People who think this way will never be good enough to be picked consistently. Everyone went through the "fat kid" phase, and there are different ways of looking at it. I can sit and cry about not being picked, or I can improve and take a dump on them when I do get picked, leading to being picked often.

AMERICA IS A COUNTRY OF EQUAL OPPORTUNITY, NOT EQUAL OUTCOME.
Damn communists.

making invite pugs a separate thing completely would almost definitely be a step back, but the things that roody mentioned are totally valid; one of the things that dissuaded me from playing in pug.na as well as even trying to play in invite pugs was the fact that I'd never get an opportunity to play anything but demo or med (i mean, i'm not the best at the other classes, but I'm certainly not the worst).

Not that we shouldn't be picking teams based on who the captain thinks is the best player; I just think roody's statement definitely has some truth to it, and is definitely the reason I stopped playing pugs.

I'm not completely up to date with the goings-on with the pug bot, but i'm sure someone could implement something simple that gives everyone in the queue a seed, and seeds anyone who was fat-kidded higher than the players that queue after the the fatkids. Maybe even requires the fatkids to be picked...

Highlander pug is the only IRC one I know is active, I frequent them often.

Terms of 6's I dunno if Pickup2 is active or not, not been on there for months, I don't go because it's only fun to play with friends and none of mine want to play pug2 anyway.

TF2pickup.net, always looks empty when I go on it, don't want to wait for ages for one to start, I'll often go on TF2center, made some new friends from it, it's fun sometimes.

Sometimes get doublemix invites, tend to be really late in the evening, don't want to play TF2 beyond a certain time.

Pugging for me is mostly about friends, if you do it by yourself it isn't as rewarding as playing with a few friends.

I remember playing a decent bit of medic a few months ago on pug.na. It was a good experience for me outside of a few awful personalities (they were few and far between).

I tried to add the other weekend, and the main issue was that there were not enough captains to start the match. Can anything be done on the admin-side to rectify this issue?

pug.na USED to be vicious back in the day, but it's become far more welcoming and accepting of new faces.

I pug once a week or so. I run inhouse pugs on my maps typically, but sometimes we play stock maps. It's always a lot of fun, we've got a good group of guys who aren't jerks and don't fuck off or try super hard. It's a good time.

Automatically randomized teams. Or just letting the players choose a team on their own like the way tf2lobby works. You could probably just have players type red or blue after some alert message is sent out...

I think the captain system is fine. I can see randomization going terribly wrong unless the skill sets of the players involved are taken into account.

boulder you are describing exactly what #tf2mix already does

I don't see any reason to turn pug.na into another tf2mix

the randomized team mention was more of an example of an option, rather than an actual suggestion. But the part where we let players pick their own teams on a first come first served basis was a real suggestion. I don't think that sounds like a terribly bad idea. Otherwise, the only other option might be to autopick a captain based on number of games they have played. But that has its own set of issues...

As for the fatkidding: I just think that if pug.na can REALLY get up and running like it used to, then you'll have "second games" filling up right after the first ones take out most of the invite guys. Usually that "second game" has a lower skill ceiling and doesn't leave that many people out. I think additional population will help solve the fatkidding.

What, letting players pick their own teams?

That's another true point; something that was on my mind as well.

On a side note, the decreased activity in pug.na could just be a due to the participation in both ESEA and CEVO, as well as any number of other things. The pugging community certainly isn't consolidated.

tf2mix is a cycle. First pug is captain, next one is first come first served. The people who get fat kidded from captain get placed in the first come first served pug automatically. In the first come first served pugs users can type !scramble to randomize the teams.

I used to PUG often and generally had fun doing it. Just having more and more issues with balancing work, relationships, ang gaming in general to fit into my time schedule. I barely have time to scrim, let alone PUG. Plus, the couple times a week that I have the energy/time, no one was in pug.na

I also wouldn't doubt if what boulder said being very true.

Tf2pickup i liek.

Even tho the teams can get so screwed since someone is roster riding

But the whole question was Why did pug.na pretty much died, And debating what caused it,
Sure it isnt the main subject of the thread but thats all he was saying.

I really wish that pug.na wasn't dead until after midnight, the games are usually at least close to balanced and people (for the most part) don't act like complete idiots. It's honestly more fun than anything else you can do without a team. Also, if pug.na were to come back to life and the high open through invite crowd were to actually play it, mixes would be better and there would be a lot less bitching about people rolling them.

I personally love the fact that I, some idiot who has never been on an open playoffs team, can play with the better half of invite no questions asked. A lot of the people I know are fucking terrified of playing pug.na because they see an average of 5 invite players per pug, and as a result it's always dead. The fact that mixes are the only irc pugs most of those people have played doesn't help, they expect the level of bullshit to remain constant.

Inhouses because im too bad to play tf2mix

mix.nahl if there are people and i dont get fatkidded

I enjoy pugging very much. I will pug with anyone as long as they exhibit respect for their opponents and the game (ie no fulltime offclass or "throwing"). I adjust my mindset to fit the individual players of the pug so I do not become frustrated if they try too little or too hard.

i use tf2center with some frequency, haven't done a mix or pugna in a while

I play hl irc mixes (#tf2.mix.euhl) because I want to improve and I have too much time on my hands.
Also really helped get friends / people in higher divs who recognized me enough to recommend me on recruitment post

I used to add up and play pugna, but then they swapped ircs and I (and presumably a bunch of the other players who didn't care that much) couldn't be assed to swap when there was another pug irc already there. So I now play mix because it's less effort, and starts quickly. When tf2mix goes through with swapping ircs I'm going to quit that as well and just play inhouses/mge/dm until scrim time.

I've added up to at least 250 pugna's and got picked in just about 60 of them. But I persist, because a lot of those games turn out to be pretty awesome. I've gotten into tf2mix again recently, and while I don't think it's as bad as people say, it can get pretty circlejerky.

Rayspugs for life. I've never had so much fun videogaming.

i don't pug because I'm insecure of my skill in classes outside of medic, but I definitely do want to branch out to other classes. I should look for some chill groups to pug with.

I used to run in-house pugs all the time. I used to encourage people to always play different classes, no matter how good you are. I had a strict rule-set laid out and had to unfortunately ban some people from playing with us. The biggest issue I've had with my pugs was that the skill levels of different users were incredibly broad, we've had players from ugc silver up to invite. I feel like having that big gap kinda killed it. Another PUG cancer was those people who would micro a team and think they were 100x better than everyone else, and if someone didn't listen to them they would start throwing. Shit like that pissed me off to a point where I just stopped running pugs. Maybe one day I'll bring them out of retirement.

How do I join rayspugs? The group is invite only. Do I just ask?

Also to answer the OP, I've lost most of my competitive drive for this game. Even for PUG's I just don't want to try and go through the waiting process for IRC or TF2 Center.

griff pugs are the greatest

I play pugs occasionally, but because of the problems already mentioned in this thread (people throwing/not trying, running perma off classes, getting mad when they are losing), I tend to just use my limited time to scrim with my team.

I'd probably pug more if it actually seemed like people gave a shit.

Mix pugs take 20-30 for everyone to add up and pick teams if you're lucky, and then another 20 minutes for the people picked to actually show up. And usually that only happens because someone breaks into their circlejerk to tell them to get their asses into their channels. Then when you actually play it's pretty much what Chimple said.

I can play 2 or 3 tf2center games in the time it takes me to play one irc pug. They're not even remotely close to actual pugs but if I just want to play some tf2 I'll pick centers over irc every day.

So I pretty much only play rayspugs.

I play mixes, but only because I enjoy it more than MGE all day. Most people aren't exactly fun to play with in mix (I'm probably guilty of this as well).