bout tree fiddy

I think that S13 was a very good season for the growth of the game, and the bigger IM in S14 coming up will be even more helpful. Bp got sponsored by HRG, so sponsors are starting to care, and now we have ESEA admins that we can bitch to for things we want. Tip of the Hats probably also got us exposure as well as proved to use that TF2 is not a small community anymore (35k for charity!)

I actually had a couple of newbies yesterday come to the newbie mix because of the charity it gave tf2 a lot of exposure. I think this game can grow especially because so many people are trying to make teams.

NFL is so popular because people feel pride in their teams and love the competition and the bragging rights once their team does well. I'm not exactly sure how, but I think once we can get some serious team-loyalty or competitiveness in the fans themselves people will be a lot more passionate about Esports.

We need teams to actually stay alive for more than a season for that.

Well there's usually a team b4nny and a team Platinum

We need to change the way we market this game to gain popularity.

Tf.tv and our broader community needs to reach out to:

Server providers (tragic has shown how successful this can be), Pub server communities (lotus has a HL team now), and actual companies to see if they'd be happy running adds with us. All we'd need is some open source techno music, and a 10 second fade in fade out of a logo and link for tragic or iT, or any other community org. It helps tf.tv because it could demonstrate ad-viewing potential (these could be stored on a youtube playlist) as well as help the community generally by advertising various orgs as well as Tf.tv. I'm sure razer and etc would he happy if somebody just said "hey bro, we'd like to run some adds for you on our casts of tf2" this also opens avenues for individual players to get involved in marketing - admit it, if b4nny said "I love this mouse" at least some small portion of the community's opinions on that product would change - which is one way to regain MGO attention.

We also need to restructure the way we do casts. Several streamers other than Truktruk need to be enlisted to constantly rebroadcast content at set times so people can tune in regularly from the EU and NA scenes.

I like skyride's intro screen, but we need to start running content at the start - tragic could make a crappy add for himself, somebody could make an add for various other things and that's what'd run prior to the game starting, and if some technical problems happen, instead of forcing the casters to jabber at each other for 30+ minutes, we should have some sort of back up plan, like a playlist of popular frag/jump movies or adds that help the community.

We should also get casters and teams a bit closer together to facilitate a proper half-time where adds could be run or a few frag videos (you only need 5 mins for this) instead of forcing casters to again talk forever and risk saying something silly or causing viewers to lose interest.

Just some ideas blurted onto forum page.

I think TF2 as a comp scene is fine, although the skill level may decrease slightly in the lower divisions because of the influx of new people we're going to see over the next 2-3 seasons as HL players cross over and new people get drawn in thanks to Tip o' hats, and i46/i49 and of course LAN interest in general.

I think steps could be taken into making some kind of 24/7 stream bot which could just play over old ESEA IM and invite POV demos, interspersed with ads. There could be a schedule for casted demos, and live matches, as well as community events. Sort of a central hub of casting and competitive TF2, recorded casts could be used as well. It would take a dedicated server, as well as a good chunk of memory for saved casts, and some logistics for casters to control the bot, but if it could be done, we would effectively have an online TV show dedicated to TF2. Would be pretty cool.

Monthly events, I think this will bring huge exposure to this game. Plus anybody who are running events can just message me and I'm willing to provide however many servers are needed.

What ever happened to making ESEA pugs not terrible?

With the STVs so easily accessible from ESEA, this process could actually be entirely automated. The host computer could simply download a bunch of ESEA STV's and then randomly pick a player to spec for the whole match.

#11 nobody wants to pay for pugs on a shitty client when they get them for free already

The fact that valve has hauled TF2 into Steampipe means they at least give a small shit. Instead of spamming hats they are dealing with core issues.

Second, what keeps me, and many others I suppose, here is the very high skill ceiling. Even individually the skill ceiling is still beyond the best players in the world. Add on the fact that you work with a team in a first person view and the game becomes very very complex very quickly. I like clicking on things. Maybe I'm autistic.

A growing community requires 3 things: a great game, opportunities for new players to learn the game, and positive and entertaining personalities within the community. We already have a great game, at least at the core (minus all the airblast/mini-sentry/etc. bullshit). Newbie mixes offer the best opportunities for learning actual competitive play. Pubs will obviously be the first step to learning how to play the game at all. Even though people like Seanbud and Truktruk stream a lot and provide entertainment, most invite/prem players don't. That cuts us off from a majority of personalities in TF2.

I'd say at the root though the problem lies in the huge skill gap between new players and competitive players, AND the tendency for pubs to keep bad players bad and just all around piss off people trying to get good. Pyros/engie/heavy are generally designed for casual players while demo/scout/soldier are designed for competitive players, which makes pub play into this weird world where no one seems to be going anywhere real fast. Either Valve has to step in (good joke) and somehow make pub play better (like improving the fucking terrible pub map pool) or groups of individuals will have to start creating servers specifically designed for "casual competitive" play. Get rid of half of TF2 and it's a great game. Unfortunately the other half is pretty shitty.

I am hoping to plan a monthly 8-16 team TF2 tournament. It will start out free, but kind of looking at a $20-25 dollar buy-in for teams. I'm looking to make the first one late June or early July. The tournament will use the ESEA format, double elimination, and stream coverage. The plan is rough, but the Tip of the Hats stream kinda kicked my butt into gear when it shows how a planned event can possibly bring in supporters of the game. The stream coverage might be with people you do not recognize, but that will change when we get a few monthly tournaments completed.

Tragic, I will be talking with you in the coming weeks to get something set up.

Comp TF2 has been on a slow growth pattern since day 1 and the game is continuing to grow. It's not going to be big without the support of the developers, but at least we can keep the game alive for the people who enjoy it the most.

The area that has seen the biggest growth in TF2 is streaming. Viewership has grown a ridiculous amount over the past year, and there are more streamers popping up every day. TF2 also has incredible retention, as people who watch those streams watch for long periods of time (I think the avg was like 30 min per user).

I personally think that the best thing for the community is the TFTV/ESEA MOTW casts which give people the opportunity to come together as a community to watch high level TF2. It keeps people engaged and it unifies us as a small community. But it seems that the best casters are going away, and mediocre ones like myself are getting busier with our lives. Personally, and I'm not speaking for anyone else, I love casting as a way to give back to the community but there is not much incentive to do it. Marxist talks about how we need more cameramen but not everyone has the talent or the time and dedication that a person like TrukTruk has to put into that sort of work. He put in two back to back 12 hour+ weekends of solid TF2 streaming simply because he loves the game and the community. It's difficult to find other people who will do the same.

tl;dr Streaming and casting is our biggest growth opportunity and next season we will have less casters, camera, etc to run the shows resulting in a lack of content. IMO this is due to a lack of incentives to cast.

And even though we need content, it can't just be mass produced. The other key is quality content. As we saw with eXtv, if you open it up to be used by anyone, it destroys the brand. TF2 streaming and casting needs high quality, high level, good stuff to be produced. If there were more content producers, competitive TF2 would be a lot better off.

Streaming and casting takes a lot of time and effort though to create that quality product, and there truly are no incentives right now to put all of that time into it. The only reason it happens is because we love the game, but that only goes so far.

How would we be able to create this team-loyalty/competitiveness for players that aren't prem/invite? With professional sports world-wide, they do so by representing their country/state/city. For Esports its a matter of representing their continent, NA vs EU vs AU, but is this enough? How else could we increase this sense of "belongingness" and loyalty?

If this is what it is coming down to for streamers/casters/cameramen than does this leave it up to a new generation of streamers/casters/cameramen? Also with what Waldo suggested with Casting TV maybe we won't need that many casters in the future if we are just re-using previous glory casts.

Trust me on this one. Nobody cares about casting old games. The only person who has been able to do it with any amount of success is Sal. The majority of viewership comes from live shoutcasting of matches.

Also Noona before you begin drumming up support for the IM/Open players, we should begin by focusing on the Invite/Prem players. Most of the Invite matches aren't covered, and with the division expanding next season there will be more teams to watch.

Keep the scope small and move outward from there. If you try to take on the whole world at once, you'll get overwhelmed. We should start by encouraging teams to stream their scrims. Or at least stream high level PUGs. A lot of people have streaming capabilities, but like I said it's difficult to a) create a high quality stream and b) the incentives are not there to do so. There is honestly little to no incentive to stream scrims at this point in time besides love of the game and community involvement/building.

Yes, but we all know that the best casters are players who know the game inside and out. However, there is very little incentive for players to give up their Invite dreams to do full time casting when it's a lot of work and you get almost nothing out of it. All live casting is done during scrim/match hours, so as a player caster you literally have to decide between one or the other.

Last season, for example, I was teamless so I had the time to do it. TrukTruk doesn't play on a team, so he has the time. Harbleu gave up a significant portion of his weekly scrim time to come cast some of the IM playoff matches, and Blank was sandbagging IM so he could skip scrims to cast as well.

Eventually though, you have to choose between playing on a team or casting, and playing on a team always wins. Like as much fun as it is to cast, it's way more fun to play yourself, and there isn't enough incentive to cast right now.

While it's not ESEA, I think that bpm had a step in the right direction for that last season, since they were sponsored by Lotus Clan. Lotus actively promoted them when they were cast by tf.tv, especially during playoffs, and much of the chat had messages like "Lotus sent me, go bpm", etc. Since esports are largely a non-geographically divided sport, at most by continent, then we need to look at those online groups and communities to sponsor teams and give that sense of team loyalty, since many pub players will find a server or server group they enjoy and stick to it.

I sometimes go into pubs and play medic.

Helps da noobs learn to play without dying every 15 seconds.
Then I tell them Tf2 has a competitive scene and stuff.

I think our problem is the fact that people are not aware that this scene exists. We need some way to connect to the people that play in pubs and let them know that we exist and tell them that if they are ever interested in competitive tf2 go to teamfortress.tv

this was on its way to become a thing and for a short period even was a thing but it got dropped, but Im more than willing to talk to the guys that runned it and try and make it happen again.

This friend of mine who watches a lot of competitive Tribes was telling me their spectate tool isn't any more robust than the TF2 one and some how their casters have come up with the ability to do instant replays and such in live content. I haven't watched to verify if it's true or not, but if that's the case we really need to figure out how to do that in TF2. Being able to stop and freeze and show plays. or stop and go back and watch a big airshots happen again would be incredibly valuable to casters for both explaining plays and showing off the big shots people make.

Also for bigger games some pauses between rounds, or during actual pauses and half time, running ad's would help bring companies into the game. I know it'd suck to watch but it'd help bring money into the game so maybe we all wouldn't have to invest money to get teams places every time an event comes around and then we could use that money to give to the TFTV stream to keep the content coming and increase quality of the content.

Also I agree with the people who are saying we should get the pub communities involved. Have teams or players associated with certain communities. Then you can get people following -insertinviteplayerorteamnamehere- because he's associated with my clan skial or whatever, and then you can also get a little bit of rivalry going and people get invested in the games.

Remember that ads and sponsoring won't mean anything if you don't have the required eye balls. I'm sure you can ask John about the actual numbers but I think for about every 500 viewers 1 ad nets you 1 dollar. At 1000 viewers running 3 ads every 30 minutes nets you 12 dollars an hour. Even run only a few hours a day that starts to add up. That would get you 1000 a month, which isn't huge but it's better than nothing.

I am not going to name people or anything, but certain server communities don't care and almost hate competitive TF2. On the grounds that Competitive Players block HTML mod, don't pub that often (at least that what they think), and their user base might become like that and stop going to their servers.

The larger Server communities (with a few exceptions like lotus) also don't want to sponsor players or teams, because it would be "unfair" to the rest of the community who is already interested in competitive tf2.

why do these threads always devolve into getting more stream viewers

Stream viewers are the part of the feedback loop for growth/decline of the game that we can most easily control ourselves.

players (especially invite ones) need to treat it like a competitive game. while really fun and great, no one will take us seriously if we keep spamming inside jokes and taking 45 minutes to join a fucking server. not that i don't love tf2 where it is now, but we're at a really weird point where some people are throwing a ton of effort into this game to make it an "eSport" and others are saying "lol its just a game it doesnt matter dude," we need to pick one.

i think the root of all of our problems with growing comp tf2 is that only like 3% of tf2's player base is involved in competitive at all and maybe 6% know it exists.
If we can get even like 30% of the game's players into or even aware of comp i have no doubt valve will at least acknowledge it if not back it
the problem then goes back to 'how do we effectively spread comp tf2' and the answer is still 'get it advertised by pub server operators'

I agree that the biggest issue with the growth of competitive TF2 right now is that people don't know it exists. It would help if Valve maybe just put a link to tf.tv on the teamfortress.com page, or if a notification with a link to tf.tv came up when you launch (like the "TF2 is now on Linux!" one). Also, tf.tv needs a comprehensive guide that is prominently featured on the front page about playing/getting into competitive TF2. The only reason that I know about the comp. scene now is from stumbling upon the MGE video archive on youtube.