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This is coming along nicely, here is a little status update:
Chat 75%
Design 20%
Steam Auth 90%
Bot 0%
Database 0%

Trath is doing a great job on the coding part. I set up the web server and started making the design this evening.

Screenshot: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8516328/TF2%20Pickup/screenshot1.PNG

If someone who can help is interested in helping he is welcome to sing up.

Edit: Also talked to w1nkee and he would be up for providing game servers.

something like pickup http://tf2l.org/pickup , ist it?

Quoted from skeej

Wow, so many naysayers in this thread. I get that people are trying to warn the initiative takers of the effort required to build something like this, but you could at least try and be supportive of the people that are trying to help this community.

Damn right! Thank you for being supportive.

I hope to see captain style pickups there

Well, how would we decide the captains then? I’ve played lots of mixes in my Doublemix Group and the medics often have no clue who to pick. It will get even harder if hundreds of people will try this pickup out.

and I’d recommend to not introduce skill-specific channels within the site until you’ve reached a considerable audience size. Good luck, and I’m looking forward to see the result!

This was the plan to begin with. I would rather see this running sooner then later so stuff like this can wait.

Quoted from Crafz

Well, how would we decide the captains then? I’ve played lots of mixes in my Doublemix Group and the medics often have no clue who to pick. It will get even harder if hundreds of people will try this pickup out.

Not sure, multiple options:

– By vote (ENSL pickup works like that, after adding and before picking, the added people can vote for captains, top2 become captains, then the picking process starts)

– You get captainship if you have X amount of pickups played. This is how pug.na does it. Not sure how they started out, I guess by an assigned group of captains by admins.

– Medics are captain by default, but they have the option of transfering captainship to their first picked player.

MInd’s other questions were valid too (add as player or class? can you add as multiclass? can more than 12 people add? (i guess no if there’s no captains))

Class adding has it’s pros and cons.
Pros:
-Don’t get forced to play class you can’t play
-Main demos don’t get to rape offclass demos
Cons:
-Wait for an hour for that last medic, when he adds, 6 leave.

Quoted from Godof

Great work Crafz and Trath,I’m really looking forward to see how this will be like.
About the captainship stuff- in the Israeli community,someone has developed a bot that uses ELO,and after a month or two, pickups have become very equalized,mostly ending by a difference of 1-2 or a draw. Israeli pickups had used the method of captains choosing teams before,randomly chosen teams and there was another method that chooses by ranking, but not ELO ranking . From my experience ELO is simply the best.
If you want,and if he agrees, i can put his steam here so you can contact him about it.

I already made an IRC bot which was a copy of the Israeli one with ELO, but the channel was a failure due to people being to lazy/dumb/not wanting to mess with IRC,Q/Auth and hiding hostname. (Understandable, kiddies wanna play TF2, not gonna have to work and figure shit out just to play a shit pickup).

ELO is a nice addition but due to the big difference between the size of the community and the number of actual pickups that every player will play, it will take forever for the system to correct itself to be as close to reality as possible. (Unlike the Israeli community that consisted of 45~ players and had like over 2K pickups in less than a year).

ELO, Captain system and w/e other features or ways this web-based pickup can work are all cool and can be discussed about forever, but there is no point in it really when there isn’t even a base.
With all due respect to Craftz for taking the initiative and getting this project started, throwing random numbers of “X is Y% done” is either super naive or a huge lack of understanding how big something like this is – especially when nobody actually knows what we are doing. (I think I have the big picture of how this would work theoretically, but I don’t have the PHP/JS experience to type shit in on-the-fly).

I have been wanting to talk to TF2’s tech master Skyride but he hasn’t been on IRC for a while. I don’t think he will want to work on this project, but he will certainly be of assistance just by being a guiding light.

TL;DR
If this thing ever happens (Nightmare’s web-based pickup or w/e), it won’t be for a good couple of months.
Don’t get your hopes up, TF2 is dead.
If this thing ever gets near finished, it won’t be for a couple months.

In QL, ELO works nice even so most of players never played against each other. I like shuffle in QL and I hate qlpickup cus of captains (and cus its not automated). And I don’t think that implementing ELO will be much harder than choosing captains, plus it might produce less whining.

Summarized the to-do list so I don’t have to write so much.

Chat: Awarche implemented the steam login in the chat. I’ve done some good work on it. Added login with etf2l name and I also made every action log in to a file: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8516328/TF2%20Pickup/Screenshots/log1.PNG . Also implemented a basic command.

Design: Stopped at this > https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8516328/TF2%20Pickup/Screenshots/screenofpage.PNG for now. Functional but by far not perfect, how ever I don’t put much priority into finishing it until the pickup actually runs.

Bot: Did not really start working on it yet. Still the biggest thing to come, but I hope I will manage.

Awarche and Trath kinda jumped off the boat so, it on me to finish this now.

Help in coding would be appreciated, contact me if you are interested.