Let me ask a real question regarding "sandbagging open" teams, this is for the players and the normal open teams at the same time.

Would you care less if you felt like the sandbagging teams that were playing open actually intended to start in open to move up to other divs? What it seems like is a lot of ex-invite players will make an open team, but never truly desire to play past open.

None of the teams we're thinking about as 'sandbagging' (namely, quantum flux and budsquad, but also other teams like mesr's and r5) are good enough to play in invite as they're currently made up so the only place for htem to go is open. I don't love the rule, but as is it's the way it works.

If there were some team who was steamrolling open made up of former invite players I'd rather see them get wrecked in invite than destroy open, but that's not happening. Frankly I don't think any of the 'sandbag' teams are even going to win the division, much less steamroll it.

To actually answer your question, I think most people want to move up whether they practice for it or not. I assume these guys play this game to win, just like we do. Just becuase they can do it without putting as much time and effort in as the rest of us plebs do doesn't mean they don't care at all about it.

i would even say the fact that they don't put a lot of time and effort into practicing to play against teams in open has hurt them more than anything. the teams that are going to put the time in and can keep a consistent roster are the teams that are going to win, not necessarily the teams with the best players. although that certainly helps HEH

ESEA

SHIT

I made this thread because my friend thought sandbagging meant a bad player dragging a good team down, and I bet him a key he was wrong. What did you guys do?

They had to get rid of their unresolved tension about a topic that comes up every season

:]
Old AG makes me mad. They got 4th in invite, and want to be moved to IM to seasons later? Root+6, and Top Guns(aka Monet) stayed invite after losing 4 players and getting last place. :/

If you look up the term sandbagging, it's different across almost all sports/games. SO you could both be right depending on the situation.

That is a way you could refer to sandbagging, but in tf2 it generally means higher division players playing in lower divisons

Most people complaining about sandbagging tend to be ones that wouldn't really win anyways. The ones competitive enough to win open won't complain because it's what it is and that's a competition.