also, i actually played in both leagues for years when i was in cs:s. i played cevo-a (open), cevo-m, and the cevo-p placement tourney (mighta been the cal-i placement tourney cant remember, i'm old) as well as esea-o/im/maybe main. i've also played in cevo tournaments for dota2 and possibly other games i'm forgetting. i am speaking from experience.

anyone with some solid proof that cevo is going to match/exceed esea please share.

oh, and i know OP was long as fuck but lets try to avoid the walls of text that a lot of people just skim over. we can keep posts short and sweet for this thread/discussion.

I don't see how your rant will convince a shit ton of teams to refund and switch leagues 2 days before the season starts...

this isn't a rant trying to convince teams to bail on cevo, i'm trying to promote people to do BOTH if they want to give cevo a chance, not just blindly give them 100% confidence they will be better than esea which, issues aside, is an established tf2 league that isn't going anywhere as long as we continue to play.

wasn't the whole 'let's go to cevo' thing to scare esea?

STUPIDEST THING IVE EVER SEEN

I dont see why more teams cant do both. We are. I'll just get backups to play if we have some schedule conflicts.

Ps. looking for backups. :D Thx.

If that was the intent, lots of people missed the memo.

Make sure to cc: everybody when you send out memos of intent

cevo should be the backup to esea. do both leagues, go nuts, but use your backups in cevo. this gives your team a chance to play with its backups and get some chemistry with them, and also lets them actually play matches instead of gettin sore ass cheeks ridin the pine all season.

until cevo actually proves itself to consistently be a superior league, it should be treated as such.

the bar is set very low for that

hard to do both when the maps rotation isn't matched up

choose your own adventure: answer my question as to why we left cevo and they never attempted to get us back until now, or show me some proof cevo will long term be better than esea while still providing everything we get with esea now.

is the bar below or above paying league fees with e-checks instead of paypal level?

While I agree there should be participation in both, some teams just don't have the time to do both.

My CEVO team consists of three college students working towards different science degrees along with a player whose availability is dictated by his work schedule and two high school students. We simply could not do both, and I think this goes for other teams as well, not just ours. With the least expensive and flat fee, and the huge improvement of stats over ESEA's, my team decided to do CEVO.

You're sort of contradicting yourself here. CEVO was super popular for TF2, and then eventually the staff messed up, CEVO became involved in big scandal-type things, and ESEA began to offer a better service for lower level players (for a while, ESEA was considered a league for only high tier teams, because it was just open and invite.) ESEA became more desirable for lower-level players, and eventually people jumped ship on CEVO to play in ESEA full time.

If none of that sound familiar to you, you should probably quit reading and minus frag me now because this is almost the exact same situation, the roles are just reversed. Shady stuff happened in ESEA, CEVO began to step its service up and provide for the community, and suddenly CEVO is the more attractive league for the majority of the playerbase (majority does not mean High IM+ players, please keep that in mind).

If you're going to try and convince people ESEA is great, you can't do so by saying CEVO is just trying to scoop up players while they can; ESEA did the exact same thing and it worked out pretty well, so it could work out well for CEVO too.

Pretty much, this. I mean, I don't really want to give ESEA money, but the fact is I'm willing to give CEVO a shot and neither me nor my team have the time to play in two leagues.

Marmaduke considering that you said if ESEA drops tf2 then CEVO will be the only 6s NA league and that they'll stop giving a fuck then surely that means ESEA shouldn't have gave fuck for the last however many seasons as they were the only tf2 league. Personally i want ESEA to stay for this season from a spectator POV (never played comp)as it offers the best competition and therefore more exciting matches but I'm just pointing that out.

Some people just don't want to or can't pay for both. I'd prefer to stick to ESEA, especially since this is going to be CEVO's first serious TF2 season since it's relaunch without much to look up too. Pretty much a risky bet on whether or not the promises given will actually come into place.

I even played on the very first season of it's relaunch, and I was personally far from satisfied.

Also:

I answered the first part in my post above; as for why they never tried to get us back? They have.

After CEVO rebooted, people were interested in them running a league. They opened one up. They even ran a tournament(s?) to try and gain traction.

It didn't work; people didn't want to split up their time between ESEA, which at the time offered a superior service and experience, and CEVO, which kind of just turned into a dead league.

Now that people are more aggressively searching for a competing league, CEVO is trying to do more to meet players expectations.

Ive never been satisfied with ESEA as a product and have thought that leaving ESEA was in the best interest of TF2 competitive for a pretty long time, even barring the "bitcoin scandal". I actually played tf2 in cevo and esea at the same time at one point, and the only upshot ESEA ever had on CEVO is that they had a monopoly on the competition, if you wanted to play at higher levels you went to esea. Following up on that, every other advantage that ESEA had (stats, stv demos, etc) has now been integrated into CEVO, and much of the competition is playing in CEVO as well now. Furthermore, ESEA has developed 0 new features relevant to TF2 competitive in recent years leaving them stale and in a position quite easily matched by cevo, leaving them vulnerable to this move in the first place. We havent had healing stats for how many seasons? They obviously dont invest any time into even simple things that this community wants, so why assume that they ever will change and be the league we all wished they would be? Its not going to happen. With CEVO we have a chance to make something for the community, by the community, a league that we can mold to something better, without the bureaucracy and lpkane of ESEA to stand in our way.

yeah two leagues is a pretty big time commitment. however, how are people gonna feel when esea upgrades their stat system, and then cevo starts asking for more money (than they are now, and than esea is now) because a)nihanni isnt chipping in a few thousand and b) there's a lan they have to fund.

People down fragging this post have not read its contents.

Edit:

We would have to re-evaluate our options, but if ESEA TF2 dies we would really have limited options.

marmaduke you cant even handle properly scheduling matches in ESEA and getting your 6 players online, are you being serious right now?

That doesn't make sense though dude, and there's no point inferring that magically this season ESEA is going to drastically change policy that the community has been asking for for years. The community has NO voice in ESEA, and we haven't for a long time that's just a fact. It is, I'm sorry. Maybe this season will change that. Maybe we'll get a public apology from lpkane about his gross mistreatment of his customers. Maybe we'll get the stat system we asked for months ago that an INDEPENDENT UNPAID developer was able to put together. If all the things we've asked for happen this season how will I feel? Happy, and maybe I'll be concidering playing ESEA next season.

But seeing as the last thing I heard from ESEA about St. Patrick and the egregious 10-year ban bullshit was "I'm hoping to have that taken care of today" followed by silence: I'm not holding my breath. ESEA has done nothing but spout hollow promises and CEVO has actively done shit to try to improve as a League. I think at this point it takes much more faith that ESEA will change it's actions than CEVO could be a successful league. Personally, people asking for teams/players to refund from CEVO last minute to go support ESEA instead make me fucking sick. You all do. You ride the wave, because this community is 95% fucking followers. Jump ship on the community that has been actively LISTENING to you for months and trying to build the league around our specifications just because killing says "uhhh BUT GUYS FREEMIUM AND MAYBE SOMETIME THIS SEASON WE'LL MAKE ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUEEEEE"

Seriously, fuck you guys. You ride the wave. But I know better and I've been fucked by ESEA enough, and until there's a definite change in course, I won't be going back. If CEVO dies and ESEA is the same, well then I guess I won't play this game anymore.

wow a lot to answer. i'm not gonna bother with quotes that would be a huge wall.

synchro: was not aware of that at all. however what i'm pretty sure you're unaware of is that's happened in multiple games in cevo (see: cevo-m friend cheating to 1st place cevo-m and finishing in the money in cevo-p in cs:s)

as far as trying to gain traction, i cannot ever recall (and i think im pretty involved in the tf2 community) a cevo tournament that gained by attention. i've been around since season 8

mile: yeah i agree that the stat tracking in esea leaves a lot to be desired but would you really bail on a league for a totally "rebooted/new" league with 0 success in KEEPING players in the games they've hosted that also doesn't have a lan? cevo has had just as many if not more fuck ups as esea. why else would they "reboot?"

and about having a chance to make something better for the community: did they not have the chance to do this when they HAD OUR PLAYERBASE? cevo was our league, we left for esea. now we're flip flopping once again with the grass is greener mindset although we're now removing lan and just sort of hoping cevo doesnt say fuck you tf2 we're dropping you as a game/gonna charge you more than esea did for league fees/etc

i do appreciate the attack on my ability to schedule matches and get 5 other people whom i have no direct control of online though, classy and relevant to the discussion.

seriously though, mile, what would your reaction be to a steep hike in league fees when they go up to fund lan/cevo no longer has community members kicking in thousands of dollars to the prize pot? what happens when the client (as is going to happen in any game in any league) crashes because of some retarded update and matches are postponed?

i thought the whole scandal in cevo ended up in the head of the company changing hands, which is the whole reason there was that revival process for cevo (because it was under different ownership)

i can't find anything about this on the web, but i remember reading about it on gotfrag/natf2/tf.tv (although i might be confusing it with another league from way back)

i used to play in cevo when it first started too, and the only thing i could really complain about it was the client was really shitty, but we got to use any cevo certified servers which had no problems back then

i also played in cevo in 1.6 days and i don't remember anything horrible about it, it's just that it was the main league for when i was playing in outside of cal (and i stopped playing before it crashed and burned)

That's basically what happened, which is why this "reboot" is so promising: yeah, CEVO didn't do much to help retain us back then, but they also folded before they go as big as ESEA became. Now that they're back, they've shown a lot of promise.

Also, this is like 5th thread that's been opened about this, can we just start a new CEVO vs ESEA forum category please?

Marmaduke, there's no need to be upset by logic.

and that's great that they show promise. let's support them (if you/your team has time for two leagues) while we keep esea as our main league. 2 seasons from now if we've seen them continue to improve and build from the first season, yeah let's give it a go. i just honestly don't understand how people are saying "let's go to cevo!" when they've BEEN OUR MAIN LEAGUE before and we all left for esea. this isn't a brand new league, this is a league with a history just as sketchy as esea's.

and the only complaint being the client is "really shitty" is kind of a big deal, no? I remember fps getting raped and being unable to "check in" and start matches, and pleading with the other team to reschedule/wait/not FFW you while you waited for an admin to potentially help you with the issue. this on top of my previously mentioned blatant cheater stuff going on.

oh and i just checked, ive been playing in cevo and esea both since 2007.

honestly i think both clients suck ass because neither of them ever catch anyone and just acts as a deterrent while doing weird shit to our computers (both cevo/esea)

Yeah because the ESEA client has been foolproof at not only cooperating, but actually catching cheaters. I'm over this thread, I'm over the -frag brigade that adds no valuable facts to the conversation. The IQ in this community has taken a nosedive in recent history, and I hope you're all happy with where it gets you.