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Quoted from Shintaz

…

i am shock
d

I do this think this thread has slightly derailed from what I originally intended, was mainly pointing out the fact that a decent pick up bot would be good. Since starting this thread I’ve been talking with a couple of people to make this happen.

Quoted from skeej

Didn’t read the entire thread, still catching up sleep from LAN, but about that pickup, I’ll say what I’ve said before:

Just make it NA captain-style! It fixes everything! Auth is not required, because abusive players will not be picked anyway, and teams are auto-balanced because of the Nash equilibrium!

soz if already mentioned, once again, didn’t read topic.

Thats the plan ;)

Quoted from Squirry

Unmm, I’m sorry if already anyone said it. But I’d like to know what’s exactly “naa-captain style”. I have an idea, but I’d like to know exactly.

2 people volunteer as “captains” then they choose their own team, this will then make the teams fair most of the time…

Ok, so this is probably going to be a bit of a wall of text, but here goes.

So you guys want a better pickup channel? Awesome! I’m up for that. So let’s look at what the main things people are asking for are:

Captain System:
So what are the pros of a captains system? Well the main one is balanced pickups… wait isn’t that a rather large assumption? What you are saying is “the captain on both teams a) is not just going to pick his friends, b) knows the relative skill levels of all players currently in the channel at all 4 classes and c) isn’t overrating himself”. The obvious answer is “well we just need to be careful about who you give captain privs!”. Well that’s going to work great for 3 months. But then what happens when these sensible guys start to get bored? It’s not an if but a when. If you look at who was active in pixel pickup day 1 and who regulars it now, it’s a whole different set of people.

So do you go searching for new sensible guys to take captain status? Great, but eventually you’ll reach a point where there isn’t any more 100% trustworthy guys to give it to. So you start having to lower the standard. Eventually you start having to give it to people like evokje and Animal because they are the only truly active regulars. Alternatively you could give it to people who aren’t that knowledgeable but seem trustworthy. they won’t know any of the players, thus the pickups won’t be balanced and you defeat the entire point of having a pickup system.

Also, was anyone here not particularly sporty at school? I sure as fuck wasn’t. The way the NA bot works right now is that it’s possible you can be skipped over multiple pickups in a row. Considering the biggest reason for pixel pickup’s existence is to introduce new players into comp tf2, that sort of defeats the purpose. If you want an elite channel with sick players, get good, don’t be a retard and you’ll get into pickup2.

Skill Level:
Which segue’s perfectly into the next topic. Skill. Because lets be honest the majority of TF2 players are pretty bad. Like, fucking hell, they’re awful, nevermind when they’re not playing their main class. Contrary to popular belief, a super active european pickup channel would not consist of mainly div2/3 players, it would be filled mostly with everything from pubbers-come-compers to around div4. It’s nothing to with the channel, or the bot, or the rules. There are literally just a metric shitload more not-good players than there are good players.

In pickups, people always want to play with people who are better than them. It’s a phenomena Torden managed to point out long before Pixel Pickup even existed. To be brutally honest, if you want an active-but-not-low-skill pickup channel, you need to kill pickup2. Obviously that is an absurd idea, and byte stopped fiddling with the invite requirements a long time ago, so nothing is going to change on that front.

All of the good players play their PCW’s, then go to pickup2 to chill out. It’s bassically the online equivelant of the local pub for prem/div1/div2 tf2 players. They don’t want to tryhard, they just want to play with other people who are already decent at TF2. And contrary to popular belief, there are plenty of medics in pickup2, so saying you don’t mind playing medic doesn’t mean anything at all.

Team Balance:
Pixel Pickup just had its 2 year birthday a couple of weeks ago. 75% of Pixel Pickup’s registered users have 10 or less games played. Take a moment to digest those 2 facts, over a period of 2 years, the vast majority of our players have played less than 10 games. That is simply not an accurate rating of skill. It doesn’t matter what algorithm, system, or balancing you use, it’s just not enough data. The amount of work that would be required to do it properly is just so wildly beyond what would actually be required.

The retort people come back with is “well it doesn’t have to be complicated, you just need to do some kind of simple 1-5 of div-based rating system!”. Do you have any idea how much time it would take to enter AND maintain a skill rating for all 4 classes for nearly 3000 people? Like seriously? It would take an hour just to READ all of those names, let alone take some time to think about them and rate them on 4 different classes. Again, considering the worst case scenario right now is a single wildly unbalanced pickup (that will go 5-0 in 10-15mins anyway), is that really worth the effort?

The only legitimate suggestion i’ve heard being made is to implement !buddy for medics. That’s pretty much it. The problem we have right now is that we don’t have enough people who just really want to play TF2. We’ve got a lot of people obssesed with DM, being the best, etc. But not enough just really hungry for some 6v6. Until that changes, no wide ranging pickup channel is going to be active.

Captains really wouldn’t work in a public/somewhat unregulated channel. Skyride pretty much has it all there. Even if someone would put that time into ‘rating’ people, no doubt a few would have opinions on how much (read: little) they know and how wrong they all are :|

Quoted from AnimaL

nice, skyride doesnt seem to have a clue how captain system works in na so he imagines his own system that has more faults than it really does

so yea, shut up ppl and go play those 5-0 pugs..its fun

Go ahead and explain the NA captain system then.

Thank you.

Quoted from Si^

[…]

tldr: They can take our lives but they can never take our freedom.

rofl, well said :P

As for Pixel Pickups, I reckon I should use it more often, but probably the main reason why new people (or maybe even low-div regulars) don’t want to get in it is because of the discomfort of playing with strangers, especially those who outclass them by like 2 divs or something. In general people like to play with people they know instead of matching up with random people whom they’ve never met, alongside the perpetual fear that if they don’t perform up to par they may get looked down upon or even shunned and flamed for “not keeping up with the people who know their game”.

Skyride has a point with the captain system, though. People will be people, and for the same reason explained above, biased picks will almost always happen regardless of whether the captains are unbiased or not. No one wants to play with someone who will bring them down or burden them, and no one wants to be in a team full of spastics, the same way people shun those who try to get a game with people waaaaay out of their league simply because “they can’t keep up and will cost us dearly”.

People do want to play TF2, people do want to play in mixes, but often because of the simplistic nature of human cliques, they will almost never deviate from the tried and true players which they know can perform up to a person’s individual standard.