there are exactly 0 lans with the proper structure to support something like this

insomnia?

thanks robin

valve plz

insomnia isn't primarily a competition lan. neither is dreamhack I guess, but the culture over the years there has always harbored it.

look at the production value once they move to stage and it's out of the hands of anyone who cares about tf2

the csgo production value at dreamhack was fucking terrible, not sure what point you are trying to make

We are THE Valve cash cow :/

what's funny is that valve could make more with esports items in tf2, traders will buy and sell ANYTHING

they don't even have to call them "esport" items, just tournament ones instead. but that probably won't happen since the biggest tf2 lan in the world gets a small 5 sentence post in a tab people rarely ever check on the site.

oh and there's still that highlander lobby thing

we should start a riot

wheres our money valve?!?!?!?!

We'll never see it mate. We're basically the Guinea Pig of Valve for things they want to beta before they put in their valued titles. It's pretty shit for us as a community, but we've proved plenty of times we don't need to suck on Valves teat to be a successful community. No one does what we do with as little outside investment/resources.

I refuse to acccept that... With the amount of money we made valve we could already have had 4 or 5 million dollar internationals.

Just imagine, we would get to see b4nny riding a limo to lan, TLR wouldn't have to steal any more trophies, MGE tourneys would be the ultimate test of skill with thousands in prizes, MGEMike would be filthy rich and banging whores with tf2 money. I refuse to believe that will never hhappen.

I was writing out an essay about TF2 vs CS:GO (which favored CS:GO for the record), but then my tired mind snapped and realized that actually, there is no reason for Valve not to do this for TF2.

If we showed enough interest for the next Summer i-series (i52) early enough (or any other major LAN event that would have us), and then spoke with Valve, presented them with some community made in-game items (let's make something awesome), and said:

"look... can you place these few select items in your online in-game store and save a percentage of the revenue generated to be used as a prize pool for the next Multiplay event. We've been working our asses off but we need some help please".

Valve would surely be the head sponsor of this event (free coverage / exposure) and we can put them directly in touch with the guys at Multiplay. This wouldn't cost them a penny yet they would still earn a bit of cash themselves as they will take a cut of the sold item revenue. They might not make as much money off these new items as they normally would, but more competitive players would buy them meaning it would be pretty close even with the prize pool cut removed from their earnings. We would do all of the hard work, as we've been doing for a long time.

In fact, as much as I love UK LAN events (living in the UK), if we generated a large enough prize pool, we might even be able to get a TF2 tournament at Dreamhack. That could be the boost competitive TF2 needs being played alongside some of the largest LAN tournament titles to date. But if Dreamhack didn't want us, Multiplay events are still decent, and a large prizepool for TF2 is sure to generate interest outside of the game.

Maybe start a 'Valve show TF2 some Love' campaign. Get in-game sprays, steam avatars, frag movie outro's. Maybe something like:

http://arxandbeta.com/images/whereisthelove.jpg

No point in getting hopes up over nothing, and convincing a business to hand over a significant amount of money isn't as simple as described, but hopefully we could show Valve that actually, their input / effort is minimal, they still make money from it and the TF2 competitive community gets off their backs for a while.

i bet portal 2 will get competitive sponsors before tf2

Email them I guess

Arx, it's all about getting the people to do it, if you're that passionate I'd suggest you get a team of people to work on this project. Think about the concept, the model you want to propose, what/who you will need to create this and set a timeline for these things to be done - then make the presentation to Valve as best you can.

Sadly my understanding of these things is rather small, my guess is you'd need a team involving someone who has good connections with Valve (eXtine or a Sal), someone who has an understanding of business/finance and/or is familiar with TF2's profit making ability who can give you the best figures/calculations, someone who can do the presentation/write it up, someone who can actually create the items, someone able to co-ordinate with Multiplay and all other efforts. You would want to have a few people on board to discuss the idea who have some relevant understanding, so you can hold a few meetings or so. Overall though, this sort of thing can only be achieved by someone stepping up, for what is potentially the most important community project of them all (getting legit Valve support) so it is well out of my depth in expertise for a project of such importance.

It'd be nice to just see some people try but I can only imagine the effort, co-ordination and work that would need to be done with of course the huge potential of rejection and shortfall.

we're like the unloved sibling of CS:GO valve im calling child services

I may be wrong but I get the feeling that Valve just puts a skeleton crew on the TF2 project, they're just a rag tag bunch of programmers and artists and the only thing they can do is balance the game, add in items and push out updates. When you need someone to change how Valve makes money off of items (the revenue share idea with an official Valve sponsored TF2 tourney) you need someone far higher up and I feel collectively, Valve have decided that putting someone that high up to work on TF2 is pointless.

I think this skeleton crew also has a very warped sense of competitive TF2, the first thing they try to implement is HL and they're whole philosophy is we have to give everyone all the weapons and then try to balance it out with some pick-ban system.

If you want to grow TF2 as an e-sport the first thing you do would be to push 6v6 with a very limited unlock list to make the game as spectator friendly as possible. I feel this mis-representation/ignorance from the skeleton crew has negatively influenced Valve's higher ups when it comes to the potential of TF2 as a serious e-sport.

Also, I feel like we should NOT give in to Robin Walker's and the TF2 team's vision for what competitive TF2 should be (some form of rock-paper-scissors Highlander with pick-ban) because it detracts from the game. When I saw the Mixup vs HRG game where Plat pushed into last with QF and Conch and Shade popped counter QF, there were about 9 different glowing halos on every player and it looked like someone vomited a rainbow on my screen. There is NO WAY any person can reasonably keep track of what's going on, even TF2 players were perplexed as how Mixup won that point as the commentators and the chat was just a mass of confusion. That is not the image we want to project to a person who is interested in competitive gaming and a potential viewer.

In saying all of this if someone were to try to lead a project I would be happy to be a 2D/3D artist and video editor. You don't get shit done with a negative attitude.

I have experience with modelling and exporting items to the game
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=7183&tscn=1379102717

And here's a frag vid I've done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KSsn22GnUE

EDIT: Also I think it's pretty pathetic and reflects rather poorly on Valve when arguably, TwitchJohn has done more for the competitive community than Valve has done.

There's a PDF somewhere that describes what it feels like to work at VALVE and one of the key points is that each person chooses what projects they want to work on. That their desks are built to be moved around (wheels) so they can group up with whoever and whatever they want to work on.

(from the PDF, ignore the formatting)

I've read that, but obviously there is some structure. Imagine if none of the games get updated because everyone wants to work on HL3. And truthfully, if you were working on Valve would you decide to work on TF2 when there are some amazing projects that are coming up (new Source engine, HL3, Steambox and those are the ones we know about, there could be a lot of amazing new projects and techs we have no idea about)? That's probably even more evidence of the skeleton crew/bare bones approach I think it's happening, and like I said, the higher ups at Valve are probably working on Dota/CS, next-gen consoles, steambox and licencing the new Source engine instead of worrying about trying to promote TF2 which, so far, has only generated 5k viewers peak.

I'll be honest, if I was Valve I wouldn't bother too much with competitive TF2, TF2 is already an amazing money generating machine with a tiny dev-team, the investment to return ratio is out of this world, why pour more resources into something that may not yield anything and ruin the cash cow (by alienating pub players who generate the revenue)?

6v6 should be positioned as an aspirational "halo" product. A tournament would help advertise TF2 as a whole.

Putting in a in-game ad for lans through the news section in TF2 and being able to watch the stream in game would do so much for TF2.