#30 That's why my idea is centered around increasing the ongoing cash flows from the game in the form of monthly/daily/per-match tickets.

EDIT: Not relevant anymore ignore this

Can Valve please just hire Lange? Then everyone is happy.

All I see is a lot of people saying they don't like it because bad people will play. It's good to see you want new players playing but don't want them to be bad.

I want it as much as you do, Sal... I'm just playing the role of the realist here and saying let's at least not get our hopes up and let's definitely not pin the future of competitive TF2 solely around Valve's support, as the chances of them changing their tune after 5 years is slim to none. The community will drive the competitive aspect of the game - we just need to do a better job of working together and put everything on a single point of failure (read: pubcomp).

The community's doing a fantastic job of recruiting and training at the moment. This is just a pitch for an additional thing that Valve could do, and it'd make them some money too.

Nobody's pinning their hopes of comp t2 around valves support. if valve ccould make money in this system they would do it.

I realistically can see this happening for highlander and i think it would huge step in the right direction

Based on what? What have they done in the past to grow the competitive aspect of TF2? I can "see" it happening, as well, I just don't see any reason for Valve to do it - there's no evidence they have any interest in taking an active role in the competitive side of the game - that's all I'm saying here, guys... I'd love it to happen, I just can't realistically imagine them changing their focus.

Really? You think the community is doing a fantastic job? I think we're serving a niche right now, and we're doing an ok job of that - that being those who are aware of and interested in competitive TF2. I bet at least 3 out of 5 pub players don't even know TF2 is played competitively. Are those people really the target for comp play? I don't know that, but if the goal here is to make competitive play accessible to all players, I'd say the community is average at best right now. The mixes are a great step, the pugs are great too, but even those are complicated for a new player to get involved in. Lobbies are the best option available now, but nobody knows if that will even be around or running tomorrow - let alone who actually runs it now. PubComp was a great idea, but it was over-planned, under-supported and apparently the whole thing hinged on 2 people, one of which ended up passing away. If the community wants to grow that aspect of the game, we can't have that happen again.

For people sayingthat it will be filled with newbies that know nothing about competitive, maybe there should be a barrier to entry. Maybe there could be an in-game tutorial, maybe 30-40 hours required on the class they want to play? Then it's like an achievement.

if you're going to do something like this, make everyone play the same game that we do with classlimits (at least 1 medic, limited to 1 demo) and frivolous stuff like the banners and the wrangler banned

i also seriously hate the "pay ticket to play this gamemode" system, it's fucking stupid. figure out another way for a dumb cash grab instead. pretty sure LoL/SC2 don't require you to pay money to have even a meaningful competitive experience, and it's IN GAME (not on a website that needs additional exposure/money) which contributed to League's growth for sure. Riot is also more on point with exposing the competitive nature of their game to various places/people, not to mention people can actually play it since the whole "metagame" trickles down to the pub level, unlike TF2

people just need to know that 6's actually exist and is a thing and if people don't like the classlimits/weapon bans they probably aren't ever going to play 6's anyway, so direct them towards highlander.

a barrier to entry will also be very important, giving a good, non-vague introduction to the gamemode will lessen frustrations and will ease the transition.

give medic players bonus rewards for completing games.

but in the end all this will be too much work for valve, i mean why even bother when you're making a shitton of money off keys and other shit right, they're also focusing on making dota2 huge anyway

the support really needs to be in both in the game and outside of the game

This has come up a couple of times so I must not have been clear enough in the video. I'm not advocating a pay-to-play system. Valve doesn't really do that model, and it wouldn't work here. I'm advocating a free system with an optional payment component. If you pay, just like everything else in TF2, you have the chance to get special (but mainly frivolous) items. That's a model that works very well for Valve.

(I haven't watched the video yet, but I will in a little. Just in case I address something that was brought up or whatever.)

I like that idea as a start. What I'm more envisioning is some sort of split where we have (like people have mentioned) tick boxes for "ESEA Ruleset," "UGC Ruleset," "Vanilla Weapons," and a "All Weapons Enabled." and a split of skill levels for something like "Expert," "Advanced," "Intermediate," "Beginner," and "New." There can be things like medal miscs when people "graduate" to the next rank, possibly strange. For example, if I feel like I have a good amount of 6v6 experience so I'd probably start with "Intermediate" which I'd equate to ESEA-O level. This would grant me an "Intermediate 6v6 Player Medal" (obviously named something more clever) which would track how many games in the "Intermediate" game mode I've played, and which rulesets I've played. It gives an item as an incentive which people always want, and allows people to judge how much experience the person has. It may even be prudent to have it display wins and games played, which may be a bit more telling of the experience.

Or there can be something like the botkiller weapons. There can even be "competitive killer" weapons or something that track kills in the game mode.

I think the idea is a solid one, especially if you have all of the different tiers of gameplay, allowing progression, with actual items to track your success.

Another idea I had was if some sort of competitive matchmaking system was implemented, they can possibly implement some sort of "community tournaments" like the 3v3 KotH tournament or something. Or small 6v6 tournaments/something like that reddit round robin highlander thing/etc.

Although, like everyone's said, Valve hasn't made a single move (other than Robin, who is no longer affiliated with TF2 development) towards competitive play, and now TF2 is getting old. As much as I'd love to see it flourish, I really doubt that Valve would care to implement anything like this.

Speaking of Robin, I wonder what top secret developments he's up to.