My friend Joe and I would like to start a PUG (pickup games) match channel for the Sins community because PUG matches have the potential to be much more fun than merely playing against random people online.

What is a PUG match? Basically, it's similar to a clan match but without schedules, without obligations to play at certain times, and with teams composed of mixed players (often from different clans and/or the clanless). Some of the advantages are:

• Balanced teams. There's an increased chance of having balanced teams and thus more competitive games. Better than a noob stomp. How? Keep reading.
• Custom maps. Anyone who'd take the game seriously enough to play PUG matches could be expected to have downloaded and installed various Galaxy Forge-made maps. Over time, certain maps would become accepted as standard clan match and PUG match maps (sometimes called "ladder maps").
• Voice comm. Anyone who would PUG would also figure out how to use an easy-to-use voice comm program such as Teamspeak2. (No mic required, but it would at least be good to be able to listen to your teammates.)
• More friends, tighter knit-community. Since you'll be chatting on Teamspeak and in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, it will be easier to make online friends.
• Possibility of rejoining games where you drop.. I'm pretty sure that when Sins games are set up over Hamachi virtual private LAN, it's possible to rejoin a game if your connection has dropped.

Joe and I have been playing 5-on-5 capture-the-flag PUG matches for the original Unreal Tournament (1999) for years and it's kept that game alive. Puggers agree that PUG matches are more fun, much more intense, and more meaningful than just playing in public servers.

So how does this work? The games are set up in an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel. People sign up to play and a program called the pugbot monitors the number of people who want to play. When enough people have signed up to play (say 10 for a 5-on-5), two people become team captains and pick the other players in a 1-2-2-2-1 order, with the first captain choosing the first player and the second captain choosing the next two players. This keeps the teams balanced. (Wow! Balanced teams! What a concept!)

OK, so how do you do this?

First you need to learn how to use IRC, which is the best chatroom program on the Internet. The IRC has been around since at least 1994 (when I first logged on to it.) IRC is very easy to use once you know what you're doing. If you use Firefox, you can get the Chatzilla plugin :

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/16

Another good program is called mIRC:

http://www.mirc.com

Numerous other programs are available and all sorts of tutorials can be found on the 'Net.

We have an excellent pugbot (the ABot) and we've already established a channel at this address (as of Jan 17, 2009):

SERVER: irc.GameRadius.net
CHANNEL: #sins

OK, so how does pugging work?

To signal that you'd like to play and to join the match, you simply type:

.join

If you decide that you no longer want to be on the list, type:

.leave

To see who's signed up to play, you type .list and to see the last match that was played you type .last

To become a team captain, you'd type .captain

Players are then picked by their player number, such as .pick 5 (to pick player #5).

What does this look like?

!last
<@ABot> hax KHXMZ DjSatuRn uMBRo Bin necrougly toast Joe sober AnceriZ 11 mins 45 secs ago.

So Khxmz was the first pick, then the second captain picked toast and Joe, then the first captain picked DjSaturdn and umbro, then the second captain picked sober and Anceriz, and poor Bin ended up being last pick.

!list
<@ABot> Unreal Tournament CTF Puglist (4/10) 1) Motoko 2) Sinner 3) Dirty_Sanchez 4) WHIPperSNAPper | 6 spots remaining.

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To make this happen, we need people to idle in the #sinspug channel until the channel has a critical mass of people. Also, we need clan support. We all have to pull together on this project and build a community for it. In time, folks will make custom maps that would be good for competition. We'd probably start with 3-on-3 games and then increase the number of players to 4-on-4 and even 5-on-5 once good maps for those numbers of players have been designed.

Once again, the reasons for doing this:

Balanced teams
Better maps/custom maps
Voice comm
Make friends
Possibility of rejoining when you lose connection