Then do exactly that? One of my old team leaders used to purposely schedule games against better teams. We didn't care if we lost cause we were like div4 at the time and wanted to see what div2 teams did to improve. Sure, it fucking sucks getting smashed but if you've a desire to improve, you rewatch the demos together, you see what they do, take notes of strats, set-plays or whatever and use them yourself or improve them.

What is this nonsense?
If I want to improve, I don't pick someone who is miles ahead of me to practice with.You can't improve if you get flawlessly 5-0'd by a far, far more experienced and skilled team.If it is a open/mid tournament, alright.But you can't ask beginners to play with semi-pros or veterans.
You don't see people going to the gym like "Yesterday I benchpressed 50 KG, today I will go for 80 KG!"

Nothing is wrong with lower level teams wanting to play against people closer to your skill level as practice but don't act surprised/disappointed when these cups die because you don't sign up.

Fact #1: if more open teams just signed up for the cups they would be not only be enjoyable for lower level teams but more successful.
Fact #2: games you get stomped on by super strong teams you can still learn instead of whining about how much better they are than you I gurantee from first hand experience and the experience of many others

There is an online cup for OW tomorrow where many of the current professional teams will be playing (like 4 or more) and they are leagues better than everyone else currently. Guess how many teams there are? 64. They know they're going to get smashed (I wanted to play and get smashed too but it filled too quickly) yet everyone is eagerly going to play Bc the point of cups as a low level team is exposure and improvement.

the only thing holding back these cups for being enjoyable for low level teams is the low level teams

When i used to play with my former div6 team back in S8 where the level was much higher, we would still turn up for these kind of cups (there was a spanish cup and in the second round we got a d2 team called k0 you might remember)

we got rekt obviously but we also got pretty excited because we won 1 round out of the 2 maps, i know it's not that good, but for our level, especially being d6 winning a round against d2 team made us pretty confident lol.

But then there are some problems in some of these cups where the prem/high team would throw shit to the open team because they are bad or would start offclassing playing engineer, heavy etc, and that is one of the problems that should be fixed.

EDIT: Also when I was making my team with some high players (Josh, beater and myself) we would scrim against prem/high d1 teams even though none of us had official experience beyond d2.

PD: Anyway, I'm pretty excited to come back and form a team in order to play cups every weekend even if it's not my own ETF2L team.

Peace

You have to offer actual incentives for people to play (making it fun) rather than trying to pressure people in to playing 'for the good of the competitive scene' or its pretty much pointless and unsustainable. Look at how you can improve the tournaments to make it more attractive for teams instead of trying to argue with people who have a different opinion about it and don't get the same things out of playing cups. Look at timings, look at the format and see if changes will increase sign ups.

Personally I wouldn't mind playing, I even asked one of my teammates if he wanted to have a go at cup#3 the other week but at the same time I'm not super keen either and I'm not going to go out of my way to make a mix team because it doesn't seem that great for an open team to play in.

The game was much different back then so it's really hard to say that the skill level back then was much higher. Old Dignitas or idk? (epsilon) wouldn't stand a chance against the 2 gunboats roamer and pocketscout meta I think, however it's very hard to test.

I'm not arguing against people who don't play the game. My point is that there's plenty of people who don't sign up for these cups who are going to play TF2 regardless and a good number of those do want to get better and improve. What I do in my free time is irrelevant to my point.

I know the meta has evolved in some way and idk, i always felt the dm skill from each player is better nowadays but there is no way you can compare the team work that it was put back then (especially having maps like gravelpit, you have suffered it as much as I did)

but yeah, i would genuinely agree with you, really hard to measure.

holy shit this

Everybody +frag avast so more people read it when they're skimming through.

Well, then what/where are these cups?

If there's more than just ETF2L and UGC out there, and this stuff's regular, why doesn't someone make a big season chart or calender of all the stuff you can sign up to? (or do these already exist and I've just missed them?)

I mean look at this:
http://www.spotterguides.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/wallplanner_2016_v1.pdf
This tells you everything you'd want to know about watching motorsport. What's on, when it's on, where it's happening. If the TF2 community wants more participation in cups and stuff that isn't ETF2L-ESEA-UGC, someone needs to gather together what's on, who can play, what you need to commit, and when it's happening, all in one place, and then the community needs to hand that around,

How about the first round or two don't have seeded teams in them?

You mean like this site?

ur posting on a website that does this already

If you have no intention of going to Dreamhack and are playing a qualifier/invite cup just for the money, it's just bad manners. A team who would actually show up to support more TF2 LAN event growth could have used that cash.

It's not much more than that truly.

My team got rolled 5-0 8 times over the 4 cups. It was fun to play... Sorry to feeling and thanks to team Vintage for not banning us for going 5 pootis heavys to 2nd on granary.

If that's what the money is for, why does the competition not offer expenses paid, or give the cash at the competition, rather than unconditional cash?

Something was clearly misunderstood, im not telling open to vs prem here, im telling open to enter and play the mid teams that enter or mid teams to play the high teams that enter. And so on.

The whole point is that if a lot if people sign up, it is much more likely for you to lose to teams roughly around your level (or at least not leagues above you) besides maybe once (if it's double elim)

Cups/tournaments are definitely a good way to improve; matches always put more pressure, even if you're not going to win the whole thing.

i think comp.tf does a good goob. In the front page there is a panel with all the past, present and upcoming tournament announced. I'd like to see more people using it and contributing

While it's amazing to see all these cups and tourneys being hosted and such, I will agree that a problem is certainly membership from lower level teams.

My question is: what if these tournaments were put on where there was a restriction as to the skill level cap of the teams?

I feel like it'd provide more incentive for the lower level teams to play knowing they'd have a chance at getting far without the prem/invite (or even IM/high) teams being their demise. Or a top player (or few players) can be assigned to coaching a team throughout the tournament. Even if it's just for a weekend of play, I feel like the support of an experienced player would help teams be more driven to improve and continue to challenge their limits. The prize pots wouldn't be nearly as significant as that of the official tournaments for DreamHack, but it'd still be doing a thing to kindle interest in competing more from the lower level teams.

I played in these cups when I was div 6, anyone can sign up for them and even though winning was very unlikely back then, it was actually fun to play. People just need to stop being bitches about signing up for online cups, it really isn't that hard to play a few matches in a cup instead of playing pugs/lobbies/pcws like people usually do.

I disagree. Getting 1 round against a top5 mixteam was one of the most fun rounds I've ever played (even though they let us get that round.) Mirelin giving us a compliment after that match against him was awesome too.

I dont speak for my team but I had alot of fun these cups

I don't know that people are that worried about playing in the cups because of skill variance. The amount of variance in a regular etf2l tier is high enough.

I think the problem is that these cups are on weekends when there's scheduling issues and teams are already burnt out from playing pcws all week. I think you'd see a much larger signup if you actually pushed these cups to Monday/Tuesday. I realise there's the potential for people to have officials on these dates but almost nobody has an official on these days and I think teams would much rather play cups as an alternative to pcws as opposed to as well as. This is a bit worse for the prem teams if they have an official later in the week, but prem teams often schedule officials for Sundays, so it's not necessarily.

The other main issue is I think that a significant number of lower level european players don't seem to browse tftv. Might be a sampling bias thing because I know more european players in general, but the number of EU flags from players I don't know of compared to the number of US/Canada flags from players I don't know of is pretty significant. It's probably worth sideshow or someone whoring the shit out of cups when he streams because people will probably realise that they're happening more readily than just putting it on tftv. :/

To be fair, there's barely any money in playing comp TF2. Can you blame these top-level players who've put so many hours in over the years for nothing, for taking the chance to make a few euros?

Can confirm.

I'm a low level euro player and I've only seen like 3-4 people posting on tftv out of the hundreds of open/mid players that I know.

Not 1/4 of TF2 players post let alone care about what's going on as long as they can post "mid on now" and get to play. It's kinda wicked considering the exact opposite isn't all that uncommon, and we see a ton of people go out of their way to make life easier for these people.

In that way TF2 is great. A lot of other ways, not so much.

At the end of the day, all of us are committed to playing a cartoon shooter that we want to play productively and enjoy with our unique perception on what productive means. Some teams/players will want to play against similarly skilled opponents so that there can be nothing to blame for losing but themselves and to result in having closer and more satisfying matches. Some other teams/players will want to keen up and play against higher skilled opponents with a significantly lower chance of having a satisfying outcome, and if they get rolled they can identify their mistakes and what the other team did better etc.etc.

Any competitive esport cannot cater for everyone's needs because every player has their own time window and goals to work with. Some people wanna know how to be the best and others just want to be constantly satisfied and win games all the time against players of a lower skill level. The less regret you have to committing to this game the more of a better player you become overall and the more you'll be satisfied with investing the time in the first place.

In terms of the actual forum topic and the dreamhack situation I couldn't give two shits about what teams are/are not going. This is the second opportunity you have to showcase TF2 at dreamhack to a wider audience so really the actual worst case scenario is that it doesn't happen at all and not because some teams the officially qualified might not attend. As long as the event actually happens the comp scene will still be satisfied anyway. And to quote from Lange...

This result only confirms a few things. First that the skill level atm is probably lower than ever and second that ETF2L breeds an incestuous environment for tf2 that makes it impossible for the game to grow. We missed out on ESL because...? ESEA also had a lack of open signups because there was only one skill division and the same mentality we are currently seeing in these cups of "I don't want to just get wrecked by top teams" was prevalent. (to be fair the timing with the bitcoin scandal could not have been worse). Now we are struggling to fill 32 slot cups that have bigger prize money than ETF2L prem.

For any open players reading this that are scared to play against prem teams: If you lose then you will learn more from that game than any scrim you have ever played against an open team. Prem teams will point out and exploit everything in your gameplay as a team and as a player. Even better still this excellent learning experience will take no more than 20 minutes! If you don't want to improve then why the fuck are you playing a videogame competitively?

Because they forced us to use their AC client which gave massive FPS problems for TF2 users.