Without even touching on the actual issue this should be obvious. If you put content you consider inferior on the same pedestal as your top content, it devalues the pedestal itself. You dilute the amount of quality content and decrease the overall value of what's on the site.

For instance if we put my 9 year old brother's poetry in the British Classic Poetry Anthology 2016, it wouldn't devalue the other pieces of work when taken as their own but "Me and My Poo" sure wouldn't help it sell. Not drawing comparisons in terms of quality of content, but you understand how it pertains to the more general question you were asking.

That's a fair comment, but I don't think it really works for Team Fortress 2. What is TFTV trying to 'sell' here? That 6v6 is a significant and prestigious esport?

they are trying to sell that tf2 is an esport. at the moment 6s is the best way to move forward with that, if that somehow changes im sure tftv will adapt

In my opinion the idea is probably more to do with the view of the future.

If TF2 ever does get to an e-sport level, even a small one, that will be on the back of 6v6 or whatever similar mode Valve creates with MM. Highlander has been a popular format for people to play, but has never been a popular one for fans or viewers or really had any top level engagement. As well as the pure nightmare of 9 players per team being an esport logistically, there has never been any evidence that HL has a 'fan-base' rather than just players. And an e-sport that justifies content like this requires a fan-base, high level competition, LANs, and obviously requires viewers etc.

For a site that is really driving competitive TF2 forward, imo it makes perfect sense to choose the gamemode that appears to have the most potential (especially with MM being 6v6) and attempt to legitimise that. Dropping Highlander, lower level 6s, 4s, A:R, and any other game-mode allows the site to focus on the one mode with the most potential and also means that new viewers, players, fans etc don't get split up and therefore minimised.

so the basis of this decision was that IF by SOME chance tf2 happens to become an e-sport (lol), it's better to change the prevailing hub for -all things competitive- into primarily 6v6 before it happens?

can't see where anything could go wrong with this, good luck on your endeavours

also, league of legends, csgo, overwatch and non--top level tf2 streams dont have anything to do with top level 6v6, i find it strange you would promote them so highly at the top part of the page

What's the point in removing HL coverage when that idiot Alkaline never writes anything about Invite anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Whatever this site ends up being, you should probably leave if that's your attitude. I'm sure everyone reasonable will agree.

I dont see anything wrong with my attitude, i was supporting the cause and giving out good luck, you should remove the minusfraggers from the forums instead since they are so negative towards my goodwill

We should euthanise highlander.

please i dont want the totalitarian ugc forums to be the only place i can post about highlander

You can post about highlander here, just make a thread etc. This policy only affects the news posts, which get similar traffic to regular threads anyway.

I think you guys are missing the point that this isn't about hl vs 6s, lolhl and whatever. Its (to my understanding) about keeping things in line and adapting to valve's vision. The worst thing we can do is to ignore what they want to do with mm and keep going how we are. Valve's mm is planned to support (and happens to be) 6s to begin with so it only makes sense we focus on that. If it was hl that valve wanted to support I wouldn't doubt we'd do same thing we're doing right now except for hl.

_

Nice precedence, that's literally everything that isn't ESEA 6v6 if we go by "b4nny didn't win it"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik8wgBSaHn0

people are continuously finding nicer and nicer ways to word out "we want to be more like esports news sites", ignoring that there's major news hub areas (most notably, anything related to the FGC like SRK or smashboards) that don't actively remove articles that have already been made and published, and even highlight smaller, less meaningful tidbits, because you're allowed to have both small and big stuff at the same time.

if you are genuinely, honestly telling me that you have no other possible way to tag or differentiate between major and minor articles, then that's laziness trying to hide off as professionalism

The site does still cover HL casts from the likes of EVL and Blackout though, it's not like the format was abandoned completely. TFTV just doesn't self produce HL casts or write articles about the format, which is fair.

I think it's a bit silly to call yourself the "home of competitive TF2" and then constantly and consistently shit on a major area of competitive TF2 in a rude and derogatory way.

We're hoping we'll be able to continue to post events for EVL HL casts for UGC HL Plat as well as other HL events.

Well this is my only problem with the website.

I totally understand why TF.TV are doing this, their staff see this website as the major place to go for top competitive news, so they want to exclude content about anything below top divisions in each continent. They have also excluded Highlander as a competitive format - They want to make Matchmaking happen with the 6v6 format as it is logistically easiest to do due to numbers. That is a totally different discussion, one of which I have many opinions on and I disagree with the TF.TV staff on but I understand their motivation, it is another discussion in my view.

I don't have any problems with TF.TV taking this approach, focusing on top level 6's and LAN coverage rather than every level + Highlander coverage. There are plenty of reasons why TeamFortress.TV the casting organisation wouldn't want to endorse certain aspects of EVL/UGC (I don't know much of EVL, but I can first hand attest that the management of UGC is sub-par) and I am sorry to say BlackOut lags behind the quality of TF.TV, though to be fair to Jon he does it all pretty much by himself whilst TF.TV have a large staff.

All this stems from is Jon wanting to publish an article to promote his casting organisation and being censored, you can't call yourself the home of competitive TF2 when you do this.

And by the way, EU Highlander is thriving in activity, we got our own community, had our own LAN, ETF2L has more dedicated Highlander admins than ever before. TF.TV doesn't want us here, that is fine, we have ETF2L. I don't have any hate for 6v6, I love the gamemode but sadly many, many gamers in this community do not share the same love.

I feel like the biggest incentive for TFTV to promote highlander would be the fact that Highlander is easier than 6's to get into, thus augmenting the population of the competitive scene as a whole. Because of highlander's easy entry and easier gamemode, a ton of really good 6's players have started in highlander. If highlander gets more players, 6's inevitably will too because quite a few highlander players, once they get good enough, make the shift into 6's and often they do very well. I don't think the incentive is the goal of not marginalizing a big chunk of the competitive player base because it hurts feelings, but rather promoting a more easy, beginner friendly gamemode which often opens the doors to 6's.

When matchmaking gets released the barrier of entry will be considerably lower than it is currently.

Short sighted decision in my opinion. Please reconsider.

What TFTV is banking on, whether you agree with it or not, is that matchmaking is gonna make 6's more accessible to the pub community. If that works, that removes one of the biggest selling points for HL content.

I don't get it, do you all really believe that this is how news sites actually work

did new york times immediately die an awful death when they released a cooking recipe instead of working all of their staff on breaking news coverage

You can shitpost recipes in the dumpster all you want, but the news section should be news that people care about, and that happens to largely be top 6s coverage.

so the answer is yes, then

that's a proper section of nyt btw http://cooking.nytimes.com/

No news site will put cooking recipes on the front page on par with breaking news. Cooking recipes are low value content which generate less traffic than breaking news.

and they have ways of tagging those non-front-page articles as still being articles

TFTV's solution to sectioning importance is to remove any non-top articles because nobody involved knows how to make a news system built on anything other than single-level. that is not a sane solution

the article was deleted because it was posted without permission. it wasn't censored; there's just no way to convert the article body into a forum post. jon reposted the whole thing here:

http://www.teamfortress.tv/30930/etf2ls-highlander-season-9-playoffs-begin

if you'd like to discuss how this website should feature more highlander content, feel free to make a new thread.