doesn't everyone say this after invite teams die and then when the ESEA poll rolls around they just vote for whoever they want?

A big reason that the top IM teams stay together is because they win. Getting smashed and losing game after game in invite wouldn't be fun and would probably discourage a lot of players.

I really really hate bringing this up, but look at the old LG with tagg and the gang on it. They got moved up and fell apart and went winless. I'm like 99% sure if I remember correctly the losses weren't the reason they broke up, but let's be real. No one likes losing, especially people that worked hard to get into invite and get outclassed. It would be like putting me into IM. I'd just get fucking stomped and I'd honestly lose motivation. Part of what keeps me in TF2 and why I am content with Open for now is that there are people better than me, but I honestly think I have a chance at beating a lot of them. If I went 0-16 in Open next season, I'm not so sure how I would feel at the end of it.

Also, why aren't we (and by we I mean vortex) talking about Mihaly's Flow last season? It seems to me that a lot of new players earn their way into Invite and stay there, but don't end up on the winning teams season after season, but it's slowly changing. I'm going to quote Shwan here when he was teaching me about the game last Spring in that TF2 is heavily dependent on experience (something I agree with for the most part). Since someone's skill or utility to a team is based on experience, how can you expect up and comers to beat invite players that have been playing invite longer than the IM up and comers have? It seems like a no-brainer to take someone who's had 3 seasons of invite albeit 2 years ago than someone who has won IM in their third ESEA season but has had no real challenges in matches (or experience losing matches in invite) so far. Especially if the older player is humble and just trying to get back into the scene, whereas the newer player might naturally feel some entitlement to their place in invite. Honestly, if people feel like players should make consistent rosters and slowly move up the ranks as a team, then GO DO IT. There is nothing stopping you.

I see two "solutions" for the tf2 community in the long term:

1) A move away from ESEA to a community driven, but still very legitimate competitive league (like ETF2L). Why does their model work, and why haven't we replicated it in NA? What about UGC makes it so different than ESEA and what can be done to make a league that is functionally like ESEA but has none of the TF2 apathy or "machinations" as pointed out by others earlier in this thread.

2) An ESEA incentive structure for teams that a) stay together, b) move up through the ranks/divisions, and c) lose. TF2 is a hobby, and if one pays $30 to lose a bunch of matches, how can he/she really be satisfied with his/her experience? Maybe it's just because I study economics that I see the situation like this, but it seems to me that the current ESEA structure is no way to grow the game. The
reason I prefer solution 1 is because ESEA has shown no interest in growing the game, despite the obvious profit incentive to ESEA to grow their TF2 divisions. Look at how many people are playing 6v6 in UGC. There should be efforts by ESEA to convert those people into customers (from a business perspective), but as far as I'm aware, they just don't care (talking about lpkane and torbull, not killing and kalkin who I think get a lot of shit but really have their hands tied in 9/10 sitations).

LF INVITE TEAM AS DEMO

ADD ME

#183 that will never happen, you need to understand that it is all about the prizes + playoffs on lan, as long as ESEA has tf2 that is where everyone is going to play. no other league can offer the same prizes or playoffs on lan, most other leagues are either just lackluster or have become irrelevant over the years, cal is dead, no one plays cevo anymore, ugc is for fun with highlander. there is no in between here, it was just a very sketchy season of invite...teams die and reform every season, players get cycled back into the invite pool its a never ending vicious cycle, just because this season had more dead teams towards playoffs than usual it doesn't mean everyone is gonna walk away from ESEA in hopes of another league having as many features and perks as ESEA

Why can't TF2 players make a league that has similar perks and features as ESEA? As far as I know, ESEA makes money from TF2 players, which means that even after all those perks, prize pots, and features (servers, etc.) they make money. If they can do it, why can't some other person/group? This is what a competitive market thrives on. If a league had the same features (including prize pots) as ESEA and the same cost to players, would there be any reason for invite players not to switch over?

Read defy's post, and as far as esea goes, they have probably monopolized the pc gaming market if we are talking about the competitive fps in north america. Nothing beats stability and that is probably the number one reason people will continue to choose esea over any new league if there is a conflict in scheduling between the two . So basically we've done off season tournies, but the organizers always made it conflict with esea so nothing really progressed, ex. the tf2pugna tourny, battle of the states,

#186 i cant honestly word this any other way, just refer back to what i said and think about this. ESEA is and always will be the premier league in north america for multiple competitive games. It has been around for years and years, and a lot of people put all their time, patience, effort, money and all the bullshit in between to give gamers a league that provides dozens of servers in different locations, client, stats, news, playoffs on lan every single season. NA TF2 is probably the smallest comp scene i have ever seen. EU is a lot different...but seriously its to the point where everyone knows everyone. there is no in between, you would need double the amount of people with twice as much time on their hands to give this community what ESEA has, don't think about it as oh hey why not just take all that premium + league fee money and toss it into a prize pool, servers etc and have everything that they have? it is seriously much more complex than that. if it was that simple it would of been done a long time ago.

#186
what's so bad about the ESEA model?
in your example, the LG that tagg was on got moved up to invite by COMMUNITY vote in the poll.

http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=poll&d=comments&id=731

if we really want to keep invite teams from dying, we need to change how teams are promoted into invite. having a public poll is probably the worst way possible to do this.

everyone is always on LG's nuts for sticking together. xen was on the invite poll with almost the same roster for 2 seasons in a row and they don't get in? g00dj0k3. it feels like everyone says one thing on the forums and then go and do w/e they want.

#183

What about Mihalys Flow? I don't see what point you're directing at me.

#189

Xensity was an unfortunate circumstance. At the time of the poll they only had 4 confirmed players. Tictack and Tony Swan were said to have left the team. So the options were to vote in Chess Club or a team with teto (who ended up leaving as well), blinky, solid, arc, and 2 question marks.

From what I understand was the compounded effect of:
losing all of their matches->chompa leaving->struggling to find a replacement-> grillz starting school, led to LG's demise

so tl;dr its almost the samething chess club is suffering from, just rl obligations grabbing people away from tf2 and there really isn't anything you can do about it, like kermit mentioned several pages ago

their roster looked like that if you only read the esea article, they had a set roster before the poll went up and the article was never updated.

Not really. They got cringe and smaka confirmed before the poll ended, but not before it started. If you don't believe me, here you go.

http://natf2.com/topics/6232-invite-poll?page=3

http://play.esea.net/teams/51134?tab=roster

Poll started the 23rd, Smaka joined the roster the 25th, Cringe joined the day after that. If you're going to say that the roster was defined before then, well it wasn't ever done so publicly and Blinky never announced that he had a set roster until later because he was still trying out people. At the start of the poll Spadez was the main candidate for replacing Tony Swan and players like sureshot and Tagg were also being tried out for the team. There was no set roster.

EDIT: Also the Arc fiasco caused people not to vote for Xensity. http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=poll&d=comments&id=778#n1

Wow my head hurts trying to keep up with this thread! This is a complicated problem that has no simple answer. With the emotion and the efforts in some of the posts it REALLY shows how much everyone cares and we need to remember that. Look at how we all came together to raise money for teams to go to lan and WOW even to Europe! Look at “community vs pros” (former 6 vs 9)! When we first got started we maxed out at 360 viewers, our second one was just over 800 and then the third we were over a thousand and we hit up to 1800 viewers. Why did we grow so fast? Cause at the end of the day people LOVE this game and want to see competition. Whether it’s ESEA, Community vs Pro’s or highlander we all want the taste of blood, see gibs flying all over the place while playing with our friends! Dammm what can be better than that!

Here is a thought to ponder…if Valve put in ½ the effort into competitive TF2 as they have done for Dota2…do you really think we would be discussing this issue?

I fear in the end it really doesn’t matter which team died, who did what or what Valve did or didn’t do for the competitive TF2 community. If we don’t pull it together and start working together, and I mean EVERYONE on EVERY LEVEL, competitive TF2 will come to an end. Not because of one person or one team but because we didn’t work together to solve the issues. I don’t know how to start or what the answers are but pointing fingers doesn’t help anything. That I can be sure of.

mile + -
Referenced post #7 by CheaP
Curb Stomp vs IM 4/5th place team. Hmm the choice is so hard
#7

an invite team which went 0-16 last season, consists of a few select team killers and otherwise low to mid invite players vs an IM team who picked up a top invite demoman and an seasoned invite soldier to improve them over last season. hard choice indeed.

hahahaha fuck you mile we still aren't dead

duno why everyone is at each others throats to get into invite sometimes, doesn't anyone recall AI being in for like 2 seasons? also spacebots.......................thatta boy killing churn that creamy butter

AI was worth having in invite just for their only s8 win.

http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=stats&d=match&id=2067232

its already been said in multiple posts, this isn't cs with a massive community you don't have to literally fight your way through every division of seriously active teams and players, at one point invite spots were practically being given out it was honestly a joke. they had to fill the last spot so they gave these teams a go even though they got stomped. so whenever new teams or teams that have been together for a few seasons get posted up on a fucking esea poll everyone shouldn't lose their shit, play IM and earn your spot. which is honestly much more rewarding than just kind of being shuffled in. it is seriously retarded when people ( like arc) get seriously bent out of shape for not getting voted in, its not like you have bragging rights if you play invite, maybe you have bragging rights if you pull a blight go to lan for the spot and win when you didnt make top 4 online, now thats a meatshot. or going undefeated the whole season like x6 and just dominating lan as well..most teams don't pull upsets out of their asses, they play like crazy and earn it.

where were the members of checksix s8 before they formed the team? tlr and harbleu were invite already, i know, i think kalkin was still in intermediate? what about dave__ac, oov, vhalin?

Guess what?

Teams dying every season isn't a problem

This has happened in every esports game for decades. It's going to continue to happen.

And it doesn't matter. The game is doing fine. It's still growing. New players are reaching invite every season, and they are making impacts. Players are still moving up through the ranks and if they perform well they get noticed and get opportunities. Every season there's a couple new players who have a positive impact, and they will continue to in invite.

The community isn't small because teams are dying every invite season. Teams are dying every invite season because the community is small, and there isn't enough incentive to build something. That doesn't stop things from growing.

It's inevitable that this stuff is going to happen. Over the course of a season it's more likely that a player on a team will have something in their life happen that stops them from playing again than not, whether that's losing motivation or something else. If a team doesn't work out after one season, then it's also going to suffer people leaving. When a team doesn't have a good record it's usually for a reason - personalities don't work out, the team doesn't have the proper skill level or chemistry. Sure you can spend loads of time practicing it to make it work properly over the course of multiple season, but that isn't a guaranteed method and probably isn't the best way to get results. People will point to LG to refute that claim, but the fact is they were not a contender in invite until they made roster changes and replaced raf with Yz50. They've managed to stay on the top by making similar roster changes ever since.

If the competition level was higher so that there were more IM teams that actually were at the invite level it'd mean more for the teams in invite to stick together and play. There would be teams that can step in and replace the lower invite teams who struggle after a season, meaning those invite spots couldn't be filled by new pug-type rosters. It'd be more worthwhile and easier to build something since it'd mean more to hold an invite spot and there'd be more prestige involved in having one.

It's getting pretty tiresome when people bitch about this every season. There isn't a solution and it's not going to change.

Now, teams dying midseason is a bit of an issue. This season was a bit unexpected. Our team will finish out and play our matches, but with 5 players since we only have 5. I honestly can't blame Rich for quitting though. We don't have anything to play for and he probably hasn't been having fun.

look at all these nerds analyzing this shit. lingles right.

this crap happened in season 9 to the same extent. and lets not forget the season 8 3-team lan.

christ, get over it. let these kids quit this game and actually do something useful and non-virginistic with their lives.

yes, i did just make up the word virginistic.

this games not going anywhere until theres a useful tournament or league outside of ESEA. ESEA is like the shitty respirator with holes in the airtubes keeping the TF2 body alive. It needs better before anybody in this game puts forth real effort or passion into playing or paying.

kalkin dave and oov all played thps IM, vhalin replaced me (fuk u kalkin)

Also re: the community looking up to invite. Not a single gamer gurl has wanted to date me even though i immediately announce to all of them that i am an ex-inviter

sometimes i wonder what was even the POINT of playing invite gosh

problem is you're EX-invite. you gotta be in invite for it to work

Interesting idea, just put all the so called formed invite teams that believe they should be in invite because they played there the season before but killed their team at the end in the invite poll (since its just favoritism) and move up the deserving teams from IM that actually survive. I hope killing and kalkin take that into consideration.

It's not hard to see which teams shouldn't be in invite and which teams deserve to be there. As far as having "experience" top IM teams play invite teams all the time in scrims and what not. It's really not far off from eachother - you win some, you lose some. The only teams who usually consistently dominate the rest of the pack are Mixup (obviously) and LG. As for the rest you'd want a team with stability and a solid core who are going to suffer through the tough times and continue working through it. Not these mutt invite teams being thrown together 2 days before the invite poll comes out to hope for luck and make it to LAN. Otherwise a month before the season ends they disband yet somehow keep the roster alive to redo the same exact thing the next season. Get "real" hungry teams in invite not just invite caliber pug teams.. That's the point of this post.

Lets look at nNn. Before they picked up powah the previous season in IM they were the 2nd, maybe 3rd best team. Then with powah they win IM and go invite. Half way through their semi successful invite stint powah leaves because he can't go to LAN. Why play in the first place? Now he's going to join kappows team in IM and give them a better chance to make invite as well and do the same exact thing all over again. Sorry but to me that's just stupid. Kappow had a solid team without powah they should've left the roster as it was. He's basically a temporary high level merc sand bagging lower divisions.

didnt you guys just pick up mike, seems like the pot calling the kettle black BRO

arizona is just jealous they didn't pick him up

that's not what happened in europe haha, i've heard numerous times that the premier teams have been actively scrimming and getting ready for matches instead of just expecting to win

how the fuck is that relevant here?