it's not too late, it's never too late

welp, where dey at robin?

maybe the hat money got to them

I sent e-mails to Robin, that makes me sad because I never got any response.

I think robin would support if his higher ups would

I don't know him personally so I wouldn't actually know

the thread title got my hopes up high. let me just say it's not that high anymore.

imagine if they made a post on the official tf2 website about the MLG vote? how many votes we could possibly get just with one post?
I'm not saying that they should do that, im just saying that one simple thing like that would have so much impact in the tf2 competitive community

you really believe that propaganda?

lol propaganda?

last i heard robin dropped some serious cash for the i46 fund raiser, but he did it anonymously. Does this mean that they can't/won't support it as valve but as private donors?

gaddd

http://teamfortress.tv/articles/view/25-robin-walker-on-competitive-tf2-and-future-updates

Didn't they just add the party find a game system?
That's only 2 years after. Standard valve time.

It would be just so much easier to drop the cash bag like they did for dota international...

It's evident they have some spare cash, (ironically a big part of it is from tf2) why not drop a few $k's or $M's every once in a while on official competitions?

That's what bothers me more. But sure, official ingame matchmaking (and maybe ranking) for the different competitive modes would be fuckin amazing.

Only in my dreams will valve post an announcement that pops up in the bottom right hand corner of your screen advertising to watch i46 :')

Robin isn't working on TF2 anymore to my knowledge. It's still his baby and he still likes the competitive scene, as evidenced by his support of it. But Valve is spending their cash on more lucrative games now, such as DOTA. And with Gaben's concern about Windows 8 trying to shit on their business model, I'd think they're probably hoarding some cash too, to try and weather the storm.

But yeah I really would like to see a bit more support. Hoping the i46 event can get some attention.

fuck micro$oft

valve os 1 incoming

ma3la that would be amazing
:')

Valve should just replace Robin with Sal and bring TF2 to whole new levels.

i think the most they've done so far is add a competitive section to spuf

Thanks for saving those enigma. My best journalistic work at CommFT... You did miss one q/a break on http://teamfortress.tv/articles/view/25-robin-walker-on-competitive-tf2-and-future-updates

Sadly some of those questions haven't developed past Robin's answer of: "We'll see"

Robin is still a great contact for us because he of course has a lot of love for TF2, even though he's not working on it day-day. CoreyP and EricS @Valvesoftware.com are good people to email, but tfteam@valvesoftware.com is even better.

good catch

I think it's simple really, valve wont see money from comp tf2 in the short term, and hats are very profitable already, so why bother.

I think the support for DOTA is just to give that game's comp scene some initial momentum since it's not such a fun game to watch.

What I would like to see on tf2 right now is tf2lobby implemented on the game client, that would boost the comp scene immediatly making a lot of people aware of what comp tf2 is and how fun it is to play it.

you just called dota not fun to watch, obviously you've never listened to tobi wan scream black hole

Probably said before they got their hands on that sweet, sweet hat money.

#23 its not that Valve WONT see money from CompTF2, it's just that they haven't seen it, probably because the money spent by any players enticed into the Competitive community just looks like money spent by a TF2 player.

Really the question is how to best show Valve that Comp TF2 IS a money maker, in one way or another.

The question I'd be asking in that regard then, is how exactly can Valve continue to make money off TF2 outside of the Mann Co Store? If they drop cash onto a competition, what would they get out of it? The game is already F2P, and I think that while enticing new players to the game is nothing but awesome, there isn't a guaranteed return on the investment.

You see, last ESEA lan I was out of town with some friends, casual console gamers if you could call them gamers at all. When I tuned in with my notebook to watch the final, it caught their attention immediatly. At first they were just curious as to know what it was, so I explained to them that it was a live match and some other stuff for them to understand why I was watching. But then they just kept watching, they don't even understand english so well but they found it entertaining.

That made me realize the real potential comp tf2 have, it's just as entertaining as any other sport, you just need to understand some basic rules and enjoy the show. I think this, and the community itself, is what have been bringing viewers to tf2 streaming lately and it's the main feature that should be exploited to enhance comp tf2.

I agree w you 28. That's why I'm here and still rocking out.

In re: 27, the situation is actually similar to Dota. The main differences are that Dota is based around the competitive setup, instead of some sort of mode that never ends and you just level up your hero for as long as you're in the game, and that Valve has brought in some serious integration of Tournaments and Spectating.

Imagine Dota style spectating in TF2 and a Tournament "ticket" purchasing system. If it's a big success in Dota, which it seems to be, hopefully they will at some point convert TF2 to a similar system. Sadly it's such a different style of game that the amount of work to make that happen would be immense. Hopefully we can get such features before TF3.

AFAIK, Robin has moved onto bigger things, he only works part time on TF2 now. Sad since he helped create the entire series!

Tho mind he did say "We'd like to see if we could" - I mostly would like to think they internally attempted and realized it wasn't very possible/useful, although I'd say they technically did follow up on this with official custom whitelist support.

#10 quite a few people who have visited Valve have basically confirmed it is is true, unless you're really going to argue that tons of employees totally fake it every time some one visits them. They transitioned to the current system sometime around HL2, afaik.

#23 This is pretty untrue. I'm fairly certain Valve is doing all of this for Dota 2 cause Dota kinda has 14-22 million players (and that was an early 2010 estimate, it's only bigger now) world wide, it's absolutely a behemoth.

#29 As an avid Dota player, I completely agree with you. The ticket system would be pretty great, as would all of the sweet sweet stuff Valve has done with Dota 2 spectator. The biggest obstacle to this system is in Dota the master server actually dynamically assigns new STVs to each match as the STVs attached to the match fill (and auto selects an open one when you go to watch it), so there's no limit to the amount of people who can watch any one game. TF2 doesn't really have this, and on top of that pretty much anything you would watch in TF2 (since servers are bought and owned by players, not just Valve) has their own limited STVs. This is probably a difficult problem to find solutions to.