There's nothing wrong with it. It may be a website from one end of the political spectrum, but the same thing can be said for Vox and the Huffington Post, yet people read those as well. Criticize the article for its content, not where it's posted. It doesn't matter if he publishes it on breitbart or the daily dot, reddit will just ban it anyway :^)

Richard Lewis is the guy you want for news stories like this as he's always the first to report on these dealings and usually completely right. This could be bad for TF2 but we'll have to wait and see. Also I don't really like the idea of 1 company merging both ESL and Dreamhack. Rip competition and hello staleness.

ITF2L

Is this perhaps the time to move over to CEVO?

Probably. We stopped providing any servers a while back when Hypernia/PurePings stopped all gameserver partnerships. European TF2 is very reliant on serveme.tf for servers - I've not come across many people owning their own servers recently. A quick check on na.serveme.tf shows a fewer amount of servers so that's one issue that would require attention.

Contacting some server providers for a partnership is possible, however we haven't really looked into it as it really isn't needed for EU. Since serveme.tf was around our servers were rarely used anyway. Either way, we wouldn't be able to have anywhere near enough servers to cover an NA league - either serveme.tf would have to get servers (donate!) or people would have to buy servers with their ESEA fees (or both).

People have to realise that ETF2L doesn't have the same reliability when it comes to a prize pool as NA - sometimes we'll have some funds come in and be fine and sometimes it dries up. Hopefully TF2 is heading in a direction where this won't be a problem for much longer but it's still something to keep in mind.

Other than that, it pretty much relies on some volunteers to help run. Sonny Black is actually living in Canada at the moment which means he would be able to oversee it most likely. Who knows, last time we talked about this ESEA stayed on and CEVO happened. We'll have to see what happens.

You could always add an entry fee for every season, something around 3€/1 key.

Your check will be in the mail soon.

perm what are you doing

We're supposed to kill of TF2, not give them hope.

the community burned that bridge so hard and so long ago its ashes already blew away in the wind.

Already going full NA

afaik most, if not all, na teams have their own servers, so I don't think that's a big issue.

Yeah it is if league matches are to be played on them. I've never been comfortable with the idea of using private servers for league matches and IMO it's a huge reason why esea has been so far ahead of the pack for so long.

Private servers are fine for scrims but you need league-provided servers for matches.

Never been an issue in ETF2L. As permzilla says the league hasn't provided servers for a long while now and the only problem is maybe hopping around a server or two before you find one that suits everyone although that's more prem players being prem-adonnas. You also gain a lot of freedom with private servers so we can run logs.tf and livestats (and the cheat feed) which are much better than what ESEA provides.

Razer Arena has a good base to build a league around. They have their own servers, match mod, and a decent website layout. STV relays are still on the to-do-list but they did have automatic log and stv uploads working for some matches.

Kinda sad that not many people signed up for the Razer Arena tournaments and therefore have no idea how good the match support was.

imagine b4nny's rage if he has to play in the same league with EU players.

Yeah, match support was awesome, and Razer admins are incredible

The Razer admins have always responded within a minute of us asking for help, so props to them for that

what about taxes

the joke is he doesn't pay them

Yea razor is really doing some work on that end, I feel like people are kinda missing that option

time to beg ddk for a FaceIt league