You make it sound as if UGC is the only place where you won't get rolled, the only place to learn the game, the only place to make friends. That makes zero sense. If you have the right attitude and ethic about improvement it should matter where you're playing, so long as the competition fosters games which you can learn from.

Or maybe I'm just interpreting your post incorrectly.

if everyone is in open, all the UGC players will just play each other while the higher seeds get taken by current open teams and all the top open teams become IM and all the IM teams become main

too high of a skill floor is irrelevant for a league, price of entry is a big problem

esea free would be cool
or cevo free
etc

playing in a free league is like playing poker with fake money, no one really takes it seriously

theres no incentive to become the best and win, other then prestige. even if it small amount of money, people actually take things seriously when they pay for them. lets be honest here, does anyone think that a team on the caliber of froyotech could emerge from a free league? Even if that league had 17 seasons to grow, if it has no LAN final and no cash prize, putting in several hours a day to win a virtual medal just isn't worth it.

Wall of text:

Deprecating the skill level of ESEA to the point that Open would be the least bit conducive to these bottom of Iron-tier players is obviously completely unacceptable; virtually everyone currently in ESEA would have to be moved up a division to even pretend that these players have a chance.

If someone has zero experience playing 6s and spends no time watching the format in order to learn it, it's only common sense that they will get rolled. If said person actually wanted to learn the format and have a chance of competing, than they would know better than to immediately join a league. Said person would (hopefully) watch some casts, some of Marxist's videos or any of the pretty voluminous (relative to size of the community) resources that have been created for this very purpose. After that, our devoted player would continue ascending through lobbies, eventually playing tf2mixes, low-level inhouses, or whatever the equivalent is at the time. At that point, it is simply a matter of practice to becoming a valid Open-level pickup, or simply making friends and making a team.

It doesn't require a low-level, easy to compete in, throwaway league in order to learn the game. There is simply a huge body of resources to learn the basics, the metagame, and the mechanical skills required to play at a decent level. There are also quite a few organizations (not sure of a good blanket term) which, from this perspective, exist entirely to help (tf2center, MGE, #tf2mix, inhouses), due to the complete and total lack of requirements other than a working knowledge of the game for tf2mix and a similar skill level for inhouses.

If the goal shifts from making it possible for self-motivated players to enter into competitive to herding as many pubstompers as possible into the format, clearly there need to be changes. In this case, a large, casual league is needed as learning the game outside of the game itself is not going to happen. Suddenly, instead of learning through a baptism by fire and developing a thick skin, players must be coaxed by close games, medals, and some level of support from iconic players. This is all to convey an idealization of the higher level, a mere idealization since the high level is played by those that (for the most part) found their way in through the method outlined before.

Thus, these players will sit in UGC (or whatever the low level league is at the time) for quite a while; whenever they leave to try in ESEA they are mercilessly beaten down by higher level teams and will frequently return to UGC, none the better.

This has been declared necessary, after all, competitive tf2 has such a small community that our entire effort should be in making more people play it, right? Rather than focus on pushing more dead weights who have little to offer and don't even have the drive to do it themselves into higher leagues, the natural Darwinism should be taken advantage of. If the only players who make it into the higher levels (read: Open and above) are those with the drive to do it themselves, the community will be much better off. Those that do so will probably stick around longer, even after they stop playing the game.

It's the simple fact that the current higher-level player base has been made this way that allows us to have ESEA LAN (among other similar events). This event which, despite (sometimes not even) only paying travel fees, is watched by a huge majority of the 6s players and is treated as the ultimate show of ability. This wouldn't be possible if the goal of every player in ESEA was to make a profit. If any attempt is made, no matter how successful, to make competitive TF2 a profitable venture for the players, it won't be a substitute for a simple passion for the game. ESEA is the monolith to this, the reason to buy into ESEA is not to win a large prize pot upon winning, but to play only against those that share a similar interest in the game.

I quickly threw together a site to more precisely track registration stats. It is in a very rough state and will be updated further, but I decided to release it now in order to present a better view of the situation.

http://esearegtracker.fwdcp.net/

thats pretty cool, but the orange makes me lack confidence

there will be more then 35 payed open teams this season

like 10-15 im teams

there seems like theres a lot of invite capable players that want to play in invite this season but I'm not aware of any rosters at all, get moved into the div and start paying up

esea should be able to live this season with 3 divs
s19 should be better

All teams with 5 (maybe 4 even) paid players should be blue, as at that point it's unlikely they won't play.

I think you only need 5 players paid to count?

No, teams aren't counted until they have 6 players paid, at least for the purposes of official registration. I'm not sure what the consolidation would be based on, though I presume it would be on the same basis.

etf2l had no lan, no cash prize (mousepads heh), and no entry fee and they still made epsilon, just saying

And they lost 2 out of 3 international tournaments on their home ground.

Just saying.

they also had insomnia series lan to fill in for everything etf2l didn't have and afaik the euros only really cared about doing well at i series and didn't give much of a shit about how well they did in etf2l (that's the vibe I always got anyways going back as far as, like, dignitas)

small sample size

etf2l isn't significantly behind NA in terms of skill, every match at i52 was a nailbiter except the grand finals

although maybe that's changed now that every european team died after i52

So who is going to make the countdown to the death of tf2 stream now this time around?

Yeah, they almost grabbed a map off of froyotech in the bracket!

I don't want to speak for any epsilon players but the i49 documentary made it seem like the true driving force behind the formation and success of their i49 roster was a desire to get revenge against NA teams at LAN. Waldo's last paragraph about ESEA being sort of a way to enable high-level competition hits the nail on the head for me. The fees ESEA players pay not only ensure a higher level of competition than UGC but also enable North America to have an event three times a year to look forward to as the pinnacle of competition. It enables street hoops esports to move up from Open to the top of invite. It enables mad men to smash IM every other season but still come back for more in invite (5th place forever rip). It enables a pug team, LiT, to, admittedly with some veteran pickups, go from a pug team with low-level invite players to an undefeated season and sponsorship. It enables mix^ to be able to stick around and continue to find renewed interest in this game (at least for a little while).

Europe is lucky that they get the LAN without league fees, but the LAN is still enabled by community money. If we ignore iM, every high level international team that has made it to the last three i-series lans made it only because of crowd-funding. There were even some high-level European teams that had fundraisers for players to help get them there. To act like etf2l would have had such high-levels competition without some form of an influx of cash seems ignorant to me; if you need any evidence of this, look at Ozfortress, Asiafortress, or LBTF2L (the brazilian/south-american league).

I don't think mixup staying together for 3 years is a little while.

Was intended more as a sad postscript about their recent departure than anything else.

I completely agree with you, having something at stake is better than having nothing (or next to nothing) at stake. Yet I think that has little relevance in a community like tf2, especially in Europe where you don't have that culture of p2p.

I really don't want to extend the off topic too long in this thread but I really need to adress this.
It's really unfair to compare epsilon from i46 and i52 to i49, it has nothing to do with the league competitiveness, i46 epsilon took a semi inactive demo (extremer) to lan, he was an oldschool demo who was a bit rusty from what I remember and never performed up to par at lan, also schocky and walters was the dream scout pair in europe for a lot of seasons at the time and walters couldn't go to lan for i46 and shintaz ringed for him, he had not played at prem level for 4 seasons at the time and he didn't really perform up to expectations or even near that. As for i52 Epsilon, they lost numlocked earlier that year who was arguably one of the best demos and callers to ever play in europe. Also they played without schocky who is the best player in etf2l history tied with mike, and for me the most exciting scout to ever grace this game, and GeaR who for me is the best roamer gamesense wise to ever play the game. So in short, i46 epsilon had 2 underperforming and rusty players and i52 epsilon was a completely different team totally deprived of the big brains like numlocked, gear and schocky.

As for i49 epsilon, it remains for me one of the most all around tf2 teams in history, every player at the time was the top performing player at that class in etf2l history and it absolutely wrecked any competition that year, if u ever wanna compare any all star team in NA u will have to compare it to i49 epsilon, it was the best team in european tf2 bar none. Gear and mike as the solly duo, schocky and bash(in form) as the scout pair and numlocked as demo and knoxxx as medic and caller is pretty hard to surpass. And etf2l being a free to play league is completely irrelevant to epsilon performance in the i-series as it was a product of various circumstances at the time.

Cyzer, you have a spot on a team. My open team needs a scout, the spot is yours XD

Why did CEVO die? I wanted to play in it because it's cheaper than ESEA and less... Evil? Idk if thats the right word... But now its no more. It had a ton of potential! And what's this I hear about Mix^ dropping out of invite? Did they all quit?

These are all thoughts I've had about ESEA, yet people continue to throw money at them and if you want to be looked at as a good TF2 player, you have to play ESEA. I mean, I'm paying... Why do I get better servers/support from UGC, a free league that really only cares about HL? I'm honestly ignorant on this, don't just say I'm stupid: Why does everyone at the higher end of TF2 love ESEA so much when ESEA doesn't love us back?

Cevo did everything it could to change that and apparently noone went with em. They had a lan finals at GXL, GXL was a HUGE LAN that was dominated by TF2, basically the NA version of the Iseries and it folded.... People rolled their eyes at it and they said fine, don't love us. They were cheaper, gave better service, had people that actually cared about the community running it and actually wanted TF2 around and ESEA people didn't join and it folded, and now we have ESEA being esea with servers that give terrible ping to people that live in dallas, that force as many dollars out as they possibly can and give nothing back. People prefer scrimming on their own servers cuz they aren't bad, people don't use the pug service because it is bad. What are we paying for? The prestige? The right for 4 invite teams to pay their own way to a lan that likely wont even pay back their travel costs? Why? Because ESEA is the only company that offers tf2 players a consistent lan... This... This doesnt make sense to me. CEVO wanted to give us a lan and we refused. Its sad really.

ded

I completely agree with this, I certainly would've liked to have seen i49 Epsilon play against the i52 froyotech or mix^; maybe one day it'll happen.

You're right in that a paid league vs. free league doesn't have impact on being able to produce incredibly strong teams; good players will come from either scenario. I would say, though, that LAN playoffs/finals are inherently more competitive than online finals, regardless of the player skill. I wish there was a good way to prove this, but sadly there isn't. The best example I can point to is Team Immunity. They won the CyberLeague EU tournament right before i52, but it's generally accepted that lack of experience at a LAN setting was the differing factor between them at some of the other teams (source: yuki from Team Immunity). If we're going to have LANs at all (i.e. the i-series), between two otherwise identical teams, I believe that the team that has LAN playoffs and not online playoffs will undoubtedly perform better. This is, of course, NOT accounting for extraordinary players (of which I would include any teams that made it to the top 4).

The other thing is, we have to be careful about what specific arguments we're talking about. I was intending my other statement to be simply about having regular LAN experience, and then competing at the i-series. I didn't mean for it to conflate with players in that scene. A more interesting question for that problem is if a free league or paid league attracts and keeps more top level players.

This is kind of off topic from the thread, so to bring it back:

• MAD LUXURIOUS-BLUE in IM is the only team that has all 6 paid up right now. cafe monster has 5.
  
• 9 teams in Open are paid up. Another 18 teams has 3 or more players paid up. This is a great trend.

http://i.imgur.com/Wa1nnfk.gif

Shooter, can we get an update on this? We're looking good for IM and Open, at this rate.

IM has 7 teams fully paid, Open has 22 teams fully paid.

8 if you count my team, we will be fully paid up by end of the day

Well I paid up there better be a league since I'm not playing anyway. #backup