Our major April update has dropped! We introduce player whitelisting and blacklisting with the highly requested pick-up game announcement feature, you can check all the deets here - https://buff.ly/3LYfrEo

Hey All,

We are back already with our first update on the progress of our pick-up game system! Check it out here - https://blog.qixalite.com/pick-up-games-march-2022-update-1/.

Hey Smuk3sh,

Great question! The current functionality we have available is when a pickup game has reached the player requirements (e.g. a sixes match needs 12 players) it will lock the match and initiate a ready-up/afk check to ensure all players are present before the game starts. A pug host can choose to enable or disable the AFK check.

I can't quite remember being involved in that joke, but I can imagine a few team members back then that liked to banter and joke around, it is part of the Aussie spirit after all XD. Also, it's nice seeing a familiar face on this post 200, would love to catch up with you sometime!

The infrastructure we have at the moment gave us confidence in striving for an ambitious goal. We have already begun reaching out and liaising with pug groups in different regions to get insight into what hosts and players want. It is a focus for us initially to develop a highly customisable pickup game solution where pug hosts are provided lots of ways to run a match how they and their peers want. This is our first step to try and incentivise inhouse groups to use a platform that makes the process of hosting a pug a lot more convenient.

Again, we hope we can execute on the development of the system and meet your expectations!

Appreciate your kind remarks! It is a core belief of ours that through automation and tools we can make the process more convenient for both PUG hosts and players; this won't be an easy ride for us, but we can only hope through healthy conversation between the community and us, that we can deliver on our ambitions and expectations of players (at least most of them).

Hey Spe0,

I'd like to keep this thread on the topic of the project we are creating, so if you wish to chat to us about your concerns you can use our support channels in our main discord here - discord.gg/qixalite. However, on a quick note, any of our platforms are governed by our Community Guidelines and any found breach of those guidelines will result in penalties.

We do take a strong stance against Discrimination & Hate Speech which carries a minimum ban period of 1 month, so I would recommend to your friends to change their behaviour to avoid more severe penalties in the future.

In the future, we plan to completely open up most of the server regions we support (30+ locations), which should cover nearly every area that competitive TF2 is played. However, while we are testing the locations will be limited to areas that have the least infrastructure cost.

I do like the idea you have suggested with the random medic feature and could see how we could add it as a setting for players to enable/disable in their pickup games. I'll make sure to bring it up to the team at our next meeting and see if we can gain some agreement to get it added to our task list.

Just to elaborate on our post, we understand that some players aren't looking to improve, just want to play with friends or want to only play with people at a certain skill level.

A way we are attempting to incentivise players coming to a central system is that they will be able to host their own pickup games on this platform.

Whether they want the bot in their Discord or prefer to have everything already setup they can host private matches from our Discord instead. We are facilitating the ability to use our automated convenient tools for people to host public and private pickup games.

As a long-term goal for us, we will create ranked pickup games as outlined in our blog post. This feature won't be available for private use and is intended to act as our official matches. These matches will be highly structured, targeted at specific skill levels, contribute to a ranking system and provide skill progression regardless of experience.

We understand this is a difficult issue that our team plans to work at, but we believe this is a great step by having an open system that attracts all types of players, whether you want to host a private game for your friends or you are looking for a game targeted at new players, there will be something there to meet your needs.

I wouldn't say we claim that we have the "definitive pugging experience", but we do have aspirations that our team wants to meet. We have an idea of where we want to go and aren't already locked into already-made systems; this is where our team wants to share our development with anyone that is interested so we can have actionable feedback if we need to change directions.

We would position ourselves wanting to have the goal of being the "definitive pugging experience", but know that is a difficult task to achieve and is only possible if we work with the people we have in mind to use our service.

Hey RoL,

Thank you for the candour and can see your point in relation to NA. Many of the smaller regions, unfortunately, don't have platforms that they can play on which simplify the process of getting into the competitive scene.

But to address your point about NA, we do plan to reach out to various pug groups and work with them to see how we can meet their requirements and hopefully expectations. We are optimistic and hopeful that our team can bring something unique to your part of the world.

Developing a new pickup game solution that meets the expectations of competitive players is hard. Today, we begin to share that journey with you.

Post: https://blog.qixalite.com/unifying-a-fragmented-pug-experience/

Our team will continue to post updates to this thread as we continue to develop this system. This is to make it more convenient for interested people that are active on TFTV, otherwise, you can keep updated with everything we do at blog.qixalite.com.

We appreciate anyone willing to help us test and provide constructive feedback throughout this process.

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

That wraps up our server expansion for North America this year with our new region in Dallas. Supporting 10 locations now for this trial with free servers located in Chicago, Iowa and Dallas, we look forward to working with everyone over the next couple of months in refining our current service and exploring new endeavours!

Locations:

• Chicago
  
• Iowa
  
• Dallas
  
• Las Vegas
  
• Los Angeles
  
• Montreal
  
• North Virginia
  
• Oregon
  
• Salt Lake City
  
• South Carolina

We hope everyone has a merry Christmas and stays safe as we head into the December period. Reach out to any of our staff if you need a helping hand or just to have a friendly conversation.

Kindest Regards,
Qixalite

We have completed our expansion for the year in North America with our final location being Dallas. It supports 4 free servers and 4 exclusive servers, we look forward to refining our booking system in the region as we continue testing!

Afternoon / Evening,

We are officially adding Chicago to our North America server trial; this comes with 4 free servers and 50 exclusive servers. These new servers are also using an experimental server image, so let us know if you have issues during this testing phase.

Kindest Regards,
Kodyn