There will never be enough teams in tf2 to support a main division

here i found you some invite teams. please have them

http://play.esea.net/teams/42469
http://play.esea.net/teams/69988

So either shaft a team or shaft a league. I'm betting most people prefer to shaft the team considering how anti-competitive it'd be.

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why are people telling them they need to care as much as others?

these guys and gal just hang out and shoot shit. let them do as they please

http://media.steampowered.com/steamcommunity/public/images/avatars/1c/1ce3058444166b75693efee123ed93d1ca2787c8_full.jpg

please force the mad men revival to go invite

I think that no one should force your team to move to a higher division if you just don't want to go, but the same reasons you're giving for not wanting to move to invite are the reasons why you should be moved out of IM.
You don't want to have a hard time getting crushed by b4nny or by another mix^-like all star team, but if you stay on IM you're the ones that will be crushing low IM teams. That attitude is simply not competitive at all, and you can achieve the same "just want to have a good time" effect by just playing friendly scrims with other teams being out of any league.

?

we lost to vector, deltafox, xen, we can warriors, and kapow's team

we struggle to take rounds off the current kapow incarnation and there is a fairly good chance they will be the weakest or second weakest invite team this season (not counting us i we got moved up, i mean)

I don't think we are terrible but I'm not sure why people think that we will STOMP IM or that we didn't have a challenging season

I also find it amusing that people are telling us what our motivations should be. If you think invite is so awesome then get good and go play don't try to live vicariously in a videogame through me lol

i've been in invite on a bad team before, it is about the least fun experience in the world why on earth would i want to pay 60$ to have a shitty time all season

why are cs players joining the spacewhales roster

they're soup's friends and they like freemium

ty djc

or put them in the vote instead of ukm, that would make sense

IM NOT ON THE NEW MAD MEN'S ROSTER, THEY ARE NOT INVITE CAPABLE
luv bl4nk

no poll without powah please huehuehue.

just add me in the invite poll.. no question asked

Yeah, I don't get this, and I don't like this. It sounds like you guys could just skip ESEA altogether, scrim high IM teams in the evenings and go to bed satisfied. What a waste.

not being willing/able to attend the LAN should disqualify them from the invite poll anyways. props to doggles for making everyone aware of ur situation so that if you did manage to be put in the poll, people should not vote for you.

they were, however, top 3 IM and i don't like seeing a "we don't want to try" post from a team that could be moved up and just don't want to be. in the past killing has taken steps to prevent IM sandbagging and after seeing something like this i wouldn't be surprised to see a roster/player restriction thing.

First off i agree 100% that if a team cannot commit to LAN, then they should not go to invite. Invite is meant to hold the most competitive players, and most importantly the one's that want to win, put in the time to win, and have the drive to win.

However, what's the motivation for IM teams if they are going to absolutely get murdered? That's not being competitive - it's simply easy wins for the top teams at this point. Let's take chess club...this is a team that would probably have wiped the floor with IM last season. They have an extremely talented roster, skilled players - they got to the playoffs due to beating the other teams close to their skill level (and FFW's from the teams that died). They made a great effort to compete at LAN, but got stomped....bad. My hat goes off to them more than anyone for sticking it out...but not many people want that scenario. Realistically if they couldn't even win one match against the top 3, and DTP has already said they are just a casual team...you do the math.

The fact is not everyone wants to be invite, or put in the long nights and hardships of becoming a top team. Yes TF2 is different than CS. Is Putting/forcing a good IM team to go invite and potentially getting a record like 0-16 really worth it? Harb, i understand you have fun with your friends...but how do you think the other team feels when your team off-classes 'for fun' in a match and still destroys their team? Also, invite isn't always about fun with friends, because friends get cut or chastised when they under perform - and the whole community then gets to know about it. Not every team wants to go through that.

Since ruwin/pyyour are supposedly gone - why not give 2 top IM level players a chance to join mix?? Would you be willing to go through some growing pains and losses (as well as not winning LAN or potentially even not making playoffs) to help bring in some new blood and build a new team? Or is it easier to get mesr/yz/moose to play and know you'll lock in one of those top spots? Just look at the 2-3 "new teams" forming now- it's still almost all top players split up from last few seasons - and why?? Simply put because they WANT to win and i don't blame any of you for wanting to win. Knowing you have the chance to win and make LAN is what drives some players....but not everyone shares that same desire.

If a team feels they would be more competitive in IM, why force them to move if they don't want to? I mean wasn't there a team like a season or two ago that was begging for votes to get to Invite, and they didn't get in because someone else was moved up??? I'm not trying to give anyone a hard time, you just need to see it from the other side of the fence.

me neither

bl4nk was my backpack

You could argue how great an effort they actually made. I think they scrimmed exactly 1 night in the weeks leading up to LAN. Also they had roster issues at the last minute. And are you arguing that them stomping IM would have been better than them getting stomped in invite?

Not wanting to be invite does not mean you should keep the same roster in IM just because they don't want to play invite. It's not good for the IM division to have a top team just sitting there for multiple seasons just because they don't want to try hard. No, maybe it's not good for the team to force them into invite, but it is good for the division.

Very few teams would be willing to try something like this. People don't want to be forced to pickup new players with no guarantee how they will perform or how well they will get along with each other. Teams have to enjoy playing with one another and have to be confident in one another's abilities. This is kind of comparable to the highlander invite player limit and it is equally dumb. People are going to play who they want to play with.

because if a team wins IM and then goes to killing and says "listen, we don't want to play invite", killing can't just let them sit in IM or it will destroy the division. Who is going to sign up and pay for playing in IM if the same teams are going to just sit at the top season after season because they are afraid of losing or afraid of the LAN or whatever.

Biggest problem is that it looks like an easy money grab. I'm sure most invite teams could forgo scrimming and get the IM paycheck every season (and potentially make more money since they don't have to fly to LAN). Even if they forfeit out of playoffs, any team that played against them has the potential for their record to be screwed over and end up with terrible seeds.

No i'm saying they we're that much of a better team than anyone in IM last season, and they still got stomped. Did they try - absolutely at LAN, but ya they could have practiced more. But an IM team that already doesn't have their heart in playing invite seeing this team lose is even more of a turn off.

I will agree with this to a point - but that was DTP's first season in IM correct? If they rode out a top seed multiple season in a row, then yes i agree they have proved themselves as not only a good team, but a team that sticks together. Then at that point they should be up for an invite vote.

Exactly my point - people shouldn't be forced to do something they don't want to. If they aren't going to enjoy it, whether its starting over with new players or being moved to a different division...it won't be fun.

Once again i agree with this to a point - if it's an IM team that has finished in the top 3 multiple seasons with the same roster then yes they need to be placed in the vote. However there's still nothing stopping them from breaking up if they don't want to play. At the same time though, who wants to pay for invite when the same 3 teams with the same mix of players dominate season after season. Once again, what's for fun some may not be fun for others..and vice versa.

Personally I'll vote for whoever is most likely to stomp IM if they don't get moved up. I'm sorry if those players don't want to move up, but they can't stay in IM.

Let's face it, if what you're saying is true (that you'll get stomped in invite), then any team worse than you will suffer the same if they're moved up in your place. So we have two options:
-move the other team up, they quit when they lose, and you stomp IM.
-move you up, you quit when you lose, and the other team competes in IM where they belong.

I think the choice is pretty obvious. Sorry. :/
Now, of course, if there's a better team than you waiting to move up, then we don't have any problem at all. They'll move up and everyone's happy.

Invite is about the top 8 teams in NA TF2, not the top 8 that want to play invite. If I allowed the "We can't get to LAN" excuse then that would just be asking for another iDemise/Harmonic. I promised to never let that happen again.

Killing i understand where you're coming from - ESEA is heads above what any other league has done for TF2. The one issue though is that every season 2-3 invite teams die, and those players for the most part recycle back through open/IM. We then move 2-3 IM teams the next season and the same thing happens. Some teams openly don't want to play, but what about the teams that really aren't ready to compete at that level? Is it worth it to consider a 6 team invite division to have less potential turnover? Could doing this give the good IM teams another season or two to hone in and really become that "dominant" IM team that will then truly want to compete? Just curious on your thoughts...

Just wanted to point out that if you think 1.5 hours a night is a 'small amount of time playing' you are hopelessly out of touch with reality.

Let's go over the facts.
1) If you think 1.5 hours a night is a small amount of time playing, you are hopelessly out of touch with reality.
2) Harbleu thinks taht playing 1.5 hours a night is a small amount of time playing.

From these facts I make the following deduction:

Harbleu, you are hopelessly out of touch with reality.

I'd say Q.E.D. to drive my point home like one of those wooden stake things in a number of Zelda games once you get the hammer item that's in like every game that most people use to drive those stakes in but you can also use it on enemies and it does more damage to some of them, but that isn't what fucking Q.E.D. is used for since there was no introduction with a statement that was to be demonstrated via a proof. Fuck you

Also, #31 is a fraud.

If you feel that we need to be voted out of IM because we are too good then that is perfectly understandable. I would vote the same way. Personally I never felt like we didn't belong there, but I can't speak for the teams we played against. I think that if so many Invite teams had not died and the right amount of ambitious teams had formed this offseason we would not even be a contender to win this poll, but that's how things go I suppose.

I think some people are a little insulted by how they are interpret our team's attitude to be. It's not that we don't want to try. We do try. We scrim frequently and we want to be competitive and do our best to win, otherwise there is no point. Having no interest in being a top 4 LAN team does not mean we think everything is a joke, it's just a difference in priorities.

What we care about is having fun, and I happen to think Invite is where fun goes to die. That's all. Last season the teams had a 50% survival rate, and I've spent enough time there already to know why that is the case.

TBH it was the case because Mix^ was the greatest team ever put together and nothing was ever going to compete with them. This upcoming season has some of the biggest roster shakeups Invite has seen in a long time and if any Invite season is going to be fun and close, it's this one. No LG to dominate, and no Ruwin or PYYYOUR on Mix^ means they likely won't be dominating either. Br0 is gone too, and so is Chess Club. All other teams died before LAN. No teams are going to be the same as last season, so that's one big advantage you will have, and that should make you want to move while your team is good enough to at least make top 5, maybe get a LAN spot.