I have had zero influence on our 6s league. Even marxist knows that. Quite frankly, I have zero desire to be involved with it anyway. Highlander is my cup of tea. Even with that I have been barely active for over a year yet the conspiracy theorists like morphiend still think I am the puppet master pulling strings. Do a little research before jumping on the bandwagon. Maybe ask the league owner who makes the decisions? He'll certainly tell you it's not me. Forn, Blazingboy, Snowblindfrog, Redrum, et al. have been running things for the past year or so.

In lieu of the despicable (and unforgivable) happenings with ESEA it seems like folks should take another look at UGC. I think if the ESEA community elected someone to speak for them and come up with a reasonable set of things you'd like to see UGC implement, our current active admin team would be more than happy to sit down and open up some dialog.

Maybe something will come of it? We already have most of the infrastructure in place. If an agreement can be made, why reinvent the wheel?

edit: http://www.gameservers.com/ugcleague/
We do have an extensive server list available to everyone in our league.

Would be a good excuse to unify the rulesets. Which particular rules don't much matter.

LAN is great but not absolutely vital to having a successful league. Yes I think some players would follow through with their threats to quit if there is no LAN. I think you just have to say goodbye to them and move on so we can put this ESEA shit behind us.

Some people might change their mind about the LAN deal-breaker and play in a substitute league if it became attractive from a monetary standpoint. I know a tf2 league is not a reliable income, but getting a respectable prize pool without having to sink all of it into travelling to the LAN could possibly entice some people to stick around. Hell it might even attract new people.

CEVO's prize this season is $600, and iT registered for it. I think someone could put up $500 initially, then included a humble bundle system for the league fee where users contribute their desired amount to register and play(maybe a minimum of $1-5). Use all the league fees to directly increase the prize pot and you would probably get a LOT of registrations and a pretty respectable prize pot. Who knows. Maybe the pay your desired amount system isn't necessary as ESEA get's a respectable number of players each season, and that also requires paying for premium, so I don't think a $10 league fee is out of the question.

I know everyone hates me, and I'm 12, but I'd help with this stuff. Tell me what I can do, I'm here.

Shit, I wouldn't mind doing this, at all. While I am "at work" there is only about 2 hours of things to do, so I could be getting paid while working on it.

You don't actually have to quit ESEA next season. If you just got a bunch of IM or Invite players to join a league, play the matches, and take it seriously alongside ESEA, you'd have a good baseline to draw in new customers who aren't being spied on. Forcing everyone to drop ESEA in one season is almost impossible, but convincing half the teams in Main and IM to try out a new league, which runs the same maps as ESEA in the same week, would let people migrate, and give time for the new league to build itself up while we still have an alternative with a LAN.

Personally I think we should just support whatever Nahanni's cooking up. She's been reliable and the past as far as I can see and probably knows how to get shit done better than the vast majority of us.

Considering that St Patrick just got banned for 10 years for a statement, I don't think it's out of the question to drop them outright

Here is my basic proposal for the UGC league that I'll be discussing with forn this weekend - let me know what you guys think.

1. UGC would create a separate for pay league within UGC.
2. Players who played in ESEA would have the right to play in a division equivalent to one they played in, in S15 ESEA and would be moved as they would have going into s16 of ESEA.
3. Rules regarding matches (how many a week), the format of play, how map lists and ban lists are formulated, and roster up&down rules, would be carried out by community vote.

1. Establish a working relationship with a server provider so as to acquire servers for UGC league purposes, with the goal of covering every match on a league provided server.
2. Talk to sizzling calamari and integrate his client as soon as possible into UGC servers.
3. Stats, STV, and POV demos would be provided through sizzling stats and his client (assuming it's ready to do such things). If not STVs could be manually pulled from servers.

1. Reworking the website to make it cleaner, easier to register, schedule, and so forth.

1. Payments would be very small to begin with (5$ a person) to prove that UGC could handle the for pay format well. LANs and additional arrangements would be tabled, with the goal of reviving a LAN as soon as possible. OR initially, raw donations would be used as a way or proving that UGC will handle your money properly and honorably.

1. Hopefully get a crap ton of volunteer time and somebody to help forn with the website reworking lol. New/additional admins would also be required to staff the for pay league.

1. UGC 6v6 as it is now would continue as a separate free league.

If anybody posting here is actually affiliated with CEVO, UGC, or etf2l can you guys please identify yourselves and your relationship to the organizations? It'll help us know if these leagues are actually looking to put in work to expand and accommodate a huge influx of higher level players that expect fair division splits or if it's all just nobody's spouting hearsay.

With the exception of marxist's relationship to ugc, i have no clue if anybody else has any official connections at this point.

I really feel it's time to give up LAN. It's just no longer sustainable to fund 3X a year. Maybe once a year, but 3X a year is getting harder and harder.

I know people are going to frag me for this, but can someone actually make an argument on why it's completely necessary?

Blazingboy and I run 6s at UGC. Please direct all questions and concerns to us or the league owner (Fornaught).

Snowblindfrog
Blazingboy
Fornaught

It may just be easier on structure for everyone if ugc-free is a division within the league and not a separate league itself?

is infinite in any way associated with 6s in UGC?

No

that's kinda shitting on the UGC players who are just starting up and dont want to get shit on by UGC players who ahve been playing for a few seasons but don't want to make the jump to a pay for play league. Maybe condense the 6s divs a little to decrease the workload, but I like having the multiple free divisions to help newer people break into the game.

You really can't just ignore the implications of giving up LAN all together. The combination of high-profile games and a big viewer base are integral to drawing in new players to keep the game growing, and the coverage of a LAN event is the best source of those things from season to season. What the focus should be is finding a way to get around the operating costs and difficulties of holding a LAN without ESEA, which is currently their biggest advantage over all the other leagues.

In my talks with forn he didn't seem interested in fully converting UGC 6s to a for pay model and I don't think anybody really wants that either - especially the hundreds (thousands?) of people who are already playing there for free :p Especially because, like it or not, the UGC free 6s league is that back bone of this community and the primary source of new players.

What if instead of paying for premium, we all just donated to get people to a LAN?

This comes back to where just flat dropping ESEA is gonna sting. Until we have a league that can support a LAN, people at the top are gonna want to play ESEA. Just focus on getting people out of ESEA over time, not just killing LAN as a whole.

Permzilla we need you

I'd much rather go with marxist's solution (even though it's idealized, as long as the website was fixed up a bit then that's the largest issue I see at hand)

european ruleset is terrible

When we made the LAN S13 it was really really cool to finally meet all these dudes I had spent years playing with/against. The LAN environment also makes the competition different. It's not necessarily better, just different. I think part of the reason is because of the shitty environment of the ESEA LAN. It's a tiny room with 80 computers and there's like at most 15 spectators, who are seated/standing right behind you and if you don't have a good soundproof headset you can hear everything they say. It didn't bother me much/at all but if there was a large spectator audience that might actually get the adrenaline going instead of just being a "meh" thing. There's also CS players yelling stupid shit pretty much constantly. The actual computer setups are nice, but you usually tweak stuff to make it as close to your home setup as possible(this is actually pretty important to doing well at LAN I think). I had to play on a pretty low chair with a pretty high folding table that had a tablecloth that slid all over the fuckin place til I duct taped the shit out of it.

That's what I got out of the LAN. Yeah, there are pros and cons, but I think the original argument that made LANs necessary is ALMOST extinct. In 2004 when CS pros had to play with 150 ping all the time yeah LAN was huge for balancing things out. Now everyone is getting better internet. Yeah playing demo is vastly different with 90 ping vs. 5 ping, but I don't think it's worth the travel costs necessarily. If the environment was more enticing or if we didn't have to rely on community donations to get teams there and then split a mediocre prize pot then yeah it might be worth it.

There should definitely still be a free UGC 6s league/divisions.

if ugc actually gets a paid league, please hire a designer to work on the site. I'm really surprised but somehow they managed to build a site more unintuitive than ESEAs

Every time I go the the UGC site it's a pain in the ass to navigate. Things that look like links don't do anything. Things that look like nothing are links. I don't understand it.

etf2l!

ehhh ill just move to germany or some shit

NATF2L would be great but what I don't like avout ETF2L is their very restricted whitelist ... they are like unbanning some weapons and not banning the Overpowered or brainless ones ... (banning fmily business ? srsly ? if anyone finds a use to that, good for him ... there's no reason to ban it really)

I personally think that it would be better if we left ugc as it is and move to etf2l (Should be ITF2L) ETF2L is better equipped to setup a paid NA League, because it already has one, all we have to do is clone it for na, and we have a good system. When it comes down to it, Whatever league gets the ITs And Mix^s, will stay. If that's ESEA, We're done for. Our first objective is to get harbleu, ruwin, vhalin, b4nny, etc. etc. to support the league, or to get off of esea anyway. (I don't know anything about invite, sorry if all those players are retired or something.) Just My 2 cents.

Over the past year Forn has made a lot of user experience improvements to the site both on the public side and to the leader interface. We are constantly tweaking and trying to improve it and welcome any feedback you have. If you have any specifics areas of concern please let myself or Fornaught know offline. We're so close to it, that everything makes sense already to us. :)