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Quoted from Crafz

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And how would pixelpickup be better? Also, you are wrong if you think you are doing something productive here. Trath has written a perfectly fine pickup bot with elo in Java. Someone has yet to explain to what’s wrong with his bot apart from the fact that it’s a irc bot. As for my website, I have not been promoting it much outside of etf2l because I know it’s a buggy piece of crap. Besides, we are not that bad off when it comes to user count: http://www.tf2pickup.net/php/stats

Trath’s bot was horrifically buggy. Like an utter mess. Or rather, someone elses bot that trath added about 100 lines of code to was. It’s not a perfectly fine. It had this absurdly complex login system with steam auths that confused people and didn’t even work properly half the time. A lot of the commands had really nonsensical and it just didn’t have a responsive feel to it.

Other than the ELO system which is of dubious benefit to begin with, it was far inferior to the pixel bot in very nearly every regard.

Also you’re missing the point here on numbers. Pickups should be the first port of call to anyone wanting to try out comp tf2. The fact that you are not promoting it elsewhere or actively trying to get high level players playing there stops this from working. Every open mm system like this is on the road to a horrible div12-circlejerk-singularity from the minute they are launched, and it takes a strong admin presence to keep it away from that. It’s happened with TF2Lobby, it happened with pre-purge pixel back in early 2011, it happened with EU newbie mixes, and its happening now with tf2pickup.net.

Also you say it’s buggy, like, 4 months is not a reasonable timescale to make a service like this stable. I wrote the pixel bot originally in about 3 weeks, and spent another 2 making minor tweaks to make it stable. I’m even saying 6 weeks for this project to be safe, it’s probably not going to take that long.

Quoted from fraac

The popularity of tf2pickup compared to its rudimentary design and lack publicity says that the web interface is absolutely crucial. For a friendly experience you need people personally greeting everyone who comes, which one person can’t do all the time, and if they take time off it’ll revert to unfriendly within a few days, in my experience. To be blunt, this community needs a lot of parenting, if you go the personal route rather than automation. I like both ways, I think they can be complementary.

To be honest the numbers on tf2pickup.net are pretty comparable to the glory days of pixel pickup. I think we almost hit 80 games in a single day a few times. Thing is its more about quality than quantity. The last thing you want to happen is to get eternal september’d by new players.

Regarding skill systems, they’re a waste of time. They don’t work (in TF2) simply because you don’t have enough data.

The reason Chaplain and Pledge play there is because it’s the only place to play regularly. You also might notice they spend half the game either raging at how terrible their team is, or loling and absurd shit people on the other team are doing while facerolling. I can tell you from personal experience that is not the regular demeanor for either of those guys.

The only bad thing is that this would be the 3rd pickup “channel”. We have tf2pickup and mpuktf2 for the better players. I fear that pixelpickup will be inactive.

Quoted from AnimaL

Crafz, nevermind skyride. Hes mad about the fact you did a better job in less time than he ever did. Gj and just get more admins on your team, because the site works great!

Pretty much what i think is happening lol.

I’m kind of with Animal on this to be honest. tf2pickup works great, craftz has done an awesome job and yes I play there because there are regular games, thats what I want from an open pickup – lots of games.

You say that people spend the majority of the time whining about how bad their team is but you also say he doesn’t do a good enough job at getting NEW players in?

So if pixelpickup is going to be good at getting new players in then surely I’m going to be spending even more of my time whining about how bad the team is??

You can talk about the ‘glory’ days for pixelpickup all you want but there is no chance that you had as many games played per day average as tf2pickup does.

Obviously if you want to recreate pixel pickup then do, I’m just saying that its probably a waste of time because we have a pretty sweet system in place right now. If craftz keeps putting time into it then it’ll become the best open pickup system we’ve had to date.

You might be right about traths bot, I though he fixed most bugs by now. Also, you should not forget that my website, when going online was horrifically buggy. Just read the change log, which was started 2 days after were already playing on it. We had numerous site breaking bugs since then and people kept coming back. Since you are not going to integrate matchmaking, how would your bot be better then any of the old bots or my website and how would you combat the future?

Watching TF2pickup.net mumble and see that there is 4 pickups running at the same time, with some good names in there, just benefits the community so much.
I was playing really often in #pixeltf2.pickup but you just have to admit that tf2pickup.net is atm a really good option.

The only problem I see, it’s that crafz should implement an automatic upload system for logs, similar to what #mpuktf2.pickup2 servers do.