Expanding the PUG system

[blackbanjo]

Hello all, just posting to let you know about a new website that was publicly released yesterday, www.tf2lobby.com. This is a system in place to start up 6v6 or 9v9 Highlander games in an organized, yet informal, manner.

Basically, you sign up and login to the site. You can chat on the main page and get some help from www.tf2lobby.com/about, but the best way would be to contact me if you have questions.

Once you are all signed up and ready to play, you can create your own lobby (similar to L4D) or join an active one. There are many different rulesets that modify crits, class limits, damage spread, map time, winlimits and many other things. As I mentioned before, there is the traditional 6v6 competitive environment and a more non-traditional 9v9 Highlander (1 of each class). Once the lobby is full, the game is "started" and TF2 is automatically launched and connected to the server you will be playing on. As of now, you will not be automatically assigned to a team or class, so you gotta pay attention and get yourself squared away. In game voice is used and having a microphone is strongly encouraged, especially for the medic.

Here are some things you can count on:

It's gonna be a little weird at first


You're probably going to get wiped, not because of bad DM but because you will likely get outplayed in terms of strategy, positioning, and teamwork. These are things that you learn as you go, but come quickly and intuitively.


You may have troubles signing up, you can ask people in the lobby or me. I am friends with the developers and can help you straighten things out quickly.


If you stick with it, you will meet a lot of nice people (like me, rofl) and have a great time no matter what format you play (9v9 crits or 6v6 no-crit)


Anyway, it's a simple way to experience a different aspect of TF2 that the Valve developers are trying to integrate in the game. Robin Walker has been instrumental in the design of www.tf2lobby.com (www.tf2lobby.com/about) by providing many resources and help for the designers. You don't have to worry about this being a malicious "3rd party program" or anything like that. If you have any questions you can post here, ask me through steam (http://steamcommunity.com/id/blackbanjo), or chat it up with the players on the main page.

Try it, you may like it.

[SATAn]

awesome, sounds pretty interesting. I'm sure some folks like laggy or maybe levi will join it. I don't know if I'm really interested in any form of competitive play anymore though, but that's just me.

[Grassman7z7]

Seems like it would be fun, for the very least to be sure of having a full team whenever you want to play. I might try it out some time.

[Laggy]

I won't use it I lag to much in the U.S servers and I don't like playing competitively with lag is terrible! And the community down here is small enough that we have one group to make announcements to fill up one server.

[Levi]

I've played about three games on it so far, its pretty neat. I did terrible two games and dominated a third.

The main thing I don't like is that people almost always rage quit after the first round. I know this isn't tflobbys fault, but its irritating waiting 10 mins for a game to get set up and then having someone leave after 2 minutes.

[blackbanjo]

I've played about three games on it so far, its pretty neat. I did terrible two games and dominated a third.

The main thing I don't like is that people almost always rage quit after the first round. I know this isn't tflobbys fault, but its irritating waiting 10 mins for a game to get set up and then having someone leave after 2 minutes.

Yeah, that happens with any new pug system. Admins are in place to root out players who ragequit and ensure they are temporarily or permanently banned. Glad you tried it though. The system will only get better with time.

[Levi]

Neat, they added a method for adding or removing karma to players after a match to help them weed out people like that.

It would be pretty cool if valve added some kind of match making service like that directly into tf2.

Also, I'm learning that I apparently am not very good at 6 vs 6 cp maps. I did great on ctf_turbine and hydro though, ha!

[Grassman7z7]

Made an account and played a few rounds.
I suck, and it reminds me wayyy too much of DotA

[Laggy]

Not sure how you can associate it with DotA or if that's even a compliment or not. But yeah, I really like played competitively until I had Black drunken cyclopses (cyclopsi? cyclops?) trying to chop my head off while being nearly invincible to my rocket launcher. And then as Rhaz's sig says, "I was killed by a skinny kid drenched in pee hitting me with a fish..." In other words it just got crazy with new items made it un-fun.

[blackbanjo]

tf2 was a ton of fun before any class updates. now there are so many weapons that the game is just a giant DM fest with no real strategy.

[Levi]

I suspect if tf2 wasn't updated as often as it is I'd probably have been bored of it by now.

[blackbanjo]

If valve spent less time on gimmicky weapons (razorback), broken weapons (Natasha), hats, and chokepoint maps the game could be much better. Instead they are still struggling to fix bugs and balance issues from 2 years ago.

They should have perfected the game and then spent time with well thought out and thoroughly tested unlocks.