water and lots of sunlight

Gotta somehow make the pub players interested in competitive, and that's pretty hard because a very big majority of them are casuals

Valve.

One of the problems with watching comp TF2 is that it's way too much of a mess and since there is no reliable auto director like CSGO has there is no coordination with what's on stream and what the casters are saying, which makes it really hard for a TF2 newbie to understand what's going on.

The other problem is all the bugs/issues with the game itself, pause breaks the HUD and player models, no real spectator tools (there is so much the community can do), random lags, etc.

But the worst has to be the lack of people that actually know about comp TF2, I can guarantee 80% of your normal pubbers don't know what rollout is, something like Dota's main page stream and tournaments information would bump up those viewers count up.

It's amazing that a 5 year old game that is played completely different competitively than it was intended to be played still has such a large following. I feel like it's strange that so many people seem to be worried about the state of our game when it is actually the most played and most watched arena shooter.

Quake, Tribes, Unreal Tournament, TFC, HLDM, etc. all have dying or dead competitive communities despite UT3, Tribes: Ascend, and Quake Live all being released after TF2.

TF2 community should just keep actively promoting competitive scene and try not to make any huge changes to fragment the community.

6 year old game*

And we're still alive, people are still playing it despite the lack of money involved compared to the big titles. Pretty amazing we've come so far. Still got a long way to go.

we need to grow this community from within. getting outsiders interested would be a valiant effort but wasteful of our community's limited resources. instead, we need more competitions for the players to encourage activity and make this place a fun place to be. if the players who play comp enjoy it, others will become interested too. if we change our game to appeal to outsiders we will ruin what makes our game unique and different from the rest.

comp TF2 has always experienced this slow growth and we should continue to grow it in the same way. do what you love, love what you do. others will come eventually.

inject money as embalming fluid to prevent the corpse from rotting

Figure out a good day every month, literally everyone who frequents tftv... Change your name to Teamfortress.tv or competitive tf2 and go shit stomp pubs all over. Word of mouth would travel through the pub communities (either pos or neg, who cares) and start putting it out there to the casual playerbase

actual Dev support

Maybe that's because the site is actually a few months old?
I started it back in July only and I can only do so much without the help of the community. It is already ranking pretty good for some key keywords on google tho. For example searching for many top players will yeld the site in the top spots and some basic terms as well. So it's already a start, if someone is interested in competitive tf2 we have put up a great page at http://comp.tf/wiki/Getting_Started which works like a compendium of resources to get started in competitive tf2

If you want to help, contributing to the wiki is a great way, there haven't been many active editors as of late.

Is there a reason that we aren't leasing out "billboard" space inside of the maps themselves on match servers? It seems like a fairly easy cosmetic to add into things, and could be an awesome way to add to prize pots/transportation costs.

I know some players would be upset about having things like that in-game, but as long as there are standards put in place for the ads, I think it'd work fine.

Platinum's idea seems like a lot of fun and I have this weird feeling in my tummy that it might work if we time it the day before esea LAN so that all of the new people that visit our site will see that they can see one of the most important tf2 events the next day.

That would have actually been a good thing to do while the one-day tournament was going on yesterday, unfortunate missed opportunity. There has to be content on the front page that catches new visitors' attention immediately, and an embedded livestream with already a few thousand viewers fits that description.

I don't think that's fair to say.

There are lots of hardcore pubbers out there, they just don't know about competitive because Valve barely supports it. I pubbed for 2 years before I realized there was competitive tf2 in any format, and the only reason I learned about it is because a friend was getting mentored by a HL Spy.

Casual and hardcore gamers alike know about Starcraft, or LoL, or DOTA's competitive scene, or at least know it exists, but how many just regular gamers know tf2 is more then just a pub game? chances are the numbers are slim.

Viewers attract sponsors, sponsors bring money.

Throwing a ton of money at tournaments isnt going to make that big of a difference. How many games have gotten that injection of cash, either through the developers or random sponsors giving the game a chance? It doesnt actually accomplish anything.

guys we've had these threads every day for 5 years and nobody has seen the obvious solution

32x32 insta-spawn 2fort is the only way to keep the game alive

wake up 6'sheeple

More of them then before seem to at least be aware that such a thing exists. I've started seeing a lot more people in pubs (on the rare occasion I play them) asking each other if they are on teams and such.

My rocket launcher has been named teamfortress.tv for months

Should do this a wee bit before lan, that way they will have something to watch to get them interested.

If you want to bridge the gap between public players and the competitive format then you need some stepping stones. I think everyone can agree that the jump from public to comp 6v6 is pretty huge.

I remember there being a public server which had 12 slots and a highlander whitelist and ran in tournament mode. Only needs a few people on the server who know how tournament mode works etc. and I think it would suffice as a halfway step. Of course a competitive matchmaking/lobby system like cs go has would be optimal but I think the idea of Valve support is pretty naive at this stage. I'm really surprised that TF.TV or ETF2L don't host at least one public server come to think of it.

Would it be a good or bad idea to have like l Teamfortress.tv after our name when we pub and stuff?(assuming were not being dickheads or trolls in these pubs)

Something that hasn't been mentioned above is that competitive TF2 takes a really long time to get going. It's annoying to watch (and play) when people are pregaming for half an hour with no sign of starting and no reason for the delay. There needs to be a schedule and people need to stick to it if they expect spectators to be interested. I just don't have the time/patience to watch or play comp TF2.

my friend says the casts of everything are really confusing, including highlander.
a surprising amount of terms and concepts are kinda hard to grasp.

Once someone types in teamfortress.tv and presses enter, where do they go?
We should have a newbie/learning section (seperate from mentoring) that explain all the basics of comp tf2.
Some sort of intro video/writeups, maybe the best ever casts, etc.

All of these arguments have been put forth 10000s of times already.

Even if you manage to shrink the gap between pub and comp play, TF2 is still too complex to spectate.

It works OK for experienced players, because they use their own frame of reference to figure out what the hell is going on when watching a stream, but for people who are barely experienced with TF2 or are pub regulars, it's really hard to appreciate the game other than "wow that was a nice headshot, woooh double airshot, etc". Inexperienced spectators can only appreciate individual frags, which, when taken out of context, can't be differentiated from any big pub play moment. Comp play becomes entirely meaningless and hard to "care" about by non comp or non high-level players, which is what you want to build an audience.

The only way for this game to grow is for Valve to bridge the gap between competitive and public play to give public players a natural path into competitive tf2, and at 6 years in I think its about time we accept the fact that that is never going to happen. Public players have no way to gradually work themselves into the competitive game mode and no matter how much publicity we derive for ourselves there will always be that gap separating us from acquiring new players from the other side.

You've seen the argument here time and time again that 6's is just too limiting in the way of class restrictions, weapon restrictions, etc, but these arguments completely miss the point. The gap isn't derived from a difference in rules between the game modes but rather from a difference in how each group perceives the game. While we are all super serious about it public players in general take the game extremely lightly. Short of ranked matchmaking from valve we will never grow aside from the steady trickle of players that barely keeps the game alive, let alone makes the game grow.

I for one and going to partake in the platinum strategy the 1st of every month from now on.

90% in game lobbies. 10% everything else. It's in Valve's hands, not ours.

http://i.imgur.com/HKbYY2d.png

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I for one think we have plenty try hard awkward weeaboos in tf2.