LAN/PRIZE POTS: i just want to play on a team idgaf about a prize pot or any(none) potential LAN opportunities. Mind you this is completely biased, but from a newish player's standpoint, viewing LAN is cool, but I feel like it's unnecessary to fly teams out costing the community money and even some of the players money out of pocket, the same thing could be done online (althought I imagine playing on LAN ping is amazing).

CEVO & ESEA:
ESEA... well what can I say. Alot of their servers are trash, we pay for premium while taking little to no part in the benefits of it. And this whole bitcoin/malware case just makes them sketchy af.
CEVO i have never played in but, personally as long as they have decent/better servers than ESEA im all aboard. We are the consumers and we have the buying power to show ESEA that they cant just treat our community like garbage and that everyone will take it lying down. As long as the community as a whole can come to consensus as to the better option is, in theory it should work since in reality we've had little to no support afaik to keep this community afloat but ourselves.

It's a pretty good refute imo. My files are my files. A league shouldn't be looking through them. My processor is my processor. A league shouldn't be able to take control over it when I'm not looking.

ESEA committed an enormous breach of privacy and trust. I personally don't care if you play with them next season, but I certainly won't be.

Then the game would already be dead. Consider the split of UGC and ESEA. The split of HL and 6's.
You're saying that will kill TF2, but that has not happened in the past and there is no proof that it will happen in the future. What's the worst that can really happen? Say has of TF2 from ESEA goes to CEVO for a season, and it doesn't work, they just go back to ESEA. No harm, no foul.

Are you saying that is half the people going to CEVO, ESEA will just shutdown the TF2 div?

lol as if a large number of people who have thousands of hours pugging will quit the game

Tons of teams have SAID they're willing to migrate. Nobody has shown anything.

EDIT: Damn Lange

hey guys what's up? im cooking bacon right now

no fucking shit. it doesn't matter how solidly built a league ESEA is, if they think it's ok to run bitcoin mining software and collect data from my computer I'm not going to support them.

Yo, nobody can argue about bacon, right?

Could you do a quick check to see how many of the 136 players in UGC and ESEA are on a IM+ roster>

GO SQUID

we can all unite under a bacon banner

We are the 99%.

You know I have issues with ESEA, but do also understand that following one league benefits all.

I want people to pay attention to who supporting ESEA and who is not. Its very funny to watch Support for ESEA be rallied behind the scenes. Not that its bad, its just illusory. Mixup and iT, Mixup specifically, are invested in ESEA. This is what they do, they make a roster, Plat makes dem nice calls at lan and they go off against b4nny. That is what they do. Pay attention and rally up support no matter what side of this you are on, because, APPARENLTY, ESEA does make money off of TF2.

ESEA is an OLD DEAD business model. Literally will be gone if CS:GO does not make it. ESEA.qlive? ESEA.sc2? ESEA.LoL? ESEA is a virus that looks for a host. New games are centralizing streaming and streamlining the matchmaking process and competitive structure of games, this will keep contraceptive businesses away, i.e. ESEA. The ESEA business model adds no real value to the game. Stats have been partially broken for 3-4 seasons now, where as sizzlingstats is that new hotness. STVS sometimes for BIG-GAMES just dont work, which as I see it, the big game never even happened. Use a client which will never catch cheaters, but turns out is malware and fried peoples gpu's, mine included. Laughable. Start a ESEA.europe league, client broken first week of season. Literally just shows you what they are about.

People arguing for ESEA do it for intrinsic reasons or because they are scared of the community dieing. Isn't it obvious at this point? You know ESEA is terrible for TF2 but you stay with it. To be turning this game into a purely for high-high level competition is laughable. That boat has sailed.

I think everyone needs to do a little self sacrifice and well find much greener pastures.

Well duh, CEVO is in the middle of a season. New teams can't be formed right now.

this season of open may have more teams registered than previous seasons, but i feel (and i have not run the numbers) that a lot more of the mid level open teams have died, the open predictions thread shows a majority of the teams that have died.

also league fees for open have increased without an increased prize pot for open.

In my eyes, staying with ESEA at this point is like realizing you're being led on, and then staying with that person. Yeah, moving on might be hard for you/some, but it's for the greater good of your/our health/sanity.

So who's going to be nailing the 95 theses to the wall?

Dat Green Grass

http://3ddigitalwallpapers.com/wp-content/uploads//2010/11/mushroom-wallpapers_24696_1920x1200.jpg

We tried to they got deleted

Basically this.

I think it's really fun to watch LAN all day on a saturday, but I'd enjoy an online finals as well (and I think a hyped up TF2 grand finals will get the same number of viewers regardless of if it were played on LAN or online). And it sounds like there's hope for hosting a finals at an already established LAN sometime down the road, which means CEVO won't have to "build infrastructure" to make that happen, they just need to be successful enough to reserve 12 computers at a LAN.

The way I see it happening is CEVO will have a pretty solid number of teams sign up and play next season, with Watch This taking home the gold (Brad already said he's gonna have an ass-kicking team in CEVO next season). Within the next few seasons, CEVO will get even bigger, ESEA TF2 is gonna die, and those that (for some bizarre) reason decided to stay in ESEA will either quit, or reluctantly join CEVO in order to find the best competition and join up with most of the community again.

we don't need all of esea transfering to cevo, we just need to make sure people from ugc transfer to cevo not esea...

too bad i addressed this in some other thread and it got buried in pure stupidity

The fact that people still even consider supporting ESEA after all that has happened makes me wonder if they still have any self respect left.

This logic is on par with Platinum ESEA-girlfriend analogy

Wow, who would have thought that an oligarchic cabal of invite players who see the most tangible benefits from ESEA in the form of LAN and prestige/social status would be the most adamant that it's the "best for the community"?

As a completely unbiased observer, I find it amusing how everyone who wants to keep playing ESEA bring up fears about how CEVO will die or provide nothing significant for the NA TF2 community, while simultaneously claiming ESEA will stick around forever or continue to provide decent support for TF2.

Quoted for motherfucking truth. I just had to wipe a whole mess of stuff from my post after refreshing the thread and seeing this.

What I do wish to comment on directly is the concern about LANs. It's the single gripe that can be effectively taken out of the context of whether you think ESEA's track record with the game and it's future trajectory is subjectively good or bad news, for examination with less emotion attached. It's also the keystone to the entire 'stay put' argument, so it's important to take it head on.

This concern centers about moving wholesale to a competitive format that, in all likelihood, will not produce a LAN immediately if ever, and what impact that may have. In my view, such a move would reset the community to a position focused on internal growth rather than external attention grabbing, and that would be an altogether good thing as TF2 gets closer to ten years old than five.

The precursor to a successful and sustained run of offline tournaments has always been a deep entry-level competitive pool. I'm trying to remember back just how huge CAL-O 1.6 was at its height; the old CPL ops guy Moncivalles estimates it at somewhere over 1500 teams.

The debate around the LAN issue always seems to settle in chicken/egg territory, when it shouldn't. The chicken is the game's Open division, and it lays golden LAN eggs. Want eggs? Feed the damn chicken.

To torture this metaphor, you can force-feed an anemic chicken a diet consisting mostly of intra-community guilt, and it'll squeeze out an egg every once in a while. That's what this community has done for years with the LANs, justifying the collective cost on the community to keep chugging out these tiny eggs twice a year on the notion that they are somehow the catalyst that will spur open division growth and kick off the whole thing. This is backwards.

The only reasonable conclusion, given the historical trajectories of games that have seen sustained LAN activity and games that haven't, is that TF2 shouldn't be expecting two or three LANs a year given its size, and the penalty for having them is a massively inflated cost of competitive participation on the collective community, and especially on the teams participating in the LANs. If you subscribe to pyyyyour's assertion above that shooting for the same competitive status that CS continues to enjoy is a waste, which it quite frankly is as long as TF2 is the most current title in the franchise, then why even continue bothering with the LANs?

This community should refocus on growing the entry point of the competitive scene, by ditching the LAN, cutting costs for everyone, and see what happens from there. If growth is the aim, ending the semiannual dump of resources into a LAN tournament for four teams is part of the problem, and the solution alleviates the TF2 community of the primary justification for staying at ESEA.

to me, the only reason esea can do this, is because they are a monopoly. There is no other league that can match their qualities of running a league, and until someone(most likely CEVO) can perform to high levels like ESEA, ESEA will be the only realistic choice. they only do it because they can. If there were 5 leagues that all competed at the same level like ESEA, a company that has shit customer service and PR(ESEA), would get dropped in an instant. So basically, until there are more leagues that have the same level of play/organization, ESEA is really the only choice for a good league

Also squid, that skyride post you used as base of your argument in the first post is from a person totally out of touch with the scene and probably still bitter with it. The ETF2L admin team has some of the most helpful, competent and genuinely interested group of people I have had the pleasure to deal with.

Suddenly it's a joke for LAN players to want to go to LAN? Just because you have a valid reason to leave, doesn't mean we don't have valid reasons to stay. Competition at the very top will die without a LAN. All the big plays and great matches you see on LAN are a product of the LAN environment. That level of play isn't happening online. I'm not trying to convince anyone to stick with ESEA, but it's true. Yeah the top invite players might keep playing the game but they won't be putting nearly the same amount of effort in an online match. It's difficult to get into that competitive mode online after playing on lan. We'd be losing out on our reason for playing the game. I saw a lot of people confused that platinum couldn't fathom other motivations for playing tf2. Well it goes both ways, LAN is the reason we play and that's as valid a reason as any.

also "free vacay"

hahahhahaahhahahaHAHAhHHAHAHAHAHAHHaahahhAHAHAHhAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAA HAH AH AH H AAaha

keekerdc spitting the truth, just like always.