We were giving it some time to see how people feel about the queue changes and are going to be opening up some polls this week for feedback.

I usually have the pug log channel (reports/sub votes/appeals) visible most of the evening, except for times like last night when I was busy doing production. And yes, you were the first to report that player for trolling. I'll be working on a way to notify any report creators if their report resulted in disciplinary action, just so that there is some feedback.

Right now the data that the expected performance is based on is temporary until we get enough data from players declaring their league history, then we will be using stats from the pugs. Each role has a ratio of which score metrics make up the total performance score, such as prioritizing k/d less on roamer than pocket, and not considering kills for medics at all.

NOTICE: The PUG website will be down until 9:30PM ET while we roll out the new elo update!

Ideally any substantial amount of money raised beyond covering current venue costs would go towards compensating LAN players/staff basics like food, travel, and lodging before funding the major $10k+ upgrade to a fancier venue. I haven't seen that amount of TF2 fundraising outside of the charity events, but if those essentials are covered and we outgrow what our current venues can handle, I don't see why not.

Trust me, we would love to and have definitely explored potential esports venues all over the US, but the reality is that any good venues that have:

• Space for 50-100+ spectators
  
• Public transit and dining/lodging nearby
  
• At least 24 SUPPLIED gaming PCs (players don't want BYOC and renting gaming PCs + 240hz monitors externally is too complex and pricey) - not accounting PCs for production, admins, servers, etc.

are completely out of our price range or straight up don't exist. It also doesn't help that the esports bubble is currently bursting post-covid and existing esports venues are struggling to stay afloat. For our first LAN in Foxborough, we were VERY lucky that Helix agreed to keep the pricing of the original New Jersey venue, which was much much smaller. For our 2nd LAN, we knew that players didn't like the lack of public transit and lodging/dining in Foxborough, Philly Localhost has experience hosting TF2 LANs, is accessible via the NE rail anywhere from VA to MA, was relatively affordable, and seemed like a safe bet. The LH in Denver was a close 2nd choice though.

The major reason is cost though. TF2 just doesn't have the money.

I think the RGL updater plugin was overwriting the modified config files, should be fixed now hopefully

pushed fix

will consider!

You're right and that never should have been the intention, should be fixed to prioritize earlier added players now!

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".

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

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.

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.

Back to weekly update #6
NEW:
- It's now random which captain picks first
- Winning a PUG no longer decreases your elo, regardless of other factors
- Volume per-notification can be adjusted
- Increased post-pug voice channel lifetime from 8 to 15 minutes
- There is now a pre-ready option for 10 minutes
-- We plan to add an alert when it expires in the next update, along with being able to customize how long you want your pre-readies to last

FIXES:
- Fixed players getting kicked from servers they are pugging on
- Fixed players not being able to use voice activity when channels are merged
- Fixed missing player stats in queue
- Fixed ineligible player role picks not being shown
- Fixed one of the servers having a 30min config instead of 20min

Forgot to mention this in the big reply post, but this is ready to be pushed in the next update