Because they offered inferior product. There was no reason for non-top8 teams to play because their website and AC client were absolutely terrible to use. Their prize pools were also quite low.

Why play in a league that is inferior in every way compared to ETF2L, and costs money to play in? If they wanted EU division to be successful, they could have launched it with high prize pool because that's their only strength.

Do signups really matter in a winner-takes-it-all tournament? Only top 1-3 teams can realistically win it each tournament. There are better ways to use time for lower teams.

One thing that none has touched yet was the fact that these open cups were organised for saturdays. I dunno you but my ex team really struggled to play on that day only of the week. (+ my captain didn't want to play with mercs cos "it's aids").
You also have to think about the fact the more you go down the divs more the average age is lower, and often you have those kind of people that has just saturday evening/afternoon to go out because of school or whatever. I bet that if the open cups were scheduled on the sundays there would have been more sign ups.

Also starting at 17:30 is way too early

Yes signups really matter in a winner-takes-all tournament, or any tournament, because that's how the sponsors get value out of their sponsorship. Razer cancelled previous cup series and thousands of pounds of prize because there were appalling signups. If we hadn't averaged around 20 for each cup this time it would have been terrible for future relationships.

As for etf2l vs esea or etf2l, you can't compare a service that does nothing except provide a framework and table, and a league that would provide a platform for sponsorship, prize pools, growth, lans etc. ETF2L is only better for very very short term community play, otherwise it's a pointless league.

Besides, your points about esl and esea are just wrong. ETF2Ls website is even worse, including a horribly stale and limiting backend and their prizepools are non-existent. Other than the laggy ac client the product is superior both short term and long term. There is 0 chance this game will ever be "big" with etf2l at the forefront of the scene as the home of the top scene or as the largest league. It's a matter of when we move and who we move to.

Sideshow nothing about your posts so far has helped me understand what your or the problem with etf2l is. I don't understand and all I can see is you're complaining about a load of open teams.

Speaking of open teams, most of the teams in etf2l s24 are brand new teams, so I don't see how they are to blame for any of this (whatever this problem is).

I did a count of all the open teams and how many previous seasons they've played in.
0 seasons - 72 teams
1 seasons - 17 teams
2 seasons - 4 teams
3 seasons - 9 teams
4 seasons - 3 teams
5+seasons - 6 teams
Which is more older teams than I was expecting, but most of those have a cup or two under their belt.

It's not so much complaining about Open teams, it's complaining about teams in general who want to improve and think that the cup is a waste of their time when there's a very good chance it isn't. Whether you're open or high it would be a good learning experience but people don't want to for the fact they won't win so why bother.

It's a general lack of effort all around from the European side at least. If you think about the number of teams that sign up for ETF2L to commit to a season, that you'd be able to find 32 of those teams that want to get better AND are able to play on weekends. Signups should be gone by the time these cups were announced but you end up trying to convince people a day before that it will be fun, it goes smoothly, you'll get experience vs good teams in an official format (when theres some more pressure than a scrim).

And as Sideshow said, signups really do matter to the sponsors. Just showing up and getting knocked out the first game supports the scene a lot more than a £5 donation for flights to LAN. Maybe if LANs had more money from sponsors to play for, more people would pay out of their own pocket?

At no point have I complained about etf2l open teams, or brand new teams. There are more than enough High/top Mid teams to make a healthy cup scene right now. Open teams in an esea context are not brand new teams tho.

I'll make a video for those people like yourself who are unable to understand the wider context of tf2's growth or how it compares to other esports models. Pointless to keep writing pages about it again and again.

I wish we had opportunities like you guys :(

I mean razer was fine but at 3pm it's really inconvient for a lot of people :/

The answer to all of these is potential growth. How the fuck are esea and esl an inferior product? Have you used the ETF2L website? ESEA, ESL and Razer can grow, we can get big tournaments/leagues/prize pools whatever if we show support for it. If ETF2L had 10 000 teams playing in it then it wouldn't be able to offer anything more than it currently does.

Yes signups matter, as Sideshow said, do you remember those razer tournaments that they ran twice a week? I wonder why they stopped.

If we push it back later people are playing after midnight cest. We could potentially do that as those who make it to the grand final are far less likely to drop out at that point, but I remain unconvinced that on a weekend a large reason for lack of signups is the starting time of 5:30pm.

Speaking as a high team leader that didn't sign up to any of these, the reason is just because the timing wasn't good. Too early or on weekends is just not viable to players who are used to playing for no personal gain.

The idea that teams just don't want to lose, or don't play because they aren't going to win is a pretty rude assumption to make. Teams have always played in etf2l for no gain, and people usually reach for higher divisions. It's safe to say many teams, including mine, have absolutely no chance of winning high, and teams are always signing up to high having come 10th-20th on mid or so.

Personally one of my favourite tf2 memories was beating some div2 russian team on that cp_collis cup like 5 years ago, when I was still a lowly barely div4 scout (we'd just come top3 in div5 I think) and I think we used to sign up to every weekly cup back when they were run (rip monday night madness) but that started at a peak scrim time, not 5 my time.

I understand that this is going to piss some people up, but there's no way I'd sign my team up just to support the community if it's not convenient for us, there's just no reason I'd do that. I'd love for it to be the case that we could all have no excuse to play, I personally would sign up myself, but half of us work, half of us study, and frankly we have more important things to be doing than turning up to support sponsors for a game that probably still won't have a future anyway.

Frag Fest: No skill tiers. No prestige (especially with so many cups). 5 hours spent for potentially winning $12. Full Tilt taking all the money in the end anyway. Only reason to play was for supporting the game, which is why many teams signed up initially, but it's hard to sustain something on passion only (some could, but I don't blame people for giving up).

Monthly Mayhem: Mostly same issues. Confusing format. Winner-takes-it-all.

Both competitions pretty much failed in CS:GO as well.

All these organizers failed because only thing they had going for them was a (very uncertain) promise of something better. Relying on pure passion is fine, but don't expect huge signups.

I'm not disagreeing with the rest of your post but thats a ridiculous claim. Of course they'd be able to get (better) sponsors and be able to offer a better service with that amount of teams.

Excellent use of selective quoting. What are the reasons to play ETF2L exactly? And how do they trump the reasons you just listed?

Simply put, beggars can't be choosers. If we get an opportunity we should be jumping on it, but instead people fall into the ETF2L safety net.

I guarantee ETF2L admins would find a way to fuck it up.

Most prestigious tournament in EU. Convenience of one match a week. Clear progression Open->Mid->High->Prem. Guaranteed high signups and an active community.

Only ESL could offer something similar, but ETF2L did everything better when it mattered. (Yes, ESL website was actually way way worse than ETF2L).

Edit: ESL has improved a lot lately though, would be nice to make something happen when the matchmaking update is released.

Skill tiers, anti cheat staff, guaranteed 7 matches, very easy to make time to play for (so easy than despite both soldiers having exams for the first 2 weeks of the season, my team have managed to squeeze in both matches), easy to find players and teams with their recruitment section. To name a few.

That hardly sounds fair. What has ETF2L done to earn that reputation with you?

Edit: Genuine question, that last one. I've been away from TF2 for 2 years and never kept up with the scene even then, so I feel like I missed something. Something about sonny black, but I never got what the deal was and I've never had personally a problem with the admins.

Despite all this drama, I really enjoyed watching these cups and think they were a great idea. Massive shout out to our mysterious donor and hopefully something like this can happen again with any issues ironed out!

ETF2L staff genuinely couldn't leverage anything with 10,000 active users because there is nobody actively searching for sponsorships as far as I'm aware and the person running the back-end actively blocked changes in the past aimed to increase the marketability of ETF2L's website.

It's draining to keep replying to the people here as very few of them have thought out anything beyond their initial propositions. What happens if you don't run a cup that starts early evening weekends for example? You end up with a cup with mandatory attendance every weekday (that nobody can handle and leads to terrible signups and viewership) or you have to run bo1 every game and your signups are limited to 16 or so. Neither of these are conducive to good tournaments and neither would increase signups as far as we can tell from previous attempts. Interestingly, neither are required in other games where people don't have the routine of playing scrims only for 2 hours per week only on weekdays due to etf2l's schedule.

Once again, let's look at other esports and reflect. Why are we such special flowers that can only play video games for 2 hours per night at exact times, despite having active games (e.g. pugs, doublemixes) happening all through the afternoon/evening? It all comes from deep-seated expectations of what we consider "normal" for tf2, which is defined by a long history of only having one league and no cups or competing leagues offering tournaments/matches at other times, AND a game where the incentive is not big enough to practise more than 2hrs a day. Do you think other esports only scrim for 2hrs per night at set times every day, and find themselves unable to play matches at other times? Or other esports can only generate an average of 19 teams signing up for cups which run on one Saturday and Sunday evening and have a larger prizepool than the biggest league offers for three months of play?

I do appreciate the people like Mould offering genuine specific reasons as to why they didn't participate though, and I'll be looking into how we could potentially run the cups later or over the course of a few days etc. to help people who have little time. I am aware that we have a small playerbase in this game and we have to make allowances for people studying/working. But you must be aware if you have ANY awareness of other esports and how they operate that we are one of the most lackadaisical and regimented communities out there, and this backward nature is an unfortunate side-effect of being small and tight-knit, but hurts our openness to other opportunities.

Is there any information about TFCups? They were a sponsor for this tournament but who/what are they?

A semi-anonymous donator who is a fan from Twitch, enjoys watching TF2 competitions, and wanted to contribute. Just a swell guy with a love for TF2! He was considering plans to contribute further in the future under the banner of TFCups and make it into something more long-term last time we spoke.

Playing 3-5 nights a week but only having 2 maps of that in a genuinely competitive setting is nonsense.

The more matches you play in an actual competition, the better the experience and the more rewarding winning a round, map, bo3 is.

Maybe some kind of bo1 double elim over 2-3 nights would work better, or over every Monday for 2-3 weeks (Is that what Monday Madness was? I cannot remember)

But to be honest we have not had many Cups to actually test what achieves the most sign-ups, what meets peoples availability the best.

People seem happy to sign up to ultiduo, bball cups in fairly decent numbers even though they presumably know they wont beat timus/syncing, mike/forsak3n or whoever. Obviously getting together 2 people is easier than 6 but the same logic of 'never gonna win' doesn't seem to apply there.

I dunno maybe the smaller team size inflates sign-up numbers, so you have the same amount of people playing tf2 in the cup just smaller team sizes.

Either way, if you're playing TF2 on a night then why not play a cup. It's been said before but if more high/mid/open teams sign-up then you don't get rolled, or you at least get 2-3 good bo3's before getting rolled. If you will play a league for no real gains (Prizes/chances of winning), then surely a cup is the same. You get the same type of satisfaction, aka we came top 6 in open/ we reached the last 16 in this cup. You'll probably get to play a wider range of teams than your normal pcw pool too which equals more experience if you wanna be pro or more varied games if you wanna have fun.

Other than the lack of availability to commit to cups I really do not understand any of these other reasons to not sign-up.

Talking about other esports, these kinds of cups are almost never popular. Only a few games like CSGO, LoL and WoT seem to get respectable numbers.

Some examples:
ESL Go4SC2, 31 players
ESL Go4Dota2, 28 teams
ESL Go4Heroes, 27 teams
ESL Go4Halo, 11 teams
Zotac HotS Cup, 10 teams

Garbage comparison zoob, these cups are the biggest things happening in TF2. It's utterly incomparable. Compare the biggest (and only, if that applied) cups in any of these other games and ask yourself if they'd struggle to get 20 teams per event.

Sure, the biggest cups in those games are WAY bigger in terms of prizes, but guess what? That's never going to happen in TF2 and refusing to play until you get 5 figure prizepots is ludicrous.

In other games, pretty much any cups bigger than Go4 are 8/16 team invitationals, so biggest cups in TF2 probably should be solid 8 team invitationals (signups should not matter then). League format has always been the main way to play for non-professional teams in esports.

If maximizing signups for sponsors is high priority, one way is to add skill tiers and involve ETF2L more heavily. Their preseason cup with Open/Mid/High/Prem tiers got 90+ signups easily.

Edit: My point is that guilting players that don't participate in these cups is a bit scummy. There are multiple valid reasons for teams deciding not to participate (that may not seem obvious for prem players). If you want high numbers for sponsors, a single huge open cup probably isn't the way to do it. Don't hate the player, hate the game etc.

This is why I said signups do not matter for this tournament, because if that's your #1 metric for success, making the cup tierless, winner-takes-it-all qualifier for a LAN does not make ANY sense. It was almost tailor-made for low signups.

1. The deal with have the ttesports prevents any other hardware manufactures or competitors of theirs being sponsors. The only person who knows the full details of any league sponsorship deals is sonny, as a league admin I try help run the league as best I can but as for sponsors when the only people we can really look to are community sites, such as marketplace, there isnt a lot of money floating around.

2. As for people blocking the "marketability" of etf2l's website I have no knowledge of this, although currently most of the effort is in just keeping it working. we dont have the money or resources of somewhere like razer, esl or esea. While I agree the current form of etf2l is not sufficient for possible futures where tf2 grows. But I disagree that people will have to go elsewhere I more see that as etf2l has an established reputation etf2l will still be a central part of tf2 just hopefully with more support from sponsors that would allow us to offer things that esea or esl do.

3. As repulsive people find etf2l/ugc/esea admins we do run the leagues you play in, and in etf2ls case for free. We are also still people so for people to label all etf2l admins as incompetent fools who dont care/have no idea about the game is ignorant and insulting.

I have not insulted the admin team at all, and I value the work you do immensely. The issue is with the product. There's a real and definable limit on what you can achieve with a volunteer workforce who are all required to do menial tasks due to a total lack of automation, and a site which is very old and very hard to develop.

Point 1 is madness. If you have a sponsorship with Tt that gives you 1k per year and doesn't allow you affiliation with any other hardware brand then you need to renegotiate that contract asap. There are plenty of leagues, orgs, and events sponsored by multiple hardware companies, and companies that would offer you more than 1k per year. There are also myriad ways to improve how etf2l markets itself and sponsors. There are companies outside hardware companies as well, I'm talking with three or four different companies that Tt would have no issue with.

For one point as an example, the site has no system for double elimination and never will until you generate enough money to pay a developer to sift through the tangled code it runs on. This applies to a vast range of problems (grabbing new users, usability, stats, map veto, ac, automation of matches, etc, etc, etc.) purely with the site, ignoring any issue with the vision of the league or how it's run.

I don't mean to bash on you or the admin team. You do an excellent job and a thankless task. But your product is poop, and will remain poop despite your best efforts, if we're talking if we're talking in the context of the future of tf2.

Your second paragraph just hits the nail on the head. You hope that in the future you'll be able to provide a suitable home with money from sponsors, but etf2l as a site is not supportable so it would require a whole re-write, meaning a paid developer. For that you need money from sponsors, for which you'd have to have somebody to approach them and a sizeable playerbase. You have no developer, no sponsorship dude, and no plan to capitalise on the influx of mm players (mostly because the site is poop and very hard to use). This is a result of etf2l cycling through volunteer admins who are burnt out after a while of doing menial admin work due to the poop site, and end up quitting before they're able to enact change or get to grips with any specific issues. I fail to see how etf2l will remain an integral part of the scene if tf2 ever manages to grow, and at the moment appears to be a semi-smothering comfort blanket.

I wasnt so much meaning you with the criticising admins that was more towards other people in the thread who seem to think that all admins are idiots for no reason without realising that a large reason that tf2 isnt 100% dead is due to the volunteers.

I agree exclusivity might seem mad but if it is needed to get the deal then it might used to have/be a good deal. If you have any other sponsors if you can tell either myself or sonny who they are then we can start a dialogue and see where that goes.
Small note it isnt 1k a year it is 4k a year, 1k per season.

Maybe if we can get more money in we can look to start hiring people to improve the site, but there are so many hypotheticals. I agree trying to get more sponsorship should be our first step.

for me the main thing I'm trying to understand is why a competitive player looks at a tournament with prize money and thinks "Nah".