MR_SLIN1. Anecdotal evidence of comp players going to Valve HQ and them telling us they want to help grow the comp scene.
sounds like a good way to shut a community up without having to do anything
2. They created matchmaking, which is still a work in progress. It's definitely bad in its current state, but they did make improvements to it since launch and are still showing it way more support than they show other game modes they've created.
"work in progress"
"did make improvements since launch"
"showing it way more support than they show other game modes they've created"
if i ctrl+f 'competitive' here
one result on October 20, 2017: Moved the Casual and Competitive badge panels to the main menu
June 3, 2017: Fixed UI not displaying the "Searching..." panel when queued for competitive matchmaking
June 2, 2017: Fixed Competitive match history sometimes appearing as empty when connection to matchmaking servers is lost
Feb 14, 2017: Added new survey questions to the end-of-match survey for Casual and Competitive modes and fixed a bug where multiple surveys could be displayed at the same time
Dec 21, 2016: Players can now set their maximum acceptable ping by clicking the new gear icon in the top right of the Casual and Competitive matchmaking lobby screens and choosing "Ping Settings"
The Competitive maps list has been updated
Added cp_granary and cp_badlands ------------------------ on a sidenote, afaik they were gonna update the
Disabled cp_snakewater and cp_foundry ------------------------ maps list every week
Oct 25, 2016: Removed ctf_turbine from the Competitive maps list
...
and other map updates and some elo updates (which to be honest, no one cares about, because barely anyone plays matchmaking for elo to be effective and it's full of cheaters). so i don't know why you'd say any of the three things you said
3. They put streams up on the main page of the game, which everyone knows are mostly comp-centered.
that was the very first thing they did after hundreds of people emailed them to finally do it. is this called "support"?
4. They pushed casuals into a more competitive pub game mode, which includes publicly-shown ranks and hidden MMR. These games are typically more competitive than your typical community server, which is a plus for the comp scene.
i don't know where you read that there's hidden MMR in casual matchmaking. publicly-shown "ranks" are actually levels that always go up. even if it was a plus ufor the competitive scene, it's a side effect of wanting to get rid of vip servers, all-skin-enabled servers and servers where people slowhack their users
5. They've made a ton of balance changes that favor the comp scene over the casual scene.
are you talking about the razorback/ambassador changes that favour highlander more than 6v6? should we list all the changes in the past two years and see which scene gets favoured more often? it's undeniable that valve is more on the economy focused side because they know tf2 is long past the way of becoming a big esport, but they are still making a shit ton of money off of casuals, so all they do is -just enough- to keep the competitive scene silent so they don't get spammed with emails.
like we get it you want to be optimistic about it but jesus.. it's not gonna happen. can we just do our own thing and not give a shit about valve?