Don't know if its just me (Skill issue) about 2-3 months ago the switch from whatever provider it was to this just has been so bad for me. Depending on the location of the server, if they are Chicago servers I typically get 40-50 ping on most other servers and now I get 60-70 after this change. And on top of that as of yesterday I keep lagging out. My upload just drops while playing TF2 and I've only had that happen to me during these pugs which is a could just be wild coincidence.

Been across the country for the weekend, so I have been unable to maintain the servers. All 4 should be operational now.

We actually originally going to use the serveme API for integration. However, we discovered that either my API key or IP must've been specifically blacklisted. Other RGL devs' keys seemed to work, but we felt being able to directly handle the servers to insert our custom configs and plugins, along with not needing to add another failure point of interacting with another service, was a better decision. If we were able to 1. access to API, and 2. upload custom plugins, then we'd gladly explore using it.

This API is now a decade old and TF2Center has been running pugs without extra requirements. You can have a TF2Center game on a stock TF2 server as long as it has the map you're trying to play.
The other services don't require custom plugins, but even so, the previous incarnation of RGL pugs had a working serveme.tf API integration and their own custom plugin installed on all na.serveme.tf servers for stuff like team and nickname management.

That still doesn't really address the problem of our API keys being blocked when we were starting from scratch. Even if we didn't want to start from scratch, the previous developers that were running under the RGL PUGs label are not allowing us access to any of their work to look at. So while I'm glad other pug sites are finding success using serveme, we are going to use what works in the first place for us and would allow us greater flexibility in the future.

We don't have a feature that blocks API keys (we're fully open source, it doesn't exist), if you can see an API key in your serveme settings, you can use it. We do have a Discord, you could have contacted us like the other PUG sites and projects if you were having issues.

Having enough servers available for a PUG service (for $3/month for as many servers as you need I might add) is a solved problem in the EU, NA, SEA and AU regions. So seeing PUGs limited or unavailable on a new service due to lack of servers makes me sad.

please dont tell me the only person developing a pug service in NA added an extra character to their API key or something, assumed that serveme.tf had some weird vendetta against them, and then wasted a bunch of time making an inferior service to give us less servers

God I fucking love b4nny for that one :)

All this time and we still have shite.

Took this long to still have an inferior site to something that was already shite.

That's the reality.

perhaps only having one volunteer guy trying to make a full stack web app is not ideal for efficiency.

i have a sneaking suspicion that there are many more silly bugs in the pug site's code, unfortunately nobody will ever know because rgl refuses to open source anything.

this isn't a knock on you dolphin, unless of course you're the one keeping the source code hostage for some reason, its a herculean effort to have made it this far, i just cant rationalize someone in your position refusing community help to this degree.

Assuming the "weekly update" post is being written as we speak, but, holy shit we have CHAT NOW!!!!

Though... its a little inconspicuous 0_0. Mixed about it since its look more like one of those "PM" chat boxes.

https://imgur.com/HE3cJd6

https://imgur.com/a/NdI3Wy1

Suggestion for the map pool: there's a lot of instances where there's only one staple pug map (usually process) available to pick alongside all the rarely played maps (sultry, granary, villa etc.). I think people generally just want to pug on the more familiar maps, so perhaps it should be guaranteed there's at least two/three of them to choose from.

is this website usually only alive after scrims or is it just dead on this fine wednesday evening

Can we have some updates in the rule section regarding the automated bans when subbing yourself out?

because I got this recently:

https://i.imgur.com/2v1W02N.png

For my situation, the captain miss-clicked me, so in order to balance out the teams, I decided to sub myself out. Only to find out I got a 8-Day ban afterwards. What. The. F*ck.

I can understand the frustration of a player leaving a pug, especially if its an essential class (ex: med), but a week?
This is absurd, come on.

(IMO, it should just be 24 hours; anything higher should be set by an admin, assuming the player has been reported for constant baiting.)

Also, is there a "cool-down" regarding the offense (i.e. offenses are reset every month)?

- - - -
EDIT 1: Got unbanned, but still, my opinion stands

request: make it so channels stay open after pugs (they boot you after 10 mins or so) or add a public hangout channel people can join to talk between pugs (can restrict to only verified players to prevent mic spamming)

also when map voting is happening there should be a visual/audio cue counting down and the duration should be longer (15-30 seconds after the pug is picked or something), currently its totally unclear when the voting is active or when you can no longer

Haven't talked in a bit. Been cooking up this larger profile update.
Moving forward, we will be switching from smaller weekly updates to these larger and more fleshed-out updates to prepare for official release soon*!

NEW:
Chat:
- Chat has been added!

Lobby:
- Sort players by last division played (or equivalent division by elo)
-- You can update your last division played from your profile once a week
- Captains are highlighted upon captain button hover
- Players with a 5 win streak now have a burning name

Preferences:
- You can now rank maps to automatically vote for

Pug Info:
- Elo info added to history dropdown
- Logs are now displayed in history dropdown
- Captains are now indicated in rosters

Player Profile:
- Added competitive website profile links (e.g. rgl, steam, logs, demos, more, ugc)
- You can update your last division played from your profile once a week
- PUGs can now be sorted by role, format, and captain
- Trophies are visible for players with top 3 wins
- Win/loss and elo gain/loss is now graphed
- Global rankings are shown under number of PUGs and number of wins

FIXES:
- Link to player log now includes steam id selected
- Player cards should no longer sometimes show as blank "Player"
- Player avatars no longer squeeze with long usernames
- Shit ton of optimization stuff to reduce load time
- Fixed stv password being inaccurate when none is set
- Adjusted pug ban durations
- Player menus no longer appear in the wrong place
- Fixed some matches not updating player w/l records
- Other smol misc fixes

dolphin you ate with no crumbs left

thank you for your hard work on the update. my only suggestion would be that the chat is open by default like it was on pugchamp, I think right now in its minimized form it gets ignored by most people

An issue I've seen occur with the elo system a few times now is that sometimes winning a pug gives you 0 elo meanwhile the losing team has a range from +0.0 to +2.0ish.

A particularly egregious example of this happening is this pug:
https://logs.tf/3630701
https://i.imgur.com/N5VIhl5.png
My team had lost 4-5, but we all gained elo in the range of +2.8 to +7.4, meanwhile the winning team didn't gain or lose elo from it. Also it is not like this is a one off thing, I have other examples of it happening from just a few nights ago as well.

I understand that there's probably a lot of factors that go on within the elo calculations, but I don't think it's right for the losing team to gain elo and winning team to gain nothing. (plus that's generating elo out of thin air which probably isn't good)

the strat is now to pick a team as bad as the site thinks is possible to farm elo for losing

The point of elo is to give an approximate skill level. The idea is that if you do better than expected, you gain elo and if you do worse than expected, you lose elo. There's reasons why we don't use simple W/L to adjust skill. Say that we have peak froyo vs a low invite team that play each other 1000 times, and froyo wins 5-4 for all of those matches. With the elo system, everyone's elo would eventually converge to reflect their skill levels, such as 2100 for the low invite team and 2200 for froyo. If we used W/L, the low invite team's elo would be deflated to below newcomer, and froyo's would be highly inflated. We used to have the winner's elo slightly decrease if they were expected to roll, but barely won, but enough players complained that we removed that, which is why we have the "elo out of thin air".

if you're going to keep the other half of this (gaining elo when losing) you have to keep this half too. otherwise the elo on the site will just infinitely inflate over time. IMO you shouldn't have either of these effects, since the goal of the game is to win the game, not win rounds; ELO ratings will still converge to represent player skill/contribution to winning given a large enough sample size even if you only count W/L and not rounds

Why not instead of gaining elo for losing, and losing elo for winning(how you explained it), when you win a pug that's say 5-4 when you were expected to win decisively, you gain less elo than if you would've won 5-0, and you lose less elo if you were supposed to get 5-0'd but ended up getting a closer score

can players get a elo boost if they play classes they dont main? i.e playing medic if you play scout or solly should give you a boost in said class so itll entice players to maybe switch if pug needs to start

honestly personally ok with elo being round based as long as like 80%+ of point distribution is ONLY W/L

The problem with this argument is that you're assuming that the Elo number has literal meaning in itself, but really, Elo measures a difference in skill. The actual number isn't what matters; all that matters is the difference. If a team rated 1600 plays against a team rated 1400, the chance of winning for both teams as predicted by Elo rating is the same as if a team rated 2200 played against a team rated 2000. Elo is not a quantification of skill, but rather, a quantification of a measurable difference in skill.

In the situation you've described, you say that the low invite team that loses every time to Froyo would be placed in the "newcomer" Elo category. But the fact is, categories are simply labels you've placed on certain Elo ratings; if these two teams were the only ones playing, then the massive difference in Elo would reflect the difference in skill between the two teams, but it wouldn't say anything about the actual level of the two teams. Do you see what I'm trying to say? All that it would mean is that one team wins every time, and one team loses every time. The same Elo difference would happen if you had a Main team play against a Newcomer team over and over. Elo doesn't quantify skill; it quantifies a difference in skill.

What I'm trying to say is, there is no such thing as "invite" and "below newcomer" Elo in the example you give. All there would be is "top invite" Elo and "low invite" Elo. In your example, you're taking labels that you maintain out of one playerbase, that reflect that playerbase's relative skill levels, and applying it arbitrarily to a completely different playerbase. In a situation where Elo is based on rounds won, the same total divergence between the Elo of Froyo and the low invite team will happen, it will only be much slower (take many more matches played) than a situation where it is based on W/L only. This can be proven mathematically.

As long as Elo measures some zero-sum number, whether it be wins/losses or rounds won/rounds lost or something, then Elo will diverge to the same point, based on relative skill, no matter what. The only thing you're changing is the speed of the divergence. In a closed-box where Froyo plays a low invite team over and over, they will both end up in the same place whether or not you calculate Elo from round wins or pure wins/losses (assuming the score is the same every time, and assuming they play an infinite number of games).

The moment you start introducing non-zero sum elements into your "Elo" system, i.e., people gaining Elo without the other team losing the same amount, or thinking that Elo measures anything other than a difference in skill, you have committed the fallacy of objective value/a "quantification" fallacy. The only thing that would change in the example you give is the labels, since you're the one who creates the labels; the bottomed-out Elo would become the "low invite" rating, and the "inflated" Elo would be the "high invite" rating. Labelling different ranges of Elo is something you do once you see what Elo ranges various skill levels are in, and then name them accordingly. Thinking it's somehow bad/a failure of the Elo system that the team that gets beaten every time bottoms-out on Elo is like those people who used to say "I was Global before the rank reset!" in CS:GO. That is, you've made the mistake of thinking that a number can measure skill, rather than relative skill; you've assigned a meaning to the arbitrary name or "rank" (like those CS:GO players) that doesn't actually exist, rather than assessed the distribution of ranks in the playerbase.

Therefore, it doesn't matter whether Elo is calculated based on wins/losses or rounds won/rounds lost, so long as the amount of Elo gained by one team exactly matches the amount of Elo lost by the other team, so as to not violate the zero-sum nature of TF2/the nature of all Elo systems. Also, although it isn't technically necessary for a functioning Elo system (based on the above), it is super frustrating to lose Elo when you win. A much better solution is to simply award less Elo to the winning team for close wins and more Elo for stomps. This will achieve the same effect without the frustration.

i mean the number itself "doesnt matter" in the sense that it could function with invite being 500 elo or 10000 but if low inv players deflated to relatively lower than main players just because they played in harder pugs then yeah that's a problem with the system
an important component though is that in the case of ties or close games, the elos of each team should get closer to converging. the big issue is that the self correcting process is really annoying because the site just arbitrarily assigns some number and these inflated or deflated elos fuck with the predictions until enough pugs have been played to iron them out, until which point teams will have close games or wins that they lose elo for, since elo predicts not just a win but winning margins. a winning team losing elo is by design

i may be wrong but i think the site only makes a noise when the pugs starting if you're added, it'd be nice if it did it for everyone so people knew when to add if they passively had the site open (e.g., you sit out the A pug and then miss the B pug right after it bc you're looking at something else)