Wait, why are we to blame? Because other people don't have as much money to sacrifice?

What you've just said blames the community for their expenditure. It's not the community's fault. Valve, and their lack of monetary backing, is the problem.

you guys know "shitpost" doesn't mean "post containing conclusions I disagree with", right?

a shitpost is a post that isn't very well thought out

so literally all of your posts?

eee / elliot is making a lot of sense here (minus the shitposting)

If you grew up before the mid 2000's you probably remember the MPAA bitching at every collective internet user about pirated films. "Films are fucking expensive to make! You motherfuckers have no idea how many people have to get paid for Star Wars to happen! How could you possibly keep downloading films for free, knowing that you are hurting the artists you love???"

Tons of video production people lost their livelihoods when changing consumer attitudes about video made a $15 DVD "expensive." I am intimately involved in a video production company (which is, as you might guess, no longer a video production company because of economic realities). Video used to be 90% of our revenue stream in the 80s and early 90s. Now it's probably less than 20% and continuing to drop.

We were the best legal video production company in America's finest city. Clients would routinely pay $10-15k+ for multi-day video shoots and the associated production. They would also pay $25 for each tape copy. We had 11 guys doing video full time. Last year, we had ONE video shoot over $2500. Clients also say stuff like "can you just drop box it to me? I don't need a physical disc." Now, instead of hiring us to shoot site inspection videos, our clients give their paralegal a handy-cam and drop them off at the plaintiff's house. No script, no voice-over, no slick edit, shot with a broadcast quality camera, with proper lighting, mixing, with everyone mic'd up and sounding good. It looks like fucking garbage because they don't hire us to do it.

But we don't send out letters to our clients bitterly explaining the intricacies of video production. Instead, we fire people, take pay cuts, and figure out how to make money with computers. One of my former boss's biggest mistakes was not firing people fast enough as video got cheaper. Our clients didn't kill us, nor did consumers kill the MPAA. Shit just changed.

That's the position that dashner, uberchain, sideshow, etc are in. I have a lot of respect for people who produce TF2 content because that shit is difficult. But the reality is, because of valve, tf2's competitive nature, Overwatch, or whoever the bogeyman is, producing great content for tf2 will never make financial sense.

Walk away -- a paralegal with a handy cam will do it and it will turn to shit. Sucks but that's the way it is.

*** Dashner you should work for ESPN, your shit is TOP NOTCH.

I didn't expect to feel depressed today, but I've been playing since release and have played comp one way or another since s9 and reading this thread is doing nothing besides making me wishing I could have done more to help, be it financially or advertising in the sense of frag videos/highlights.

Just to add:

It never has, it most likely never will. TF2 has changed very little in quite a long time, I think losing ESEA lan was the biggest hit we've taken. However we still have some talented and hardworking people making sure our leagues and lans, where people compete for a few thousand dollars at most, look like dota and cs where people are playing for millions. I believe almost all of them know what they're getting into but it's obviously very draining. We clearly don't have Salamancer anymore, and Lange made that video a while back explaining the issues raised by this thread.

Nobody said LAN is gone forever

instead of being sad and depressed, can we try and focus on fixing stuff. Surely there are things we can improve.

If there was something us as the community could do, I'm sure it would have been done a long time ago. We are basically waiting on the big man to step in now

I've always found it incredible that the production for tf2 events is better than some large scale dota/cs events when it's people paying for it out of their own pocket on what little budget they have. We've had some incredibly talented individuals like Dashner, Davidthewin and Lange who really make production incredible.

On a positive note- Valve could quite comfortably provide support without any significant risk to themselves. The scale of support needed for tf2 is currently a much much lower cost than for any other game- they don't need to jump to a 6 figure tournament straight away- but ingame item sales in tf2 towards tournament production/prizepool could be a huge step.
Valve are known for using tf2 as a guinea pig for their other games and I wouldn't be surprised if they tried experimenting with different ways of tournament funding/production with tf2 as it's something they've had a problem with in other games previously.

Where's the fundraiser?

OK, I'm out

I don't come around these parts much anymore, but I felt I had something to say on this topic.

The coverage of a TF2 LAN is only as expensive as you make it. An event can be covered for little to no cost at all, but each time you raise the bar in coverage quality, the cost increases.

For example, how much does it cost to get two local boys with decent skill at casting to an event with their computers, headsets and a copy of the game? The answer is 'not very much'.

Do you want more commentators? This might cost more for tickets or accommodation.
Do you want production crew? Again, more transport costs and accommodation.
Higher quality commentators? Maybe these aren't local and you have to fly them into the event, another cost.
Higher quality production crew? Maybe these aren't local and you have to fly them into the event, another cost.
Do you want floor coverage such as articles, camera men, schedule updates? More people.
Do you need to rent or buy better equipment?

All of these expenses add up, but let it be clear that the vast majority are _optional_ expenses to improve the quality of the production.

When Beta and I first started commentating tournaments at LAN, we were sat in an event 'pub' with a hand held microphone and a projector linked up to someone spectating the game. We would simply commentate the event (no online streaming) to the people in the bar, talking about what we see. The event was local and we would camp in a tent. We paid for our own tickets to the event specifically to do this job because it was fun for us.

The technology is significantly better now and for a couple of willing volunteers to get to an event with their PCs and host an online stream is extremely easy.

I love the fact that the TF2 community invested in several tournaments, pushing the levels of production an competition to levels unseen by any other non-corporate-sponsored game in the history of eSports, but for a title like this, it simply isn't sustainable. Events do not need to be cancelled, but the community isn't going to be willing to keep fronting thousands of coins for round the world trips for entire production teams and it doesn't make sense from a commercial view for Valve to front these costs either. I would love that to be different but anyone who thinks that sort of investment from Valve is commercially viable is simply living in a dreamland. The answer is to scale down production levels to match the budget that is available.

The same thing can be said about the competing teams. If the teams aren't willing (or able) to fund their own transport and expenses, then they might request funding. This again is an optional extra. You're paying for an increase in competition at the event. It is still completely optional.

There will come a point when certain things aren't viable due to cost. This is how most of life works. Just gotta be smart about it and things can still happen.

I know HL is hated and is seen as an evil word, but DeutschLAN 2015 happened and had a decent (enough) level of production considering all EU Premiership HL games are normally handled by 1 guy.

Sure it wasn't i55 levels with interviews, team cams etc. But with 0 budget available and the available internet we still managed to get some webcams set up and a few people to cast the games and the community seemed to enjoy it.

Although I don't know the reception if i58 was just sideshow running around with a go pro on his head

Not a popular opinion and I understand but the money that is dropped into a LAN could be used for monthly or weekly tournaments instead.

The thing about production costs, is they ramp up really quickly for teeny tiny increases in quality. For example, to improve beyond the i55 levels of production would probably cost thousands, for very minor improvements. Basic production is very cheap and even a fair bit above basic production is also pretty cheap. But when you have lower levels of production, you lose the enthusiasm from a number of the people involved. I believe Dashner's enthusiasm comes from striving for a better production at every event. If you told him to scale it down, the challenge is gone, the enthusiasm is gone and he probably would soon look for a new challenge elsewhere in his life.

If you want funding for these events, people simply need to pitch it better. Give the community some options. Give sponsors some options. Half of the fight in any business is securing funding. The original hype of the 'first international TF2 event' has long departed. The whole of Europe and America were fully engaged in determining the best of the best. Even the follow up events had enough hype to secure some funding for teams and production. We had competing production organisations that pushed each other forward and with the way that the tournament results went, we got a proper trilogy out of it! But that time has gone. Now you need a new story, or a new business proposition / concept for new sponsors. There's always the narrative of 'TF2's LAST STAND'... SHOW THE WORLD WE WON'T GO DOWN WITHOUT A FIGHT' type scenario. When I roam around this neck of the woods, all I hear is "Hey give us some money or we can't do what we did before". It's very uninspiring.

There's still passion in this community. I may have finally lost mine after 17 years of fortress gaming, but there's still a whole bunch of it left around here, including those who were recently inspired by the last bunch of international events. Sadly passion for production or competition simply isn't enough to keep this going, you need passion and effort to secure funding before anything else begins. Think like a business, not a bunch of gamers. You need to sell your service.

There's only so much money in the community. After funding two teams the community really doesn't have enough money to donate to a production fundraiser when they don't really understand what their donation will pay for. Paying for just flights alone for the NA staff who are necessary to put on a show like i55 comes to the same if not more than an NA team. This is almost entirely out of pocket and unlike players there's no prize pot to earn something back. Any extra funds we do get usually goes to better production equipment such as the incredible cameras we had at i55.

If there were no LANs in TF2 this game would be pretty much dead at the top end. Every ESEA playoffs since they removed LAN has had multiple top players expressing the sentiment that they dislike online TF2. Luckily the prize pools are there to keep them interested.

When have you ever seen tftv production staff complain about a lack of recognition? Well OK it would be nice if people were more appreciative but we know what we signed up for. Personally I think the tf2 community does a great job of appreciating their production staff compared to some communities because it's so tight knit. I don't think I've ever seen anyone comment on the camera man in CSGO or the person running the graphics in dota. Uberchain's post isn't saying "praise me for doing all this work" it's a reality check for those who don't actually know the amount of work that goes into a production like i55.

I don't understand this thread. Uberchain is complaining about how content creators aren't supported enough by valve and taken for granted by some members of the community. eee is shitposting about people complaining about content creators not getting enough recognition. People are complaining about eee shitposting about people complaining about content creators not getting enough recognition.

If you want to give content creators money, give them money. If you want to help fund the production of an expensive event, help fund the production of hte event. If you want to try something to make valve give money, do that. If you enjoyed produced content and want to praise the organizers for the good work, you can do that too. If you would rather not do these things, refrain from doing them.

What's even the discussion here?

You could argue this is what is burning people out, Dashner constantly striving for better production, but not having the budget to do it?

Not going into the lan aspect but comp tf2 is not dead, in fact, it has never been so alive. The popularity of comp tf2 within tf2 general community is at an all time high. We have a higher amount and quality of resources that ever existed (tftv, comptf, pugsites, etc...). (ie: comptf growth over the last year)

We, as a community, have done the unthinkable and transformed a casual shooter with no dev support into one of the most mechanically complex, high skilled, and interesting competitive fps ever existed. Now, and as uberchain and clockwork very well said, the ball is on Valve's court. Now, It all hinges on them to make or break this game competitively and financially. Valve has more than enough resources to do it, more even than Blizzard and look what they've done with overwatch at such an early stage. It all depends if they're interested or not.

Now personally, I've not been involved in any lan production but I have my fair share of community projects and through them I've sacrificed at times some aspects of my real life in detriment of this game I love. I've started to question all the time I sunk into it, because it's very easy to burn out when you don't see any palpable results for which you've worked so hard for so long.

I'd just take issue with all the business brains saying it makes no sense for Valve to fund competitive events for TF2. The world has changed, Twitch is now the key promotional platform for any game, and the competitive events (as can be seen by which game is in the top spot at any given time) are what pull in the viewers, who become customers, who make publishers money.

Dota and CS are currently far bigger games but that wasn't always the case and it's in an environment where they receive vast publisher support. The fact that those games are the ones in the ascendancy is down to a big slice of chance, their moment in the sun coinciding with the rise of Twitch, and the game experience so closely matching the competitive format.

The end game to the competitive developments Valve are making must be to fund events for promotional purposes otherwise there's no point doing it. They're rebuilding the player base from the ground up to play MM in a lan viable small team format, and promotional events on Twitch will help that transformation too - there's a case for it happening sooner rather than later and I hope internally they're having that discussion.

what's incredible is that the peak was after i55 when there were live brackets being checked

We always have a traffic peak around big events, particularly in August with i series, its been always like that for the past 3 years. Our current everyday traffic has surpassed i55 peak

Like I said in the other thread, it doesn't even make any difference whatsoever whether it "financially makes sense" for valve to fund tf2. This company is so unimaginably rich, even if it was a huge flop and they got back 0% of their investment (which obviously wouldn't be the case), they could shrug it off like it was nothing. In the time it took me to write this post (from my phone), valve has (conservative estimate) made enough profit to fund the entire current esea tf2 prize pool. They could just do it really without risk so I hope they will once they have assessed the potential of comp for a while.

Why doesn't TFTV just have a Patreon to support casters and shit? Casts go up for just about every ESEA-I game, so there's definitely content to base it off of. Hell, you could even pool the money earned from it and put it towards sending people to Insomnia and what not, maybe even start a new LAN for the top teams if the contributions are big enough (unlikely?).

Big youtubers have Patreons, streams have donations, I never understood why there was nothing like this in place.

Because you can't say "We do it for free, we don't want donations" and then complain about costs.
Some people have said you cant rely on the community to fundraise for teams to get to iseries, but if comp tf2 is getting bigger and the fundraisers kept being funded, what's the big problem?

You're right. Twitch is a huge promotional tool for businesses. But what you're asking Valve to do is throw money at sponsoring a tournament for one of their titles that was released nearly 9 years ago. If you're going to spend thousands of dollars promoting a product of yours, it doesn't make sense to promote something that old. This is almost like suggesting that Sony should invest money into PlayStation 3 advertising because they may sell more PS3 consoles. It'[s not identical but it's not too far off.

The reason why DotA 2 is getting the support it is getting is because of market research. Valve knew that in the current gaming climate (moba mania) DotA would thrive. Their business model is virtually tried and tested and there was little chance for failure, especially given the original DotA's importance in the genre. It's very easy to just think that these companies just cough up money for fun, but there are extensive decisions to be made. A company worth $3 billion doesn't simply just drop $1m on a tournament for shits and giggles. It wouldn't surprise me if any purchase or investment over $300k had to be signed off by the board, and this value could even be significantly lower.

I could write a thousand more reasons why it wouldn't be a great idea for them, but the simple way to put it, is that whatever money is invested in Team Fortress 2, could probably be invested elsewhere in the company to generate an even greater return, whether this be additional developers, promotional staff, online advertisements etc...

The thing is, this is not what a successful company does. You never just waste money. Risk on any investment should be calculated. What is the potential return from investing even a penny in a TF2 competition? In the early years of TF2, the competitive community banned all unlocks. Unlocks are how Valve make money from TF2. How would investing in the competitive game make any sense? The money they did invest went into casual game modes, like Mann vs Machine because it's far more beneficial to entertain the existing public community (who buy unlocks and stuff) than to potentially turn casual players into competitive ones (who aren't allowed to use unlocks and therefore will probably not buy as many).

TF2 does still make Valve _some_ money, and it's worth attempting to keep the player base for as cheaply as possible. Coding in a matchmaking system (which already exists for other Valve titles) in the devs spare time was probably quite a good investment. They aren't looking to gain huge numbers, just retain existing ones. Afterall, TF2 took a long time and a lot of resources to create. It makes sense to try and extend its life span for as long as possible.

It's not what anyone wants to hear, but it is the reality facing this game. It's not a dead game, but a title this old isn't 'going places', it's just surviving. A business would be stupid to invest in it. The best thing Valve could do is try to retain a loyal fan base as cheaply as possible, wait to see how OverWatch works out (it will have heavy Blizzard investment) and if it turns out to be slightly successful, they could work on a TF3 game to compete alongside it like DotA does with League of Legends.

Imagine if 1/100th of the money that floated in the cosmetics "economy" went into supporting the costs for the LANs and the streaming/casting on it.

The sum total value of all the keys currently ingame is about $2,000,000, and 1/100 of that is about $20k