Given the huge number of new players, I think a separate channel in between pugna and mix is what people would want out of another channel, and given that new map pugs haven't gone well at all, being entirely based around new maps might not work well.

By another pug service, do you mean another IRC pug channel exclusively for non-ESEA maps?

UGC plat is kinda weird, pretty much anything under Open would be reasonable for a low-level tournament. Steel/silver UGC teams is probably your best bet for newbie teams, since asking for people below that would be pretty difficult.

I pretty consistently get up at the same time in the morning throughout the year, regardless of when I go to sleep, or what I've done that day. The most useful thing for that is the fact that I have about 4 different alarms around my room, all about 10 minutes apart from eachother.

The other problem is the psychological effect. If you aren't tired enough when you get home from work to sleep immediately, do something to tire yourself out. I go to sleep around midnight during the week, if I'm not the least bit sleepy by that time, I'll do something mentally taxing to exhaust myself. Reading is also good for sleep, if you want to dedicate ~30 minutes of time to it each night/day. It's an excuse to do something which is good for you anyways.

Anyway I've never consistently had to work at night, so take the above with a grain of salt.

Mana, have you played CS:GO? This is the main menu. I'm reasonably certain that the streams displayed are just the ones which have been accepted by Valve at some point and have the most viewers, sometimes they aren't even streaming CS:GO at all.

Looks cool, though I've never done anything like this myself. The smoke seems a bit odd, not sure how to put it, and the central white plume could be removed altogether, but that's just my opinion.

It's not actually because most people on here are that offended by it, it's really just an avant-garde reaction to something the hive mind deems plebeian.
On topic, make sure nothing cpu intensive has high priority, try a non-g400 mouse, try other Source games if you haven't already.

Week after i49? There might be enough teams by that point to warrant a 64 slot tournament.

Run a full virus check, to rule that out as a possibility.

Good soldier, looking to improve. Too bad he's Californian.

I just did this, my performance did not change at all. Might increase loading times a bit, however. It's pretty easy to do, https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129 explains it.

pretty sure one of the main reason Vector died was because of computer problems, nothing like what you're describing happened.

It might be an internet problem, have you tried the usual fixes for that?

witch hunt over guys

Delete everything in your steam folder besides steam.exe, steam.dll, and your SteamApps folder, then restart your computer, then start steam. That should fix it if it's a steam problem.