Come play some video games with us.

My mom said we can even stay up late and order pizza.

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Why are the payouts on this site so low?

Betting a value of 7.33 on a 43% underdog only has a potential payout of 4.18, which is a very paltry sum for betting on the team with worse odds.

https://i.imgur.com/YtH6wtQ.png

For comparison, betting roughly the same value on an underdog with the exact same odds on CSGOLounge would yield a payout of 9.58, which is more than double what would be won from the same bet on Saloon.

https://i.imgur.com/iIBFgKW.png

There is currently a bug where the bot crashes right when picks finish. This kills the pug very often because nobody remembers what team they were on after the crash forces them to reload the page.

Then instead of having an ESEA profile, make the requirement to have an ESEA account with at least 1 pug or match played in any game (including CS). Alt accounts will stop bothering with how much that requirement forces them to feed lpkane's wallet.

https://i.imgur.com/XYBgt.gif

There are less custom maps in the rotation this season than in many previous ones. Process, snakewater, and gully were in the competitive map canon long before Valve added them to the game.

It's not like adding a few ammo packs and tires on mid would make granary a completely foreign map. Even lobby players figure out viaduct_pro fairly quickly.

And if you care about the distance the comp community has from pubs there are much bigger issues than requiring four 50 mb map downloads instead of 3.

edit: how do i proofread

Generally speaking, IRC as a whole is dying. It's getting increasingly difficult to find quality scrims on irc at most levels of play. This is especially annoying during the offseason because most teams don't have rosters yet to add team leaders from. Like the recruitment boards here, it would be available as a resource for any div/league but with an implicit assumption that the board is primarily for ESEA 6s because ESEA doesn't have an equivalent available. ESEA does have a scrim finder built into the client but nobody uses it because of it forcing you to use their servers and requiring everyone in the scrim to have premium.

TFTV should add a scrim finding board to fix this. There are at least a few people already posting scrim threads here, so it's not like the board wouldn't see any use. It can also be marked as not visible on the sidebar by default since most people not looking for scrims won't care about those threads.

They're both really chill and friendly and good at/quickly improving at the game.

Only downside is they're kinda gay but who isn't these days?

SICP is a very dense and technical book written 30 years ago for MIT students who went into the course with a strong engineering background. Many of the examples in the book use a lot of higher-level math that isn't really needed to learn programming, because it was expected that its target audience would know it already. And nobody except the stuffiest of academics still use Scheme to do anything. SICP is good for what it is but it's not a very helpful book for beginners.

"Learning to program" by reading through a textbook was honestly never something I found very engaging. The best way to learn is by working on tangible projects; you'll probably learn many of the concepts from any textbook just by googling to find out how to solve a problem you run into while coding. The language you start with really doesn't matter as much as people think it does. Python works fine, although I personally think getting used to a language with C-like syntax early on is helpful but that's just my dumb opinion. Once you're really fluent in one programming language, learning others comes very easily.

If you need ideas for programs to write that are beginner-friendly but still challenging, the DWITE problems are a good place to start.
Once you have a good understanding of the basics you should also take a class about data structures and algorithms, since they are very important things to understand for anything past the most basic programs. The Khan Academy course on algorithms looks well thought-out although I haven't personally used it.

It's not so much a UGC vs ESEA issue as it is a difference in philosophy between 6v6 and HL as a whole. ETF2L highlander has very similar allowed unlocks to UGC.

The idea for 6v6 choosing what and what not to ban has always been "ban everything that isn't fun to play against." This leads to banning out most of the unlocks in the game and only ever playing one map type.
Highlander tries to make a competitive mode that actually resembles the stock game, by making as few arbitrary rules as absolutely possible; item bans will always be arbitrary rules from an outside perspective, even if they are for well-justified reasons. This leads to a lot of things that some people don't like being left in the game (soda popper, the pyro class, etc).

And highlander with the ESEA whitelist would be much worse than highlander right now. Teams would literally choose to turtle on second instead of attempting to go to the midfight because it will take too long for the heavy and engie to rollout without gru/disciplinary action/gunslinger.

It's worth pointing out that the demo in that scrim, lymphatix, is the account that was banned by ugc for hacking right before the current DDoS attack started.

Also this thread needs more entertainment value so have a pastebin (for my beloved = bullet alt and/or associate)
also note that for my beloved is the only one to mention hacking in that chatlog.

http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=635866&find_comment_number=92#n92

In case the thread gets nuked:

http://i.imgur.com/BzPQilR.png

I used to use this dinosaur of a machine:

http://www1.pcmag.com/media/images/14447-dell-dimension-8200.jpg

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,484752,00.asp

It somehow got 50-60 fps consistently with Chris's maxframes config through some black magic. It took a solid 10 minutes to load into a map, though.

bumping for badlands week

Okay I decided to post the actual team status partly because the last time I did that it led to very tangible improvements with us and partly because I am mildly paranoid that my teammates will post about it first in a way that implies everything wrong with our ESEA experience is my fault (it partly is).

Our second half matchups haven't been great so far. We got 2 forfeit wins off of recently dead teams and 2 teams we have no hope of beating. Our only close official matchup so far this season (on viaduct vs snsf) was ruined because they couldn't get six which was a bit sad

We aren't dead yet. This alone exceeded everyone on the team's expectations. Shoutout for tsc for being so dedicated to keeping the team not dead

Not really. This is most evident in our post-mortem mumble discussions after getting rolled in a scrim or match. We would all agree that our losing stems a very fundamental thing: first it was that we had no combo cohesion--our demo overextended into everything and I didn't protect the medic enough. This took around 2 weeks to start working towards a somewhat workable fix. Then we noticed that nobody on the flank communicated anything at all during scrims. That took about 3 weeks to fix and showed no signs of progress until one of our scouts quit and the other one had football gifs posted at him. My method of trying to fix that problem was admittedly very rude but it was out of frustration that our team completely forgets what we need to improve on as soon as the conversation ends. Our currently identified problem is that we don't focus damage or call focuses. Whether this will be fixed before the season ends remains to be seen.

Hell, if I had a time machine for us to go back x months and play against them, a few of my past teams from UGC would probably beat us in a match. I was being carried on those teams but at least they had a decent reaction time when someone called a push.

Everyone on the team has scheduling quirks that rules out almost all of our available times in the week except the default match times. Tsc goes home from his dorm on the weekends and apparently doesn't take his computer with him. Dharma is on a UGC 6s team (she was on it before we got her to play for us). Me, Rhydon, DrJeremy and Hydro are all on different highlander teams. All of those ugc teams are in different divisions and have different scrim schedules, and all of us are playing different classes on said ugc teams than we are in open.

My HL team's scrim schedule is also the most rigorous out of the above--it literally follows every rule from technosex's post even though none of the other people on my hl team have ever seen that post or even browse tftv. I can't fairly prioritize some scrims for the open team over hl because it feels as though the hl team's practice is determined work towards a very real goal which isn't a feeling I've been getting from Just Wait for It at all. I think I also find my experience with my HL team more fulfilling and I would probably learn more from my experiences there than I have from ESEA so far especially if I was playing a more skill-indexed class than fucking highlander engineer.

I am not saying that UGC is a better league or that Highlander is a better game mode, just that I have been having a better experience with them in this particular season, which follows several seasons of UGC that completely failed to "make the hours count" as technosex said.

Our first match of the season was an absolute horror story with every possible ESEA-esque thing that could go wrong going wrong, but Tsc already posted about that in the last thread.

As far as the teams we've played against go, it was pretty discouraging when the Muffin Men spawncamped us with sticky traps after wiping our team on mid, while setting up a sentry on second before they capped second. Seendio was very respectful with their steamroll, though. Shoutout to Seendio.

It feels simultaneously underwhelming and overwhelming.

2 years ago, in UGC Steel back when I first started playing 6s, I was on a team led by Jinta where his magnificent autism led him to make a 20-scrims-per-week schedule, which was ridiculous for a ugc steel summer season team. He claimed it was based on HRG's training schedule. We actually went along with it because everyone on the team was either NEET or on summer vacation at the time so we had nothing better to do with our evenings. The team quickly ran into a huge problem: everyone who wants to scrim vs steel 6s teams is really bad, and we quickly outpaced that level and rolled through every scrim. But we still got mixed results in our official matches because the Steel 6s teams that actually won games were made of offclassing open players, and those teams never scrimmed, at least not vs other steel teams.

ESEA is advertised as a Mecca for teams looking to try as hard as the above one did. One that Just Wait for It has failed to capitalize on. Our attempts at finding games in #tf2scrim have gone hilariously awful. After that we decided to just add low-open team leaders instead. When I became scheduler last week, I decided to just make a thread asking about it instead of rifling through Steam IDs on ESEA team pages trying to find who was interested and had a living team that could play at the same time as us like our last scheduler did(?). Most of the teams that replied from that thread last week still rolled us 5-0.

Everyone on the team has been taking our badness in stride with a good sense of humor, which is strangely fun to see from the inside if a bit jarring to those outside the team. The many puns based on the team name of "Just Wait For It" have also been fun.

Saam's football gifs basically saved our season improvement-wise. Shoutout to Saam.

edit: grammar and phrasing