cheaper than esea
less recognition than esea

sephiroth

The current season of CEVO has been a disaster for most of open I'd say. My team kept running into scheduling problems. We'd try to play a match and something or another would go wrong and the match would get moved back. Eventually we started playing matches 2-3 weeks later than when we should have. And when a team forfeit loss it just meant we had to schedule another match as CEVO doesn't really allow you to have forfeit wins. I know this wasn't just exclusive for my team as other teams we played against had similar problems. We even saw a few teams die right before we play them because their leader was so sick of rescheduling.
There's also the fact that everybody in the Main or IM division got moved down to open as there weren't enough players in Main. This caused quite a few issues, often you'd either be matched up against an easy team or a team that was so much higher than your skill level. Rarely did we get put into an even match up.
I believe that because of all this many many teams ended up dying before the season ended(including mine). For me CEVO was a complete disaster and I'm not sure what I want to do next season. Give CEVO a second chance, or spend quite a bit of money to play in ESEA.

Now maybe others in CEVO had a different experience I don't know. But this is what I experienced.

Just finished the regular season last night.

-The make-up match system for FFWs sucks. Its neat that we got to play 15/16 matches but having to cram 3-4 matches in a week along with other commitments was a huge hassle. There needs to be some sort of opt-out for make-up matches.

-The site itself is frustrating to navigate and you have to jump around just to find what you're looking for.

-Only 20 teams survived the entire season.

-CEVO Match Mod has been broken since the Steam ID change (August 21st). The servers themselves are pretty poor (especially Dallas). Most teams preferred non CEVO servers.

The league fee was $18. I'm not seeing the value compared to ESEA. I'm not sure what the open fee was for ESEA this season but usually it comes to around $25-30 (taking in account Premium). ESEA is definitely worth the extra $7-12 dollars.

Only thing CEVO has ESEA beat on is their prize pot. Prizes will be lower next season though due to fewer teams this past season.

you martyred yourself in the name of cevo and didn't even follow what happened after. tisk tisk

the rescheduling thing sounds really dumb, and tf2 skill levels are so diverse that two divisions can never be enough

I didn't play CEVO though

we were playing this season, and unfortunately we got booted because we had too many forfeits. the first forfeit was because we didnt have 6, which is fine that's our fault. the second forfeit was after we actually played the match and lost it (not on cevo server) and then rikachu reported it as a forfeit because the website wouldn't let him report it as a win for some reason the regular way. the third forfeit was because the other team wouldn't work with us to reschedule, and because you can only have 3 forfeits in a season we got booted from cevo. waste of time and money, should have been completely avoidable.

the scheduling thing has not gotten better since last season, and if you are playing both esea and cevo its nearly impossible without going insane, simply because of scheduling issues.

I played a total of two cevo-p matches on client so far this season. They were pretty much viewed as paid scrims by my team. There were even cases where we played a team in esea and reported that match score to cevo. There were also matches we played with three ringers.

Maybe it was just because our team isn't taken seriously by other invite/cevo-p teams but our matches were pretty much a joke. Granted, our esea matches weren't that serious this season either.

It seems like esea is opposed philosophically, however it is probably the better product. Automatic win recording makes what happen to London impossible. I mean yeah there's a ton to be desired, but esea finally added med stats and med picks.

Cevo is probably more approachable as the admins are a lot more friendly and talkable to. You see them in stream chats, and on forums far more often than killing or tri. But esea has had more than 4 years experience running a 6v6 league so there are less issues but when they do happen more intensely, probably due to the automation.

The choice is either the experienced league that has a slightly better product, or the new league with approachable admins.

after talking to the people on No More Anime, theyd rather not play another season of CEVO, with them saying the only thing it has over ESEA is the prize pool size (at least in open, for this season).

the scheduling is awful, the cevo client doesn't work half the time, and most of our team gets 140+ ping to cevo servers

on the plus side we did play the correct version of snakewater though

Servers, scheduling, and support all managed to be as bad, or worse than ESEA. Playing a Snakewater match on gully due to CEVO servers being broken was fun though.

I agree with most of the complaints above. For the most part, I found it inferior to playing in ESEA.

Played CEVO last season.

-The CEVO servers config was messed up at times. We had a couple matches where the first half went the full thirty minutes without a team hitting the 3 mark, then the second half was treated as a golden cap for some reason and things went pretty awry; thus, we mostly played off client (at least they'll let you do that).

-The client itself wasn't so bad.

-It feels like no one in the community actually gives a shit about CEVO for whatever list of reasons.

-The website is pretty "meh." Whole lot of things, but not actually much there (which there doesn't need to be).

-The entirety of the Main division moving down to open was pretty shitty, and as said, almost every team we played against was either significantly worse than us or significantly better than us (the teams that were actually close to us, based on scrims, we completely botched our officials against from not having played the map enough due to whatever issues, which kind of blew).

Seems like some of complaints would be fixed with more teams in CEVO.

every single time i have tried to launch the cevo client it has not launched and i have to re-install it
at least i got to play all of my cevo-p matches off client
also i still cant figure out that labyrinth website

does the cevo client still say that creepy as fuck goodbye when u close it

I think that's the real reason ESEA was able to overtake CEVO back in the day.

our team got dq'd without warning, apparently there are times for substitutions for FFW's and there is no explicit deadline. maybe that's why? i'm mostly angered by no communication from cevo.