Like I said before, it's pretty sad that we let this company control the fate of NA TF2.

When I made my first post, that was before I learned that they straight up lied to us about the 1.9 coins, and it turns out it was closer to 30. The real joke is that we're expected to believe that lpkane was cashing in on these coins for weeks without noticing; yeah right.

So the question now is, what do we do about it? Well, the majority of people are probably going to stick with "nothing". If a lawsuit comes down on ESEA, I would love it, because for all of the good stuff ESEA does for E-Sports they have an about equal amount of "dumb and bad" going on.

Enigma says (and has said pretty heartily in the past) that without ESEA, NA TF2 dies. Let's consider for a moment why that is:
1. Prize pools
2. LAN
3. Anti-Cheat

We could spend all day arguing which is more important than the other, but looking at it, how many people actually agree with this? Open and IM players certainly don't compete for the paycheck (though it's a decent incentive), so the competitiveness definitely doesn't come from there. The LAN us huge for obvious reasons, but I think the two biggest parts are a) reduces cheating at the highest level b) brings a more personal face to the scene, which makes it more interesting to watch. The Anti-Cheat client that ESEA provides is a nice complement to VAC, and would be tough to do without.

So, given all that, it would seem that Europe actually provides a good model for what a community based TF2 league could do (which is probably why it's been talked about to death): they have "premiership" prizes, the i-series LANs, and a community made anti-cheat (I'm not too familiar, how good is it?). Seems like a pretty good deal to me, but it's always met with some form of resistance.

At the risk of ruining all of my valid points, I'm gonna say something I think is on a lot of people's minds: the reason we continue to support ESEA is to keep the top players in the game interested. The mid level open teams who dump a collected hundred or so dollars into the league for a missed-playoffs record certainly aren't gaining much, and the top level open teams have more competitive games scrimming IM teams than playing their lower matches.

Does this help the game grow? Sure, but at what cost? We haven't had a massive jump in open teams in a few seasons, so how much is this really doing? I love watching and playing TF2 on LAN, it really is a different experience. And without a suitable LAN alternative, I don't know how successful an alternative league would be for TF2. Should we rekindle the ESEA boycott fire? Perhaps, perhaps not. All I'm saying is that everyone should really consider what they're putting into the league, versus what they're getting out. If you can justify it, hey, that's fantastic, good luck in the upcoming season (I'll probably still be there despite this wall of text). If not, I hope you can come up with a reasonable alternative.

tldr: esea is the league we need, not the league we deserve (heh)

Ignorance does not preclude liability.

TF2 community getting mad about something and then not doing anything about it

WHERE HAVE WE SEEN THIS BEFORE?

it's an important point, though. companies don't go under because their employees break laws. If the right steps are taken (lpkane stepping down would be a good one), this can and should salvage esea's reputation to some degree.

Maybe it's just me, but this does not change my intentions of playing in ESEA S14 one bit. It's disappointing, but not deal-breaking for me.

It's a recurring theme amongst most gaming communities. There's a pretty wide intersection between enjoying video games and being lazy.

I'd also like to clarify that, for the most part, the fact that they were [almost definitely] illegally mining bitcoins and abusing the client isn't even what I'm that upset about, especially considering most TF2 players don't run the client 24/7. The thing that really bothers me is how lpkane handled it (ie in typical lpkane fashion), via lots of lies and misdirections. If he had just come out and said "hey, yeah, we did this as an experiment and forgot to remove it from the code, sorry. we got X coins out of it though, and we'll be giving premium users something (freemium codes) in return for the trouble it caused." instead of just dodging everything with sarcasm and general douchebaggery, most people wouldn't even mind that much. It's that sleazey "thanks for your donation" business attitude that puts me off more than anything.

what is there to do about it? unless someone fronts $10,000 to start their own league or the community decides to raise $10,000 every 4 months for a league then there is nothing to do. top teams play so they can play on lan. that is the incentive to be a top team. without the incentive of a lan finals i know personally that many top players would quit. without the game having high level competition it will die. lan is what attracts viewers; invite matches are what attract viewers. if people are talking about the best interest of tf2 then as bad as esea is it is the best thing we have.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrqlP6hzofE

Hah! Having him "step down" is enough? He should be dropped like the PR disaster he is along with any product managers, or developers who were responsible for the addition of that code.

Leads to an interesting question? How is "work" on the anti-cheat client managed? Is there a product manager, are there testers, waterfall or agile, etc. How the hell did this go through without anyone asking questions and what changes will ESEA make to ensure this never happens again?

I'd be willing to pay $30 to play in a TFTV league, 60 teams * 6 players * 30 $/player = $10,800.

There would be A LOT of obstacles to overcome but it would be possible. Would be a long time before it could reach the scale of ESEA, but as least it wouldn't be run by scumbags.

Honestly though, I hope this doesn't kill ESEA.

I don't know if anyone wrote this on their "league wishlist" but a NAtf2l would be something I would put high up there, saw it suggested elsewhere. CEVO is probably still a bad idea for multiple reasons, UGC will probably never consider a paid for higher level alternative, so I dunno. It seems like the best suitor to me, but I'm just a pretty mangirl with no husbando bidders. (hint NAtf2l thats etf2l with an NA)

The other, probably better option that everyone else already threw out is NATF2 but I mean, enigma already has done a really great job with the website. I can't expect him to do this without atleast getting some real qualified people to help. He's got a professional gamer lifestyle to stick to, y'know.

http://eric.thunberg.com/ <-lpkane really gives no fuck with all this revenue he gets.

It really is illegal though, see here: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/hr1525/text

Don't worry guys, Slasher is on the case.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1dglil/popular_competitive_gaming_league_esea_admins/c9q91i6

Incorrect, TFC thrived for a longtime, there was no LAN for the Platinum division, no money, no prizes, people played for the love of the game. TFC died eventually because it got old, valve stopped supporting it, times changed, and people moved on to other games. TF2s release sealed the fate.

They betrayed our trust
They fried our GPUs
They poisoned our water supply and burned our crops

Get the pitchforks

sorry but that doesn't sound like a great situation to me. yes tfc may have sustained itself but i doubt it continued to grow. tf2 right now has been slowly but steadily growing over the past couple seasons with it being on the verge of its biggest season yet. if esea were to die that would change.

i don't see why the tf2 community is so up in arms over this. there has been ONE esea match played since the bitcoin thing was added. i highly doubt anybody from tf2 runs the esea client outside of matches so in all probably only 12 people were affected by this. the cs community has every right to be upset about this seeing as they use esea to scrim/pug but we don't. yes it was scummy of them to do but it really had no affect on most tf2 players.

I was just pointing out the game/leagueplay won't die. There will always be leagues for people who enjoy Fortress class gameplay, always have. People adjust, life goes on. I agree with you though growth likely will cease. And yah CS players should be alot more pissed. For TF2 players, its just a loss of trust issue.

I'm not an expert on contract law or anything but I'm like 95% sure that you can't get away with doing something this blatantly illegal just because you snuck in an extremely cryptic message in the ToS

The people in this thread suggesting that the community needs to create its own league are misguided. Now is not the right time.

Personally I would like to see whoever was responsible for this to resign/get fired.

http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1dgyat/esea_league_secretly_installed_bitcoin_miners_on/ reddit/leagueoflegends front page, that's pretty huge, I mean that isnt r/gaming thats r/lol for gods sake, a subreddit made for league of legends.

Let's bring back twl so Daniel from KoG predicts week 4 of twl-i on cp_badlands

Personally I think it's amusing how europe is worse off for having a community run league most of the time, but then situations like this make the american scene want to be like us for a while.

If you really think about the large scale, the whole game would be a lot worse if NA tf2 turned to a community league too...

I never found out if his predictions were correct :<

This is a recording involving one of the whistleblowers and an ESEA coder.

http://www.twitch.tv/ggty886/b/397871712

I felt that the attitude in the talk was a bit too light-hearted. "We calculated how much money we could have made if we did this to everyone... ...it was like hundreds of thousands of dollars".

I'm going to play a little bit of devils advocate here and just say the amount of people coming out and saying their hardware got borked is almost as sketchy as esea using users to mine for bitcoins.

i don't think esea will die because of this. will people lose trust? certainly. but i doubt it's going to kill them.

Yes. I ran folding@home on my (overclocked) cpu and gpu 24/7 for 4+ years and never had either fail. I'm sure some people actually did but most of them are full of shit

There's a few in every crowd.

That depends on how well the mining code was written and how "nice" it was (ie how aggressive it was in taking resources). Folding is written by people who probably know more about what they're doing than the ESEA anti-cheat developer team. Would love to see the bitcoin part of the source code, but I don't expect that to come out unless there's a lawsuit.

that's actually exactly what he said/did

intent is worth examining, because i cannot believe that lpkane would risk stirring up a giant shitstorm for a paltry amount of money ($3600 over ~2.5 weeks) compared to what ESEA rakes in from legitimate operations

They can take our bitcoins...

BUT THEY'LL NEVER TAKE OUR PREMIUM!

Lure.

Oh, if there is more to it than just 100% load then I don't know what I am talking about. Figured that was the basis for failure.