does anyone know why number of open teams keeps fluctuating? i saw five teams listed last week and now there's only two...

ESEA always filters out the teams every once in a while to remove teams that do not have at least one player on the roster that is paid up. So add a few more than what is currently listed, which still probably isn't above 10 anyway..

Everyone is waiting to see what everyone else does that's probably why there are not many teams.

looks like ESEA is dead? no open teams.

21 teams ready and paid in cevo vs open 2 teams unpaid

your advocating the wrong league.

At this rate it's looking like ESEA is not going to run tf2 at all for season 16 unless more people sign up for open

Good job guys, we boycotted ESEA!

i hope cevo is good.

you guys are acting like registration closes tonight

9 days, 2 teams in Open.

its also only been 4 days since it was announced and 3 days since old rosters unlocked

also with cevos deadline being this monday and many teams not being readied for that yet its understandable teams wouldn't be worried about getting set up for esea just yet

maybe teams won't register but calling it a done deal at this point is silly

it also seems unlikely that esea would drop the game completely, if anything they'll just remove main and move teams down to open

That would just make ESEA lose more money since main entry fee is $17 while open is like $6.

to me, the divisions in CEVO is whats gonna kill this season. Basically every ESEA-O,ESEA-IM,and some ESEA-M teams will be put into CEVO-O, while some ESEA-M/ESEA-I will get CEVO-M.

all i can say, is its gonna be really, really rough being a (new) Open Team, and possibly other Open teams that will just get rolled because they are matched up with teams much, much better than they are.

OK, i'll point out the elephant in the room. The real enemy is UGC. If even a fraction of the UGC 6s teams ponied up and put down some money into CEVO and ESEA we wouldn't be having this discussion about either open division being too frail or sucking players from one another.

Has there ever been a season with more preemptively paid teams in any league?

This is a legitimate question. I honestly can't remember exactly but last season weren't there not even that many teams added up when registration was supposed to end? As in pre-extension? Everyone needs to calm down and realize that drawing conclusions this early is simply fear-mongering and panicky. It's entirely possible that a lot of newer players are hoping to pick up a team but simply haven't gotten around to it yet.

Open fee was $10 last season, just FYI.