I fail to see how a 5 time increase in the amount of pugs happening concurrently is a decrease...

Nah I think you're still missing one...

i think you're still missing an Olgha...

Are you sure this is the right velocity...

Faceit vs Pugchamp for me basically boils down to risk vs reward. The risk of faceit is alienating the existing comp base in the hopes of creating a massive scene of new players (which is one hell of a long shot). The risk of pugchamp is in not bringing in new players with the benefit of keeping the existing player base happy. TF2PL beginner has brought in 6450 players (if you combine the eu and na ones). Assuming a constant influx of players, we see 1612 players brought in a month. So the beginner divisions are doing fairly well. There is a dramatic decrease in player number as you go into amateur and advanced, 1623 and 679 respectively. Remember, these numbers only reflect the number of players in the hub, NOT the number of players who actively play. So it stands to reason that beginner is worthwhile, whereas amateur is borderline and advanced is just barely cutting it, especially when you see that advanced rarely, if ever anymore, has more than one pug going at a time.

The fact that advanced has so few active players would tell most sane people that playing pugchamp is worth it, even if it is only used by them. As the beginner players rank up, they can start to use the amateur and advanced hubs for themselves, and will eventually build up enough of a base in both hubs to be able effectively run pugs in advanced consistently, without massive delays.

One point that I almost never hear discussed is: Why don't we focus on bringing more active players of the game, i.e pubbers etc. into comp, as opposed to focusing on people who play games in general. I feel like we'd have more success if b4nny would spend his time, or at least more of it, working with valve to encourage average players to play comp and to at least inform them that a scene exists. TFTV rarely sees more than 300 viewers, and I doubt that more than 5% of those viewers are people who've never seen competitive tf2 before. If b4nny and Valve came out and said, "Hey, we're going to stream ESEA Grand Finals on Fill in the Blank Valve channel, or on Fill in the Blank ESEA Channel" that would encourage a lot more players who already know how the game works to come in and try it out, effectively boosting our player base. It might also have the added benefit of causing more people to try out faceit, thus giving Faceit a reason to change their site to benefit us some more.

I wish I knew how many players joined beginner each month, because I have a sneaking suspicion that it decreases each month, which would tell us that we're not actually increasing the comp player base, just increasing the number of people who play pugs on one particular site, as more and more of the existing player base goes to this one site.

lft

Mustardoverlord has been using your pc...

LFT

Go Velocity!

Go velocity!

Go max!

gg slime time. Fun match

Allez Ascent！

ATX

Go Brainsense!