I wouldn't worry too much about that. VTV has been involved in i-series TF2 casts since forever and while our online commentaries have been reduced recently, the passion and dedication is still there for these offline events. We promoted TFTV at the last event as much as we could and the collaboration between the orgs and other individuals produced the highest quality TF2 spectacle to date in both online and at-event coverage. I'm sure that will continue and the relationship between the two orgs at these events will only continue to grow.

Still seeing if it's viable for me to go. Went to Amsterdam last month which crippled my finances, but I'm so up for this! Same with Beta but he's waiting for confirmation from the wife that he's allowed ;).

Awwe this thread makes me sad to realise how many good players, bad players, and just... TF2 personalities have left the community. Seeing some of these names mentioned makes me feel funny inside ;o

Yes, with the EU ruleset, the team with the disadvantage is encouraged to push. Why? Because otherwise they lose the game. The only motivation for a team to push with the US ruleset is because otherwise they will get completely bored out of their mind. When there is money involved, people are quite happy to sit there and be bored if it means they have an increased chance of walking away from the game with some cash in their pocket. This is why I'm a fan of the EU ruleset.

Excluding the scoreline, the advantages in TF2 are actually very small. You get a slight respawn advantage by having more capture points secured than your opponents, and a team with an uber advantage gets just several seconds of invulnerability. Even this advantage carries a risk, that if you do not accomplish anything with your uber push, the enemy team now has an uber advantage. Most of the time the uber advantage is partially negated by the 'defenders advantage' which includes height advantages and having a resupply near them.

The fact is, in a high stakes game, the advantage often isn't enough for the advantageous team to want to make a push with. So they will be content with staying put. TF2 having a clock is what promotes action during high stakes games and yes... the action comes from the team who NEED to make a play, which is the team who is losing.

This is the same in a number of sports. A team in football (soccer) will put more strikers on the field near the end of the game if they are losing. This means less defenders but it is a risk they need to take as they are the ones who need goals. Sure, the winning team might take off a striker and put on another defender because they are defending their advantage... their score advantage. This makes perfect sense and is just called being smart. If the defenders are too good at locking down, then sure, it might be boring to watch, but this is not always the case.

If you make it hard to teams to pull back points, it might encourage them to play smarter so that they don't get into a position where they are far behind and require drastic methods to get them back into the game.

So more onto the topic... if you want TF2 to be more entertaining / interesting, then you firstly need to play to a clock. Timers force teams to do something. Secondly, we need that round timer to actually come into play. Maybe change it so the round timer doesn't reset when a point is captured, but instead rewards half a point to the team with the most capture points after this timer expires. This should hopefully encourage more time based, ultimatums, whether that means a team might decide to just hold for 2 minutes or to make a push for the end of the round with nothing to lose. You will still get stalemates but they would be shorter and have more options for both teams. Don't know if that made perfect sense but rushing this :P

Oh and I don't actually know the facts, but just responding to what people are writing here. Just pure theory crafting :).

So the alternative is to let them default the game, pay them the sponsor's money, and then go and explain to the sponsors why they didn't get exposure in a grand final because people decided not to play. The grand final is a big deal. If I was a sponsor, I don't think I'd sponsor this league again.

At least by withholding the prize money for the team that defaults, the league can suggest to the sponsor that the remaining money gets put into a new, smaller tournament, or gets carried across into the next season keeping them on as a minor sponsor. This keeps them happy.

Of course, we all know it wouldn't come to that. What is more likely to happen, is the other team show up and play with pyros and engineers just to stick a middle finger up to the league because they wouldn't let the players play when they wanted. League, Community, and even future sponsorship deals lose in this case.

At that point i'd also withhold money, write a new rule stating that teams must complete all of their playoff matches and attempt play to the best of their ability (admin's discretion), otherwise they may not be paid prize money and could face player bans. Yeah... I'm not a fan of on-the-fly rules, but in this case I think it's fully justifiable otherwise everyone is going to lose anyway.

A league isn't meant to fit their schedule around the players. The players should fit their schedule around the league. Of course this is just a hobbie for us and there are more important issues in life to attend, but then we shouldn't really complain when we need to get a sub in.

Work Christmas party day! It's going to get messy.

This always happens during ETF2L finals. Throughout the season players play every week and then when it gets to the final, people disappear for a couple of weeks. You can't really blame the league too much on this one (players being unavailable shouldn't be their problem... they have a league to run), but I guess it could be handled differently.

As for a comment mentioned about holding onto prize money, I actually think that is a VERY fair thing to do. Sponsors expect a level of coverage for their cash / hardware, just as they do with any sport. It's not a donation just for the sake of it (most of the time anyway). If I sponsored a tournament and the grand final was effectively boycotted by one of the teams, I sure as hell wouldn't pay up as if anything, a large portion of the brand exposure would come from the Grand final. At least holding prize money shows to the sponsors that the league is serious about promoting the sponsor and we might actually be able to retain that sponsorship going into the next season.

If we want to grow TF2, we either get competitive players from other games to transition over, or we get casual players to play the game competitively. We aren't going to get many players from other games transitioning over as the game is old and most potential targets would have already moved. We need the casual players.

Ultimately it comes down to how much of our 'competitive game mode' we are willing to compromise to get a larger player base.

Competitive TF2 needs to be 'approachable' and enjoyable for the casual players but we lock the game down far too much for that to happen (unlocks, class limits, team size, map pool). Casual TF2 players enjoy playing public TF2 and they also love being social. If competitive TF2 was simply an organised version of public TF2 the competitive game would be significantly larger... but also quite shit.

Closer you get the game to the public style, the larger our player base gets. Now go draw your line on how far you are willing to go with that.

The alternatives are just small steps we can do to getting a few more extra players. We won't get many, you probably wouldn't even notice the growth happen but there would be some. This can be done by adding more media content, more live streaming and casting, more tutorial videos, getting youtube TF2 celebs to heavily promote the game, getting competitive players into the public servers and effectively recruiting people directly from the servers to go and play lobby's (could dedicate a day every month where we all go out and do this), more of those internet celeb matches (try to get League / dota stars in), and just generally having people in the community putting in some effort to add more exposure to the game.

Miss two attempts at a headshot in a row... just walk away. You're not hitting a third attempt.

Hit two headshots in a row... you will always hit the third.

It's clearly minus fragged by people who don't live in the UK :P
The man has a point! :)

Still, the venue is nice but just have to hope Coventry don't have a home (football) match on the i-series weekend, otherwise things could get messy.

It's fine for people to voice their opinion and even attempt to sway others, but I always think the first post in a poll thread should be 100% neutral, as well as the actual poll. After that people can campaign as much as they want. Otherwise it just looks like the pole author is trying to get people to side with them, and even if only some people do decide to side with that person, you might find that other people deliberately piss against the wind to show they haven't been influenced.

This one has been done correctly :)

I wish people would do polls properly for once.

You shouldn't post your own personal view in the original post as it could cause bias and people that might not have thought about their choice yet will often look for an answer to be given to them.

You shouldn't use 'I'm crazy because...' as you are attaching your own negative stigma onto that option which could influence the results.

It makes the poll almost worthless on a subject that people are genuinely interested about, which is a shame.

For the record. Pay to play would kill ETF2L, which in turn would kill Europe's competitive TF2 scene. Sure, you will get a very small, highly competitive league, but a large number of teams, especially the lower division teams would simply call it a day and gradually drift away from playing Team Fortress 2 at all. The only way it could work, is if it was optional, and barely anyone is going to pay an optional charge making it pointless.

Prizes are nice, but shouldn't be why people play TF2. People are willing to fund competitions, but not prizes. You get players jumping on the LAN fundraisers because it's entertaining to watch and be part of those competitions. Paying for prize-pools doesn't add any enjoyment to the game except for the few that actually win it.

If you want a pay-to-play league, I strongly suggest leaving ETF2L out of the equation completely and working on some sort of ESA or other related solution. Honestly, messing about with ETF2L's system has a very strong likelihood of killing off competitive TF2 (too long to fully explain how but I'm sure some people could work out the chain reaction that would almost certainly follow). I really hope people will look at consequences before any decisions are made.

ETF2L isn't going anywhere, has existing structure in place, and in effect unifies the two largest competitive TF2 scenes. ETF2L is non-profit and community run. It's also dedicated for just TF2, so things actually get done when our community puts the effort in.

The only downside to it is the name. Of course there are ways around it, but it might be a little confusing for new players to come in from the US and have to sign up to a European TF2 league website.

I think NA would really enjoy playing in an NA ETF2L league. Might even be able to get some fun 'off-season champions league' going on, where the top few teams of NA prem and EU prem play in a 'home/away' system. More points awarded for an away win (played on other continent's servers) etc...

But yeah... just the name is the issue.

Other options could work too, but I quite like the sound of this one.