Yes.

yes please

Are you talking about only your lan videos/ pictures, or encouraging other people to do the same?
I think no matter which situation of the two,
this is something that would be greatly appreciated, and amazing for the community. :>

take some of the extra money at http://i52.tf and take a job for tftv as a video journalist

I'm a Digital Cinema major so it wouldn't be too difficult
I also already have all of my own necessary equipment
2 Cameras, 3 Tripods, 2 Lights, Green&Blue screens, Lav Mic, Shotgun Mic, Should Mount, Camera Cage, etc

Also, none of this was planned out with the people running i52.tf so im sure I will have to create something of my own.

I always enjoy seeing more interviews and over the shoulder game players from a variety of players.

Would love to see live cams watching each of the teams to capture big moments, big wins, any big reactions from the teams themselves. Especially during big matches or finals.

Get this done tagg, everyone benefits from this. Everyone.

Something like the CSGO ESEA LAN had with the team cameras would be awesome. It was great to see the reactions of the team members whenever something big happened.

That all depends on where the casting table is and where the players are
At i49 there were players scattered all over the place, so if i52 is anything like i49 it doesn't seem likely.

All of that footage would have to be used in an event video, which is something I plan to make if there is enough interest

send this guy to Europe

You should link your ESEA video for people that are not in the know (like me), otherwise why would they encourage and/or donate for you to do this. Otherwise, somebody in Europe could do it for cheaper.

Nobody in Europe made a thread suggesting it...?

And I don't think tagg's main point was that we should raise money to send him to Europe, he's saying we need to make the coverage at i52 the best we've ever seen for TF2 - but hell I think he's the guy to make it happen.

EDIT: alright then cool edit your post.

He actually made the 'official' LAN Picture Thread linking his twitter account where all his videos and pictures are.

My opinion as someone who has never been on a competitive TF2 team, but who follows it:

Right now I find it pretty hard to follow the comp scene without spending a lot of time reading the forums, watching streams and asking questions in chat. For instance the times that I've gone on vacations, I've come back and had a rough time catching up on what happened.

I think that one thing that could really help people follow the happenings would be a constant flow of short, descriptive articles on the front page. While I appreciate the super high quality, well written articles that make the front page now, I think they come too infrequently to really keep people informed. I think that just a few quick sentences describing things like results and roster drama shortly after things happen would be very helpful.

Just for example, I missed the i52 qualifying round robin. When I logged in on Sunday, all I could see was an event advertising that grand finals would be mix^ vs xts. I think it would have been excellent (and not a ton of work) if someone who watched the round robin on Saturday wrote a few sentences about what happened, maybe mentioned xts redeeming their lan performance against 20b, how many rounds mix^ dropped, that sort of thing. Instead I read through the 81 posts on the forums, and after not reading anything too informative, took to stream chat to ask questions, where someone linked me the bracket.

Sorry this isn't particularly relevant to tagg going or not, just the thoughts of a tf2 fan regarding possible i52 media coverage.

hasn't the community already put out money for froyo + mixup and lange as well?

i know i'm probably in the minority here but honestly while i think it would be awesome to have more coverage at i52 i think if you want to do something like this you should pay your own way

There are already plans in the works for using the extra funds raised, and there are plans in the works for better/more lan coverage.

Tagg does raise a good point about how lan coverage has worked, we're looking at improving what we show and how we show it. Previously the best way of doing that has been lan movies, i.e. the i46 documentary and the hopefully upcoming i49 "fragumentary", which can capture the lan atmosphere to an extent, but 10+ months later.

I definitely agree with the fact that watching tf2 lan streams doesn't have the same excitement as other games - and that most of the reason for this is a lack of interaction between what is actually happening at the event and the game itself. TF2 is a hard game to set up something similar to most cs casts though imo, and maybe its unrealistic to have "team cams" (even just end of round switches) during the bracket stages - but surely something like that could be possible by the time it comes to finals where both teams are in one place?

Another option could be team mumble cuts I suppose - but i know a lot of players hate those so that might not be a great idea either.

Something easy though could be just walking the camera around more during games/in between games - if you guys remember i49 some of the interviews happened at our tables (which for us and hrg were right near the casting stage), and I think rather than just having the cam on the spectators during downtime it might be a good idea to walk the camera around a bit, and to do it during games as well (particularly if the two teams playing each other are sitting together) to give the spectators a bit of a feel for whats going on.

as long as you bring the krispy kreme again, then i would donate.

An event movie would be awesome. I always loved what they did with these i40/i43 clips.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVcY6PrdJ5c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgrnL1Mr3aM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwXrrotAGDI

yeh they were great, he should make more

I heard he's making i49 movie as well

I'd chip in. Your extra coverage of ESEA was pretty great, would love to see it for i52.

A lot of people saying you dont feel part of it while watching these tf2 lan events on a stream. What is it exactly that makes you feel disconnected? Last year at i49 we had plenty of awkward interviews, bad jokes, musical intermissions, drunk casters, crowd cams, team/player cams, walking around interviewing players. Its obviously difficult to gauge it being at the event, as you dont see the stream, so from an outsiders perspective what can we improve on?

As DavidTheWin says we have plans to improve over last year, there is a couple of things in the works. Some of these things hinge on what multiplay allow us to do and what they can provide. One major thing that will improve the quality of the coverage is we are splitting the ingame director and the production machine so its a 2man job now (no more octopus lange from i49).

If you are serious about improving the quality of the coverage then watch back last years event and post here what you think can be improved. (dont post obvious shit like the sound being out of sync and mic quality as we are fully aware of these things :P )

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLayp9cpOkRhMHu3m85VpkhUm1lLad9wCj

Tagg msg me on steam sometime

What would your estimated costs / money required from a drive be?

Sounds like you guys need a journalist or three. I'm too busy, too shit at the game, and as yet too untrained, but give me a year or two and I can do this. In the meantime, there needs to be someone who understands sports journalism (basically, if you have at some point regularly read the sports section of the newspaper/digital equivalent and can read, you'll do) covering each of the major leagues, even if it's only as said above, a few sentences a week. And then bigger, more constant and professional coverage for the major events, particularly LANs. This can tie in beautifully with Tagg's media, with a little bit of planning.

@BoneS:

I watched a lot of the i49 matches before I really understood the comp meta, so my viewing experience is probably indicative of a newbie. While there were some negatives I have to say the way the coverage was done was pretty superb, especially the explanation of common tactics, so that part is great, well done commentators and everyone who helped produce.

Some features I did miss compared to other televised sports (which I think is what should be emulated, to a degree) were:

-Replays. I understand you guys are watching it live and that the casting team is understaffed. But you need a couple of extra 'cameramen' watching the stv on their own computers and picking out great things to show as an 'instant replay' kind of thing. Technically it could be a little difficult to do, but even watching an airshot from another pov when normally we'd just be watching another point capping would be very cool.

-Cuts to the players' faces. It's been discussed above, and I certainly felt while watching the matches that it would be nice to see the players' reaction. To take a somewhat painful example, that last iM match on granary... we really needed to see the reactions from both teams. It would really have added to the cast. (Sorry Aporia :p)

-Mumble comms, or as I thought at the time: 'I'd love to hear what the players are talking about'. This one is iffy, it's not really done regularly in any televised sport, probably mostly because of profanity issues. For instance it'd probably not be good for people to hear Yuki saying 'scout raped' or whatever -- that still shocks me a little, even though I understand perfectly that Australians are rude as fuck.

-Perhaps some slightly higher quality player models and other textures could be used in the streaming hud as well, the game could look pretty amazing.

-Please also use that caster cheat mod that gives you advance warning of airshots etc because it's annoying to miss things like that. Happens a bit.

-I also don't know if it's technically possible but if you can download and rewind the stv while the match is still being played, that'd be swell. That way you could for instance get a pov on a scout who snuck behind and got a 3k including the medic while we were all watching a different skirmish, and then play it back in some of the 'dead time' -- point capping, stalemate situation, that sort of thing. There is so much that goes on during fghts that can be shown post-fight without making us lose the thread of what's happening.

Looking forward to the coverage!

Edit: apologies for wall of text, I cleaned it up a bit so it hurts less eyes

I thought the streaming from the event was OK. Interviews, team cams, bytes stuff all pretty good. Biggest stand out was the intermissions with the camera on the (very small) spectators. Need to work on that as showing nothing happening is a mistake.

As has been said above walk it round some more, show us the competitors faces not, gather their thoughts and not just the stars. You cannot have enough interviews and they don't have to all be the biggest names. Much better than having nothing happening on stream that is a big turn off for people from outside the community looking in, and that is the people Tf2 comp needs to attract if it is to grow.

The biggest thing for me though, is the lack of the official i49 movie. This is something that should be planned in advance, executed to plan on the event, and brought to the public very quickly post event in order to capture interest and impetus. This needs careful planning, scripting before events in order to not spend 6months going through a random collection of media to find things that may link together to tell the story.

We raise money to send teams that have won enough money to attend without community support, teams that have sponsors we really should devote some of these funds we raise in futue in the direction of of the official LAN movies. This is a good thing for the teams themselves, really have something to show sponsors and the sponsors get something they can share widely as part of their marketing and thus bring other interest to our game. It is a missing link at present.

I hope that GentlemanJon will cover the matches, I know it burns a lot of his time and I understand he wouldn't, but his articles are just the greatest.

Can you promise us more Blaze?