I had intended to make my previous big post my last one in this thread, because at this point I'm rapidly losing interest in this "discussion". The more times I have to repeat something, the more I feel like it's a lost cause and I should just let everyone else bicker over ESEA's grave.

Anyway, let's take it from the top: I'm sure that making anyone who disagrees with you out to be a CEVO fanboy makes you feel a lot better about your arguments, but I assure you that I'm really not that attached to CEVO as a league. I'll admit that the collective negatives of ESEA have driven me away from them, and CEVO is really the only viable option for me. If you think I'm retarded for not wanting to give ESEA money because I don't like them as a business then whatever; that's, like, your opinion, man. I'm also a supporter of CEVO because of the community volunteers they have helping them out.

As for what CEVO has done that ESEA hasn't? That's not exactly a fair question. I will say that CEVO's action compared to ESEA's inaction should be an attractive point for anybody to look at. At the start of this whole mess, CEVO didn't have post-game stats, didn't have STV downloads, didn't even have servers available to reserve and play on. In the span of a few short months, they implemented all of that, and all because the community asked for it. Sure, having the healing stats is a pretty small deal - but you can use that same reasoning to ask, why hasn't ESEA added it in the year+ people have been asking?

Objectively, CEVO offers nearly the same benefits that ESEA does for a smaller monetary cost. You can't say ESEA has better competition because 1) there's plenty of competition in CEVO, and schedules are dynamically assigned based on league performance (so you play people around your skill level, just like in ESEA) and 2) there are way more teams in CEVO right now than ESEA, so it's a really invalid point.

The other two things ESEA provides are a LAN, and their client-server integration.

Yes, the LAN is nice. But saying that there's no way to have entertaining, exciting and intense competition without a LAN is, and pardon my language, a load of dumb-ass fucking bullshit. If you're seriously going to tell me that only 4 teams and their on-LAN matches are worth having a league for, then you're on your way to convincing me that playing in any league is a waste of my time as well. I have no intention of making LAN at this point because I'm not currently good enough and don't have the time to put in to getting there. I play TF2 because I like my teammates and enjoy the level competition I get. If that makes me a bad player in your eyes, you really start to sound like you're damning me to hell for not holding the same beliefs you do. If you can pull the "wal-mart, nike" and "disciple" bullshit then I can absolutely pull some religion b.s.

Now that my ranting is over, the last edge that ESEA has is how easy the actual server management is. You jump in, type ".ready" and the match is on; sure, the servers may have had weird geographic distributions and poor often performance, but it was admittedly stupid simple to get in. The interface wasn't the best, but at least nobody had rcon. Still, this one advantage unfortunately isn't enough for me to want to participate in ESEA.

This is probably going to be my last full-on nerd essay on the subject, because I'm running out of meaningful things to say, and I really don't feel like there's an actual discussion going on here. All I know for sure is that I've already played a preseason match in CEVO and so far, I haven't developed any symptoms or experienced negative side effects.

lol what time-tested infrastructure are you talking about? You mean the shitty stvs that take a season to fix? Or the regular client problems? Or are you talking about the incredible servers that used to lag on granary shutter doors?

You've got to be kidding me; this is probably the dumbest post I've read in this entire thread.

You're seriously going to blame the massive amount of people who joined CEVO for invite matches not being played instead of the invite teams who chose not to sign up for both leagues? At the very least, they could have signed up for CEVO just in case ESEA didn't happen, the same exact way people have been begging players to join ESEA because they get a refund in case the season doesn't happen.

Not to mention the fact that the "bandwagoners" are the ones who are responsible for the LAN happening in the first place.

I'm sorry but it's getting really hard to respond to comments like this in a neutral tone.

What has CEVO done with its feedback? You're just spouting bullshit about how this thread is stupid and people are just running around saying the same things over and over but I'm just straight up asking you to at least pretend like you're saying something true and not just making up shit like "people see CEVO was listening the entire time, ESEA supporters panic" because that's sure as hell not what happened here.

Maybe I'm totally wrong and CEVO has done things based on community input but until you can give me some examples of that I'm going to continue assuming that you're just making shit up.

Do you have anything backing that statement?

I literally just explained what they did, are you even reading my posts? It doesn't seem like it. In fact, you failed to point out one specific thing I mentioned that I made up, and if you think I just invented everything in my post you are sorely mistaken.

Before everyone was interested in CEVO, there was a small group of players who were trying to get others on board. Before anyone would, they wanted CEVO to have more features to more closely match those of ESEA. I'm going to spell it out for you very clearly in a nice, neat list so you don't miss anything, okay?

CEVO didn't have a single of the following features until TF2 community members ask for them.

• A prize pool. This season, like the others, was going to be free-to-play. People wanted a paid league with prizes on the line, so CEVO implemented and offered that. On top of that, Nahanni had enough faith in the league that she put up a bunch of money, which CEVO matched without collecting any entry fees. On top of this, all of the money we put into the season goes towards next season's prize pot (sans Paypal costs).
  
• Post-game stats. CEVO didn't have much of a post-game match page aside from some predictions and round results. They worked with the SizzlingStats guys to add the stats system to their page.
  
• STV Download. Just like the above; when people were happy with the stats, they also wanted an STV download to go along with it.
  
• CEVO provided servers. CEVO matches were initially going to be played on the home team's servers following their server hosting rules, but people wanted officially sanctioned servers from the league. They had them up and running in time for the first matches to take place.

Now, if you're still confused about any of those or don't believe me, I'm not really sure I can help you at this point. I might be mistaken about some small details, but as far as I know, every single one of those things was requested by the community and added by CEVO as a result.

I'm gonna get minus-fragged for what I'm about to say, but the invite teams not wanting to play in an unproven league with less separation of skill and no LAN to meet up with the best teams is reasonable. Why would they want to play against people who are much worse than they are (no offence)? It's not fun for them and not fun for the people being rolled. Some people like to throw the "play the game for fun" argument around, but for them playing on even grounds against teams with similar skill levels /is fun/. I can understand less divisions takes the fun and challenge away, so I assume that's why they didn't initially signup. I'm just assuming though, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong (in that case I'll shut up and apologize)

This is just really awful decision making in my opinion and again lots of people will disagree with me on this but that's fine. Just answer me, why would you all suddenly decide to join CEVO, a league that has failed in the past? Just because ESEA, the main ground for competition in NA (with a lan, even grounds for the players and entertainment for the viewers) has made their mistakes and one rogue employee who was sued did something that didn't affect the TF2 community whatsoever? Multiple small irks they've been trying to improve?

Sure ESEA has made their mistakes (what company doesn't do this) that make you scratch your head, but from what I've heard they're really trying to step it with a better client team and management in general, operating at a loss and even then still giving away things for free. I'm not saying you shouldn't play in CEVO, I'm just saying dropping ESEA completely in favor of CEVO in a leap of faith is a bad move.

synchro should drop the mic after that.

Thanks. I honestly did not know that those were things (besides the prize pool, I knew that I guess) that the community had to convince CEVO to implement. Seems to me like they're all pretty basic parts of running a competitive league but it's awesome that they were willing to implement those things when people asked for them.

My team played their first cevo match yesterday, we all averaged 30-50 ping lower than when we used to play same server location in esea.

I don't know how someone can get literally shat on like you just did and then come back and try to sound like they were right all along.

if you have a hard time understanding it i'll make it easier for you

it's not that people enjoy abuse, it's just sometimes you gotta take the good with the bad...for example you probably scratch your head sometimes when you see two people getting back together after they where clearly miserable, women are nut jobs....but guys go back because they just want dat ass....even if shes bat shit crazy she got a nice body...so you can get that last squeeze and then break it off again, or be miserable stay together fuck whenever, then probably break it off again...rinse and repeat

ya know what i mean?

what about the part where the server was stuck on 2fort for 20 minutes before matchtime or the fact that somehow someone was allowed to post twitch plays pokemon as the official match stream or the pings of the other team or any of that

:)

When I was in London I flew across Europe to Poland for 20 pounds. A similar 4 hour flight from Nor Cal to Chicago is normally hundreds of dollars. If you can get to and from a lan that is relatively far away from you for less than $200 in the US then that's amazing. Also we don't really have affordable trains that take you anywhere at all.

I'm just glad that my honest question was answered and I'm very happy that CEVO implemented match stats and stv downloads for their league participants :)

$

I would 100% agree with you if CEVO didn't have a Main division where this wouldn't be the case. ESEA had 19 teams across Invite and Main last season. Given that teams who do well in Main are supposed to be moved up to Invite, it's pretty reasonable to think that, if the top 16 teams from those two division had all moved to CEVO-M, the competition would have been pretty great (again, since schedules are made as the season goes on, we'd probably see some internal divisions going on anyway).

wow slins a baby back bitch, ruining our fun in the other thread

CANT YOU SEE RANDO IS IN PAIN? HE NEEDS OUR LOVE AND SUPPORT

Unsubbed unfollowed 0/10

have you even looked at some of the teams in cevo-m lmao

The competition wouldn't be great no matter how many top teams are in cevo because no one cares about winning cevo. I see why cevo could be appealing for open and new players, but it offers nothing for the top competition of tf2, simple as that.

The server was stuck on 2fort because the person who reserved the server did not realize that the rcon code was available in the match page where he reserved the server.

EDIT: already answered above, whoops

The Reality was not organised by ETF2L. It is a (still ongoing) LAN series. I think dunc and some others organised The Community LAN (TCL) on site and used ETF2L's tournament system for the matches ... or something along those lines.
On the topic of another European LAN, I just have to say that I still have a Dream...

Let's see:
insomnia ticket: 110 USD
Gas+ferry: 110 USD
Hotel: 100 USD
... and I was travelling from Germany. That is already 320 USD and I have not eaten (or drunk) anything so LAN usually adds up to about 400-450 USD for me. Even the year before when I took the plane, I paid ~170 USD for the flight Hamburg - Birmingham (the cheap flights don't go everywhere, just to some selected cities ... and Birmingham ain't one of them).

1st part, that was before matchtime, and was due to my own inexperience with cevo shit, I didn't realise I had to change it myself and the password didn't showup until I had refreshed the page.

2nd part Yeah, it's pretty stupid that they loaded a stream onto the MOTD.

3rd part I don't know the average pings of players I haven't played with, but when we were playing they all seemed to have at least decent ping while we were playing.

ALSO, by far the biggest thing to my team, we didn't have any of that bullshit stutter, or random times where the server lagged, or massive ping fluctuations.

Honestly, I'm glad ESEA is dead. The company is corrupt through and through and even if we're going into uncharted territory with this whole CEVO thing, it has to be better than what we've had so far. So far all I've seen is that community icons like Lange and Nahanni are willing to step in and dedicate their time and money to the cause, and CEVO simply has a better product than ESEA, LAN or not. If teams like Mix^ can't see that, then it's their loss and they're giving up this great game for a corrupt piece-of-cr*p company with a shady owner and ineffective admins.

So far, the CEVO matches have been pretty much flawless, and with all the improvements they've been making it's sure to get even better. I look forward to this new era of TF2 and I know the rest of you guys are too!

Good luck and see you on the battlefield, guys. Should be a great season in both CEVO-O and CEVO-M. :)

Did you just have a stroke?

That's the prerogative of the players, not the league. You can't blame CEVO when they offer everything that's needed to foster high level TF2, besides a LAN (and we've talked that to death anyways). If players don't want to take the better league seriously, then maybe TF2 deserves to die. I don't mean to be harsh here, but it really just comes down to the players realizing that they need to learn to love CEVO and that it's far better than ESEA ever could have been.

its funny cause owl is basically an old man sitting on his porch yelling across the street at the kids playing stickball cause he can't play anymore