Idk man. Turning pub players into comp players in a game where comp players dump thousands of shekels into their hobby for no rewards whatsoever (see this thread) doesn't seem like a horrible idea to me.
Valve are obviously going for competitive tf2, despite everything you mentioned. It only makes sense to try and make it successful on the largest scale possible. I also don't see how tf2's age is a problem. CSGO is a 4 year-old port of a 12 year-old game. Chess is 600 years old btw.
My point is that they are investing considerable man-hours into comp tf2. You make it sound like this is an insignificant task, but I think the current updates are quite expensive. I don't see how the effort that's going into matchmaking makes any sense at all if the goal is just to appease a couple thousand nerds. It would be a completely pointless thing if the comp tf2 scene doesn't grow considerably as a result. They aren't retarded so they know that the scene needs money. They also know money will tempt players to play the game. And you say a successful company doesn't waste money, but the potential waste is completely negligible. Even if they went huge, they would merely run a moderate risk of having invested 1m that over the course of the next years don't come back as comp tf2 profits. But they couldn't care less, they make 2 million a day. Which btw makes me seriously doubt they would need the board to sign deals of 300k or less.

Either way, I can't see how investing man-hours into a competitive mode of, as you said, an old game whose playerbase is entrenched in pub play, without offering significant pull factors (shekels) to actually make anyone care about the work they are doing.

That's not even including the worth of the glowy pixel hats themselves then I guess, and it does sound like a good budget to help support the costs people made "in service of the community" To think, the same amount is now frozen on a single VACced retarded trader account.

sorry but i really dont get this argument: what does age have to do with anything? people still play smash fifteen years after that game was released. cs has been fundamentally the same type of game for longer than that. age shouldn't be a factor if the game is excellent.

sure, it'll turn some of the people who think age = bad off the game but this game has managed to hold 60k players through the years and there are almost 180k people in the competitive beta group. i don't see how tf2 isn't going to "go places" if valve plays their cards right with comp mm. i'm sure optimization is in the cards as well and we might even see a graphics overhaul.

You said it yourself. Big youtubers.

Patreon is very nice and all but it doesn't work unless it's at a huge scale. I've had a patreon for comp.tf yt channel (which has 4k subs) for like 6 months and I've only had 1 single patron in that timeframe. Pretty much the only tf2 patreon that worked/was sucessful was SIN's and he already has one of the biggest tf2 youtube channels.

not to knock you but you're offering a very small subset of a small community a very specific product. Setting up a "tf.tv" patreon would likely be much more successful just because we could bill it as paying for the forums, the servers, the casts, and the streams. I'd pay $5 a month for a gold nerdstar tbh.

please don't take what I'm saying as me saying to stop do LANs cause that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that continuing to do the work the casters do for this community and expecting anything near a worthy repayment is simply not going to happen in the next 12 months. If TF2 takes off, they'll be livin the dreammmmm but right now complaining about the lack of interest in casting is pointless because there's a lack of interest in the game. Until tf2 is dead someone is going to be doing the streaming and backend casting work, even if its just Avast or someone trying to cast an STV from his bedroom. Nothing we can do is going to improve the LAN experience. We need more people in the community to attract sponsors -> money -> interest in a feedback loop that ends with us having people watching the casts and our casters getting the actual money they deserve.

What you have been saying in every post in this thread was "You are whiny idiots for wanting to be thanked for volunteer work, stop doing it if you don't like it" with an obnoxious attitude that communicates complete taking for granted of these volunteer services, which is what the whole rant was about in the first place. Nobody is dumb enough to fund tf2 events out of their own pockets expecting to get rich because of it. For aformentioned reasons I also think it's not nearly as ridiculous to expect/want financial support from valve as you make it out to be. So I don't see what there is for you to actually criticise.

There was such a thing before, it was called tftv plus and in case you haven't noticed it didn't really work out. Also tf.tv forums, servers, etc pays itself. Afaik enigma makes (or at least used to make) a living off tftv.

Now if you're talking about casts and streams thats another thing but then again I could say the same thing about that being a very small subset or a very specific product.

"So I don't see what there is for you to actually criticise."

some weird sense of entitlement that just because they do volunteer work for a game people like they should be exempt from any criticism [The community has been...will be enough] or the entirety of the "woe is me my developer doesn't like my game" self pity that it promotes. It just feels like its trying to justify the fact that tf2 didn't/hasn't take/n off is because Valve won't support it, and it's totally valve's fault that people are stepping down as casters or community promoters.

Feels very defeatist imo. TF2 stayed alive 8 years w/o dev support, but the minute valve promises MM everyone starts assuming that valve is going to do all these great things for 6s. Being realistic, they won't. They've gone from actively ignoring you guys to passively working with. You likely won't see game breaking updates before LANs anymore, but you're not going to see CS levels of support either. If everyone decides right now that they're not going to bother doing anything anymore then the game (6s) will die, because Valve has no interest in or benefit to gain from supporting the competitive community as it is now. Saying the game is in valve's hands is wrong because its just as much your own grave as it always was.

i had more to write but walked away and forgot sorry

tbh i never knew about that. Still tho, not like you can't plaster a patreon link all over the streams that now appear on the main menu and hope for the best.

You're obsessed with the age of the game and it's irrelevant, completely. Valve never want TF2 to die, you will just have to get used to that idea.

Valve have made their development investment decisions and they're developing competitive systems for the game. It's happening, making stuff up about how no company with any sense invests development time in it's assets that still make it millions of $ a year (that would be really stupid obviously) doesn't make that go away.

They've stated in conversations with players designed specifically for public consumption that they want to make competitive a core part of the game with all that entails, with the expectation that they change the players who are currently pubbers into competitive players, and to create a stream ecosystem around that new skill based focus. Out of the mouth of Valve employees, updating the game to the current landscape. I'm going to take their word for it over yours.

Tournament wise it's possible that they wait and see how it does and historically that would be true, but what they did for comp TF2 in the past is from before the age of Twitch, before CSGO and before Dota 2. There is no reason to expect history to repeat itself as the landscape has changed so much and their attitude and experience as a company has grown massively in that area. There are good reasons to accelerate some competitive tournaments early to hype up adoption and grow that stream ecosystem, it's not hard to find another example of that happening right now: Overwatch.

Nobody is talking about million dollar tournaments or massive investments in events. Those are straw men, feel free to knock them down. What's happening is happening and it's indisputable, they're doing the work and investing in the game. Valve only own a limited number of major IPs and TF2 is one of them, it would actually be sheer idiocy to not invest in it to keep it relevant in the current gaming landscape, and fortunately that's not what they're doing.

I can't fathom why you'd write so much that's so obviously divorced from reality.

Valve could fart in a jar and it'd help out more than 2k competitive players could, but they simply don't. Either they've given up because they see no financial gain in TF2, or are planning something huge that'll be worth more than any cent they could put into the scene as it is now.

That aside, this is one of the most sour communities I've been part of for a while. The amount of people who do good just for others to have an easier time is both depressing and admirable, but how little realize this is crushing. You may think redditors are opinionated nobodies with nothing but shit to post, but in reality they care more about this game and community than most competitive players do, where joining a discord and posting 'mid on pls now' in the wrong channel is the most community interaction they'll get.

It's really hard to justify why people should (basically volunteer) work for all these events, when Valve could save it in a heartbeat. Do they even know? Do any of them come here, let alone hear any of it from their puppy eyed MM-mascot b4nny?

Jill's posted on tftv and actively lurks r/tf2, no doubt they're aware of the major concerns

For whatever reason it looks like they're just gonna roll up all their support into one big update where we can assume thereafter we'll get constant support, and I guess they're just gonna stay quiet and inactive in the comp community until then

So, your strategy is to first cut costs in a market where service is valued at a premium. Then, you allow potential competitors time to outmaneuver you and claim market share you gave up on. Then, if they succeed, you start moving into a now more crowded market with harsher competition.

This is amazing to me

Real talk though pretty much all of Valve's decisions are based on a principle of "creating value". They don't aim to create cost efficiency across the board, they first aim to create the highest possible value from any situation, which generally works out being more cost efficient anyway. They hire the best possible staff and pay a premium for them, because one exceptional coder does more work, better work, and is cheaper than 10 average ones. This principle applies across the board. (Netflix does this too.) It makes the most sense to find what makes our weird tiny community so stupidly passionate about 6v6, and find a way to expand that to the masses. That's how you get your precious cost efficiency, by creating massive amounts of value.

Remember, before LoL and Dota went fucking bananas, little mobas that were mods of other games (starcraft, warcraft - note that Blizzard completely missed this train despite being on it from the start) had small, weird passionate communities. Riot and Valve either saw potential or got lucky in tapping into it, and here we are. 6v6 is a pseudomod of a worse game, and tapping into the weird little things that other people find and love is kind of what valve has staked most of its business on. (dota, portal, tf, csgo, l4d). We have consistently loved this weird little game of 6v6 for a long time. There's clearly some potential here. Valve sees this (now) and I guarantee you the conversation is "how can we create value here?" TF2 is and has always been in an awkward spot, but they're a company that likes to take risks and try things. Get excited.

I second this. Online tournaments can be produced for a fraction of the cost and pull roughly the same viewership. Instead of paying $20k to get a team out to EU (not to mention the other costs to get production crews out there), we can run a $3-4k tournament every other month that'd be killer for the scene.

Our community needs to emphasize consistently producing content as a way to get more eyeballs on our community as opposed to these one-off events that, while very popular, don't give us as much to watch. Sure i55 and TOTH are amazing and I'm not suggesting that we stop doing these, but I think that anybody can easily start producing content and increasing the reach of our community.

That's all well and good in theory but as soon as you announce that there will be no global competition any more for TF2 and instead the money will be used for domestic online cups, you'll see a fraction of the money donated because people care far less about regular cups than they do about a huge TI-type event. And then when that falls through all the top talent will leave, as there's literally nothing to play for. The only thing the top teams play for right now are cups and lans, the iseries being the most prestigious and the one they care the most about.

It would also be a step backwards in terms of PR for competitive tf2, as the iseries lans always get 5x or more viewers than online cups and introduce loads of new people to the scene due to the amount it gets talked about.

Sure. If people are willing to pay out of pocket to make these events happen then by all means go for it. I'm simply seconding an opinion for an alternative use for the money. If you host online cups, you're still doing it for the benefit of the top teams, and they'll actually make money playing in them. It's much more sustainable in my opinion.

That's totally false. ESEA announced the end of the LAN a year ago and there were more teams signed up in S21 than there were in S18.

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