http://freakonomics.com/podcast/choking/

This is pretty long but it's a good listen (or read). Lots of interesting stuff comes up that people may find relevant.

That's very deep stuff you just said but the reality is we need much more comprehensive gun regulation and training for owners. It's not 1776 anymore and if the founding fathers could look at our modern situation I'd like to imagine that they'd be reasonable, compromising people.

Awesome guy who's saving our season from roster mayhem. Epitomizes the whole "Chad" mentality both in action and attitude. Very smart and always remains cool and focused. Has great comms and calls and knows what to do and what's going on around him. Gives enemy teams "The Reich" pretty much every night and to that all I can say is "L'chaim!"

I figured out why she is so well liked... It's because she's so damn likable! Super nice and chill and pleasant person and she has a lot of medic experience. Sometimes she can be a bit not-confident in herself and I think she needs to put some serious dedicated effort into playing combat classes and improving her mechanics as that's easily her biggest weakness right now. Good luck P!

https://clips.twitch.tv/BrightPlacidMushroomKreygasm
https://clips.twitch.tv/GlutenFreeExpensiveWolfDendiFace

CONGRATS to The Ballstars, Hunter's team for winning (not big surprise, but they had some hurdles along the way)

2nd place: kraft makk&cheese: 4stime branch, sherwoodfan's team

3rd place: Tullians, the edward/playmo team

A bunch of teams didn't show up but we definitely caught some great games on stream and fun was had. Here are the vods. You might see some highlights from the stream at some point...

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/331128533
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/331185676

Stream is live here! Not gonna lie, total shit show so far but we're gonna do what we can with what we've got!

https://www.twitch.tv/flaaaaff

As predicted I have a bunch of people telling me that they can't show up. I didn't think 10am was too early for west coast since it's a weekend and it's later than your typical school/work start but idk. I'm going to push the tourney start time back by one hour to 2pm Eastern (11 am west) in the hopes of getting some more people to participate. Come out and play, dumkopfs.

Alright, everyone! The tournament starts tomorrow at 1pm Eastern Time! It's a small and intimate little tournament and I certainly hope we don't have a bunch of people not showing up because that would be lame. If you're missing a person then ask the other team if you can use a merc/ringer in their place. Just get a friend and play. There's really not much reason to deny a merc and teams are encouraged to allow so that the game can be played.

We should already have all the captains in the discord server and when a tournament round starts I will message each team captain server info. Upon completion each captain will message me the result. The sets will be best of 3 games and I am allowing 1 hour to each tournament round but in many cases the games will be a lot faster. Once all games in a tournament round are done we can start the next round. Because of this I don't have a great idea how long this could run. I predict that at the very least the finals will be played on Sunday but we shall see. The server reservations last about 5 hours and I doubt playing much more in one day would be wise anyway.

Here is the bracket!!
https://challonge.com/3ub2tbs2

Team list for reference:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sRregNPEtUcGJbPpWG2b2s1YR40i2WrOJCIAKVMEHuo/edit?usp=sharing

Note that it has a bit of an odd shape due to a not-square amount of teams. Round 1 is just two games. So Team Feet, Shitposter Central, gangweed, and [NO NAME (crate's team)] are playing first!

The wonderful and smooth-voiced Flaaf will be broadcasting games on his stream:
https://www.twitch.tv/flaaaaff

BIG SHOUTOUT once more to Arie of serveme.tf (na.serveme.tf in North America) for sponsoring this event by providing servers!

Nope the deal is sealed. We have a little 10 team tournament this time around.

I'm not so sure there should be open / IM medals. This would only encourage more sandbagging and whatnot. I say if you want your medal (and for it to actually mean something) then get to invite and if you want it to be not-green then you're gonna really have to work for it.

Sunday Oct. 28 is the last day to sign up with your team. Frickin' do it -- It's free!! I can all but promise you'll have fun. Worst case you lose and oh well, no biggie. There's 8 teams right now (out of a potential 16). We can definitely run an 8 team tourney. It's a little scant but it would be fine and it is a nice square number. But even if there's a weird number of teams, like 12, it would still be fine as some teams would just get a free win into the next round on the bracket.

Also between this thread and the discord channel some people submitted that they were LFT. We are not going to make teams for you. Someone has to take charge and be a leader. Add people and make some teams. Take charge, do it up.

Here's the people who mentioned they were LFT for this:
(Sorry if you no longer are and something's changed, I'm just listing what I see)

kalieaswari
daybraek
Alexandros
Jon_
Cole
Console
Dimmy
ENEA
golden
sage

PS- I'm going to be experimenting with some slight changes in the future to help improve the flow of the game. People have been playing really hard with a tournament as motivation and have come up with some insanely efficient ways to play. This is great and actually the whole point of this all in a way. So I will see if offense can be made slightly more demanding along with a few other changes. But I won't be doing anything to the map until after the tournament so.. godspeed folks.

Yep, on the other side though. It's mirrored. Excellent throwback to RGB 2. Glad people are thinking of me <3

I'm going to go ahead and betray the inventors and users of this simple yet effective technique.

https://clips.twitch.tv/EasyScaryDiamondEagleEye

Don't get wrecked by this. If you don't understand this play then this might lose you an entire game in only a couple minutes. As a general rule you don't want to leave your defender as the only one to try and stop this (or any other coordinated) attack play because, while his role is important, it's very difficult and rather unreliable. Offense is king in this game mode and can outplay a single defender at the goal often times. Figure out how to prevent this from happening--I know it can be done. Also this technique and similar ones CAN be done from other spots on the map so this is only one to watch out for. Other strong plays will surely be thrown at you in the tournament and it will be the teams that can identify what is being done and adapt, figuring out how to interfere/counter them that will have the most success.

I may modify my map later on but I'm not going to touch it until the tournament is over so pay close attention to the little details!

We're in discord right now. Come play the game with us esp. if you're never played and want to try!