Yay chemistry

Everything he's saying makes sense though. Generally there are 2 maybe 3 teams that have a shot at winning Invite; with the 4th seed and below just hoping for a LAN spot with no real hope of winning or even be competitive at LAN.
Big name players will always have first dibs at other good players, therefore leaving it this way season after season.

This obviously would not happen, but if there was a draft, matches would probably be more competitive/interesting across the board.

Pharaoh to touch all butts and win Invite. #believe

Thank you Kermit. This forum is out of control lol

And we'll see at the end of the season I guess pot. Good luck.

http://logs.tf/22700

SHREDDED

So create a fantasy TF2 invite league and realize your dreams. Put a $50 buy in for the league and distribute prize money to the winning teams at the end of the season. Make it a keeper league.

Would you play?! It is a fantasy draft type of idea Mike. You seriously don't think it'd be more exciting than what we currently have though? The difference is you'd have 8 more evenly matched teams with more hope to play/practice for and better chances to win. Just a pipe dream idea which will probably never come to fruition though. Wouldn't be able to run a fantasy league and esea at the same time it would interfere too much.

It's kind of stupid to argue hypotheticals, but whatever. The players would miserably hate it and the only way something like this would ever happen is if someone put up a massive amount of money and forced everyone to do it in some sort of tournament. There's no way that players would subject themselves to playing with people they don't like for an entire season for a measly $1000 MAX a person with a viewer count of like 2000 people. Throw upwards of $100k in the prize pot and attract 100k+ viewers and you might have a shot. But purposely making all of the players miserable for an entire season so that there are some closer, albeit less skilled, matches is retarded.

i picked u with last pick

I don't think the players would be miserable. Good leaders/managers can manage anyone you just have to do so on an individual level. I'm sure some of the lower invite players would be ecstatic to be playing with the likes of you. Maybe not vice versa however. The teams that can develop the chemistry/team work will be the best instead of the teams with the most stacked lineups. Odds are even with a draft you'd be on a team with other people you've played with before. Albeit they wouldn't have been your first pick if you had your way, but perhaps your second or third. That's what would make it more competitive and balanced though. World Series of TF2!

This wouldn't really do much for you since you're on top anyway usually winning the 1st or 2nd max payout, it would more or less be more of a personal challenge I guess for the likes of you and banny. Who can make it work with anyone not just the best of the best sort of thing. That measly $1,000 MAX a person is what every person competes for in invite every season but as we pointed out only 2 teams really have the only shot at winning it each season. No ones arguing here though just brought up an idea and discussing it! Good luck this season brother.

This went from a pred thread to talks about a fantasy league. How does this shit even happen?

l m f a o

You need to understand the fact that everyone in invite just might not like each other, therefore just because you can "distribute" the skills better does not make it fun for the players nor does it mean they will play better as a team. Just look at the Chess Club drama before lan and the season THPS dominated every single all star team where Col had tlr, enigma, and plat playing. With the former having player drama issues which made them definitely weaker and the latter showing you not every All star player team is good

So you're saying it will be more difficult, implying that only the "good" captains would pull it off?

If you're playing this game for money, fame or to appease the small amount of viewers this game gets, you're doing it wrong. And this applies at every level of TF2.

Forcing players to not play with people they get along with is a sure fire way of destroying the competitive community (most successful teams/players move up from the bottom to the top by playing with regulars and building a chemistry).

the problem isn't the top teams taking the best talent, or luring the better players off the lower teams, the problem is the best talent on low teams getting wide-eyed when a top team asks them to join

I remember when EMG only had b4nny as a superstar. People always wondered when he would leave EMG, and you always found out this team or that team asked him to join, only b4nny didn't leave his team. Ducky too was asked on several occasions to leave the "lower" teams, but he stayed true* and didn't kill his up-and-coming team just to play for the "best"

moral is, stick it out, stick together, and when all else fails...become funny, likeable, handsome and just obnoxious enough to the point where everyone is like "is he for real or just joking...haha who cares he's great" and then you roster ride the fuck out of them

*= maybe cheated, probably not, but maybe

welp im 0/3

still time to become sarcastically ironically obnoxious

Pufffffff: Invite needs TEAM stability..not the flavor of the week

pretty cool old thread, ruwin made a really nice point
http://teamfortress.tv/forum/thread/1014/4#post-103

shits going down

Actually being a manager at my job, I have to deal with many different kinds of people and personalities but ultimately it's my job to make it work and function at the highest level possible. I don't always like the people who work for me but I still have to make it work if i want to succeed. Team leaders usually tend to that job. If you want to win of course. I forget a lot of people on these forums haven't really gotten into the working age yet.

Anywho you guys are right, enough with the fantasy bs. Have a good season!

nvm soups off

too bad no one works at tf2 as a job. i can stand people i dont like if it gets me a check at the end of the day. if its a hobby, id rather say fuck that and quit.

In invite you do kind of get a paycheck. And you also get the satisfaction of winning. I bet there's been many invite winners who didn't all get along all the time.

Reality though is there's plenty of people who treat tf2 as if it IS a job and not a hobby, or both. That's the competitive side of it. Some people put more than 60 hours a week in playing this game, instead of working a full time job. Why put so much time in to practice and get better if it's just a hobby and not something serious that's goal oriented such as playing in invite to win prize money and develop e-fame? Everyone is different of course but for a lot of people it's not always about who you play with it's about if you can win or not. I understand the "I want to play with friends" notion but that's another thing that could be hampering lower tier teams. I'd personally rather just play with friends and enjoy the game because of where i'm at in my life hence why we're starting from scratch. In the past though while in different personal situations it was different. To each his own I guess. The compLexity of TF2!

blink
A draft works for football because football relies upon millions of fans to fund it and because the players getting drafted are financially obligated to do well with their teammates. If football was just a hobby for these people, there would be tons and tons of backlash from draft picks. A draft for TF2 would equate to teams that are more competitive with one another, but the overall quality of play would drop quite a bit. Some teams would have that one person who can't stand that one other person and the entire team would falter from it.

As it stands, if a team has the balls to stick together and improve, they will learn from their mistakes and losses and will tighten things up to the point that they're competitive with the top teams. We've seen this a few times (although not as much as we'd all prefer).

And just to clarify, in invite, you don't get a paycheck unless you take first place. You get a "here's reimbursement for most of your expenses" check.

You just assume that because I don't agree with you, I must be young, inexperienced and without a job? You must be the shittiest manager in North America to have such incredibly lacking people skills, (which is something I learned at my last job, where I dealt with customers on a daily basis)

You didn't even answer what I pointed out, which is that you try to argue that it won't be any more difficult for people to get along with each other while using this system, then later imply that it will be much harder.

SO PREDS. THOSE ARE A THING THAT THIS THREAD IS DEFINITELY STILL ABOUT.

Personally, my general feeling is that mix^ will take it over the newly altered iT, with Watch This and One Two Tree making up the rest of the LAN, but I could easily see any of those teams beating each other depending on the circumstances, and I may be under-rating some of the other teams because I just haven't seen them playing in the streams I've been watching.

I don't know how well this post will be received, as normally I don't comment on shit like this - but this is something I actually have experience with, so here we go doogs.

Yo. The draft thing.

Long story short, I used to play a game. It was a niche game, with a "comp" scene even smaller than tf2's. Let's just say I was pretty fucking good at it.

Similar to invite tf2, one or two teams generally dominated everyone else, with the other teams having no chance at winning anything other than the occasional upset. People brought up the idea of a draft, and used the NFL comparison. Other people saw the obvious flaw in that comparison; that the NFL is more about money and entertainment than it is about fun or competition. It's a business, not a hobby, that can afford to pay it's players lots of money to win or lose.

That's the obvious flaw, but there's a lot more to it than just that. Check this out, doogs.

The NFL also has coaches, managers, owners, and a whole staff of people involved in drafting their players. The players themselves don't do that shit, and for good reason.

Lets say you want 9 invite teams. You need to pick 9 player-captains who are going to draft their teams. How the fuck do you decide who those players are? Are they the "best" 9?

Who decides who the "best" 9 are? The playerbase? LOOOOOOOOOOOOL, please. Put yourself in an invite player's shoes. A bunch of people who think X player is better than Y player because he/she got better stats in a certain game, or had a couple flashy plays which happened to get caught on stream are now going to have a definitive say in how your season is going to play out. You would be mad, don't lie.

Ok, so you can't just do it by player vote, then what? Do you have players volunteer? What if you get too many? What if you get too few? What if they just pick their friends instead of top players? What if they pick the wrong people?

Think about it, yo, how many 5-0 roll captain pugs (inhouse, irc, or otherwise) have you been in? But this time, it's not "fuckkkkkkkk these teams suck, I can't wait 'til this pug ends."

No. This time it's "fuckkkkkkkkk these teams suck, I can't wait 'til this season ends."

[Not to mention, pug teams which have a medic captain are generally at a disadvantage unless the other medic(s) are of vastly inferior competence]

So, ok, you really have to make sure those 9 players are qualified in order for the teams to even have a shot at being truly balanced. Say you settle on 9 players who are qualified. The first three or four would be obvious, but after that it would get pretty gray on who to pick over who. Is it really possible, to in a game with so many subjective variables, pick the 9 best/most qualified captains? Further more, are "best" and "most qualified" even the same thing?

You might think I'm alluding to players being butt-hurt over not being captains, or not being selected as one of the "best 9 players" - that's not it at all though. It's the exact opposite; being a captain is what you (as a high invite player) wouldn't want.

Let's go hypothetical real quick.

For this example, these players will be captains:

b4nny
ruwin
seagull
platinum
enigma
lansky
tyrone
TLR
Clockwork

For the purposes of this example, let's assume all of those captains are perfectly evenly skilled/competent (we all know tyrone is the best, but bear with me).

Say you have another player who is on par with one or more of the captains, but isn't a captain due to there being a limited number of captain slots, or that player returning from a break, or w/e reason.

Let's say that player is none other than the one and only Calvin in da Zone (aka calzone). Enigma wants to play with platinum, but he can't, because he's also a captain.

Calzone possesses the same skill level as Enigma, but he's not a captain, so he can be on Plat's team.

In this example, friends can't play together, even though it would change nothing skill wise. Sure, you could implement a player-trade system. But should a captain really be able to trade himself to another team (and inadvertently trade his captain spot to another player in the process)?

Say the players in question aren't both captains: what if a team doesn't agree on a trade because they don't get along with a certain player/prefer one's play-style to another's?

TL;DR: there are so many fucking ways that players can get fucked over for a season and not have fun.

"But, the bottom teams in invite aren't having much fun either since they just lose to the teams at the top, and have no hope of winning"

True, but they make the choice to play in invite, as a team; knowing that they will be facing almost insurmountable competition. Imagine how much it sucks to make it all the way into invite with a team of your friends, winning your way through IM (or main, now), only to lose to almost everyone in invite because you are hopelessly outmatched.

Ok, now imagine that you're hopelessly outmatched due to unsuccessful captaining, and you're losing to everyone in invite; but this time, you're not even playing with your friends.

(Unsuccessful captaining could refer to either blatantly bad picks, or picking a team that maybe someone thought would be good/looked good on paper, but ends up being mediocre/poop).

Low-invite teams of friends have often failed to last a season. Imagine a low invite team that shows up to scrims like they are showing up to a fucking job, and then afterward they all go hang out with their actual friends, because they don't give a shit, or even outright dislike each other. How long do you think that team would last?

Forget all that shit I just said, let's pretend you actually make 9 perfectly even teams. Then what? A team winning or losing is really just going to come down to luck. Is there even a point in having a four team LAN final if the other 5 teams could have easily been in their places on a different day? To me, that shit seems like it'd be pretty boring to watch from a spectator standpoint, and really lame/annoying/a chore to play in from a player standpoint.

Sorry if this post was mad discombobulated.

Oh, and since this thread is really about preds:

Decimate is gonna go huge. They wanted to know, what it looked like. (only he will get that joke, sorry).

edit: grammar fix, my b.

How about just get continually fucked on until you get good? Or admit you don't really care enough/are bad and quit.

I like that system.

Also preds: Mix^ is looking mighty strong. I don't know how iT is going to pan out - changing 3 people, many who haven't played together before, is always a little rocky, and I admit, I'm p-interested in 1-2-3.

Although I'll be cheering for the 6 cuties to turn heads despite them being new to invite.

i can't wait for lpkane to show stevec the monet at lan