Nope, it works perfectly fine. Many people in low divs (including myself) use it.

It's somewhat open, especially if people don't have commitments for Highlander (highlander scrim on weekends with Monday being their match day). The vanilla schedule for a team is usually scrimming tues-thursday though. You could find a team that only plays matches or one that does scrim outside of Tuesday / Thursday.

If you can't find a team that fits well, you could also roster as a substitute and play PUGs until you find one that does or your schedule opens up.

I've edited it to be more clear but I wrote it in that way because Main and Advanced players PUG and scrim deep into the night more often than their lower division counter parts (starting past 10 usually). I've never seen an IM team not just drop dead to sleep after a 10:30.

1) At least for the lower divisions, yes. I can't speak on Main and above. There's a healthy amount of teams and RGL is honestly way better than UGC. Open as the only real free division is subject to a lot of sandbaggers and people dipping down (with class restrictions) though, so if you care to fight for a top 3 spot be prepared for that.

2) Only Main (and IM if you consider 9:30 and 10:30 to be super late) teams and above scrim super late. If you play in open, typical scrim times are at 8:30 and 9:30 with default match times being 9:30 on wednesdays. On average you will probably finish at around 10:30 so it should give you enough time to get to bed. Official matches with a lot of back and forth, pauses or breaks between halves will cut into your sleeping regiment. So you will probably want to encourage people to ready up, be on time or just grind MGE till you steamroll everyone so you can sleep. If you play on a team that is understanding of your schedule, then if scrims go on for too long or people are too late you can cut it short via a change in the match timer or round limit. You can try scheduling scrims earlier but I cannot say how successful you will be.

3) When Pugchamp died, everyone moved into in-house discord servers. Most are usually private and circle jerky, so you gotta know a guy who knows a guy. Some are public though. You can find a spreadsheet of all pug servers here.

TF2CC is pretty much the prime spot for lower division PUGs at the moment as well as a learning center with question threads and resources. Recently, higher division PUGs up to Main have been introduced if you feel like open PUGs become too easy.

Some of my favourites from the 4Zae Charity Stream:

https://clips.twitch.tv/LongCarelessMonitorFloof-8CX6UYLhlXUaBL1i
https://clips.twitch.tv/ConsiderateFaithfulTortoiseEagleEye-c2n3Pkg9t77gKqfx
https://clips.twitch.tv/AmusedRelentlessFennelPlanking-4aSJAmFFXErZI_da
https://clips.twitch.tv/ConcernedShinySandpiperKAPOW-WroXbB4wvg7SmgCw
https://clips.twitch.tv/CrowdedTenuousPheasantKappaWealth-N5iRDe5siIir78mu

I don't know if anything can beat the time we all huddled in a circle to reload the righteous bison while looking down and then joining a casual server to terrorize while named different Storm Trooper units.

The bison has a very interesting reload when you look down...

Salut all, TF2CC is running our 4th newbie cup and we have 200+ accepted signups wanting a starter position!, our last cup had 24 teams and the forecast is that we're going to have more. Thus, we need more coaches to fill in the demand.

IM+ playoffs experience is preferred but will accept even seasoned amateur players (or equivalent). Our base ranges from people who are new to the game itsself to experienced pubbers and below 3rd place Newcomer who are all very new to 6's. You will be teaching them very basic concepts, how to get scrims and occasional demo reviews.

This is a 4 week long commitment starting April 19th to May 19th. You will need to be available online around twice a week, and able to answer text questions from your team throughout. You can also request a co-coach to split responsibilities.

EU coaches are also welcome but you will have to work around NA times.

If you don't have a lot of time commitment but still want to help out and participate, we are looking for coaches to do general map reviews for everyone in our teaching corner (or other concepts) during the cup. We also are always looking for more event runners to have extra hands on deck.

If you're interested, join the TF2CC discord and apply for coach in the linked channel.

Merci!

https://clips.twitch.tv/AnimatedGlamorousHamburgerSuperVinlin-HhB5qmDeMRSr_Edy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTP8w1ROAzU

There is no way to do it without config cheats in insecure mode (or actual cheat clients), you can't do this while playing. There's a reason you only see this in frag movies. You could maybe get it working via preloading as it's just a texture replacement really but there's no telling how often it would break on Valve servers, on community servers it would probably work.

If you're working on a frag movie, the easiest way is to just use Lawena (a glorified config loader) which has a menu for changing skyboxes (this does not work in normal games!). And if you use HLAE, do not turn off insecure mode and try to connect to normal servers, there's a risk of getting banned.

Also some community maps internally contain the skybox instead of referencing a skybox within TF2's base files. This means that on maps like reckoner, normal skybox replacements do not work and you'd have to play on an alternative version of reckoner with no skybox. So even if you were to do this, it wouldn't work on all maps.

If this is something you want to have a discussion of you'll need to ask yourself whether the problem is high level players not really wanting to put forward the time or whether there isn't a space for them to do so.

Tf2 Coaching Central has spaces for coaches to host classes, events, review sessions and post in a channel meant for guides and resources where people can search for key words for what they're looking for If they can't find an already existing guide in there. We're also working on converting the text channel to a forum with better organization and actual tags. Even though we don't allow high level players to play pugs, coaches can get an exception to just be med locked as well.

Wonder for instance found some of his favourite high level educational videos (both old and new) and posted them there and sometimes would pop in to answer text questions. A lot of high level players think they have to be a professor or bust.

I'm sure RGL is also planning on adding unto their guides section.

I've asked adv / invite players and outside of the Newbie Cup, the consensus is that they'd rather have people come to them than the other way around being fairly content with teaching a small subset of people in private. It would be great even if Invite players kept the same relationships but did it in a public discord so people can at least see a learning environment, perhaps even have people join muted to watch. There's a lecture hall channel explicitly for that purpose. A lot of coaches apply and then never do anything. I can't always blame them but that's the state currently.

I think you should avoid having your name being tied to a service. It's been alright for you because the community is tight knit so the good name of swiftyservers passed fairly quickly but I think it's a bad habit.

If you do want a new alias IMO you should pick something else.

https://clips.twitch.tv/DelightfulClumsyHawkNomNom-PukhyZjNaELEYSZ_

I actually think they are relevant to this thread. Both organizations started as one-stop shops for everybody but naturally just progressed to being NA focused due to lack of EU coaches and player interest.

I can speak a lot more accurately for TF2CC, while it hasn't been advertised that well, wants to give out event runner and pug runner roles for the EU scene. I'm sure Newbie Mixes feels the same but understandably aren't always willing to go super far out of their way for a base that hasn't quite bit the bait when they can work on more projects like the Team Drive or Newbie Cup etc.

https://www.twitch.tv/firesidecasts/clip/AgileTenuousAlbatrossM4xHeh-Tc0ZYRQ2ZCQNXRsA?t=00h00m20s