, feedback and suggestions are appreciated. Thanks again for your support through the bumps in this alpha period!

We've been working hard to make global coverage a reality, and this is just the beginning.

Yeah, I don't remember ESEA ever scheduling matches for the second half of the season until week 4, though my memory may be hazy.

I've made a change to hopefully significantly reduce it. Let me know if it's still happening and I'll investigate further.

If the league providing the vast majority of prizes for TF2 still uses stills from Meet the Pyro, should you really expect that much from a coverage site just wading in?

Hey all, sorry for the myriad of issues last night. Some of them are issues we fixed, and others were game servers being strangely unresponsive to RCON commands. We've added a retry mechanism to hopefully compensate for that.

The site is still suffering from overload issues, but those should hopefully be less prevalent when the site is moved to a new server for beta.

The site will consider any server that is currently assigned to a completed game as free and reuse it.

The update is finished - you should be able to see more detailed stats now, and players on the homepage will display a tooltip on hover with some stats.