The only thing their unofficial PR spokesperson has contributed here (as opposed to reddit) was an ironic post making fun of people trying to customize their game so yeah I don't think the rest of the team is much better.

It still hurts that Robin left for Dota2.

I think that's not quite true. If it were, players who visit Valve HQ and meet the TF team wouldn't come away with gushing praise of how talented, capable, and intelligent the devs are- both b4nny and Slin have, off the top of my head, said as much after visiting.

The dev team is probably just way too small. This game has had almost a decade to get pulled in as many directions as possible- competitive, casual, mvm, SO many gamemodes, community servers, cosmetic items, countless unlocks... The game is HUGE. It also has had just as much time to have code obfuscate and become more complex and bug-filled. The task of "improve TF2" is absolutely gigantic, let alone "fix TF2". There are obviously people at valve who work on assets and artwork for multiple games, but excluding those... How many people have their primary focus on TF2? It's almost undoubtedly a single digit number.

The TF2 team is actually doing better in the past year than they did the previous couple, I think, but it's still not near enough- and I think they just don't have the manpower to achieve what our competitive scene needs.

the relationship the tf2 community has with valve its like watching a victim of domestic abuse, you get shitted on, beated and thrown to the ground but at the end of the day you still comeback for them because you love them ...

its hard to empathise with the dev team when they just do stupid shit that makes no sense like give the sun on a stick 25% fire resist WHEN OUT like why its literally a stupid useless mechanic or look at how fire decreases healing received now why not just make him do more damage it makes no sense when their/valve's direction is "work on what you want to" how are they going to actually do a "pyro pack" that wont end up making the game even more bloated

TF2's code is such a fucking mess it'd be easier to make a Source2 port and work from scratch than try to untangle it.

This sounds more like the relationship between NA comp TF2 and ESEA.

Also I found out Eric invited sigsegv to work at Valve and he had to decline because of college and health issues.
The world is a cruel place.

If any current bottom invite/prem team were to put in the same hours scrimming as any of the top 16 teams globally in OW they would be the best team in TF2 since old Froyo/Mixup in two months tops.

It's possibly the easiest it's ever been for the past two seasons to get into the top of TF2. There were teams this season that literally never played outside of matches and could be top 4 teams or top 2 (ronin).

^ 2nd and 3rd place teams did not scrim. If that doesnt tell you what state the game is in i dont know what does.

http://puu.sh/qICe1/7a2a6de944.png

About getting more money from competitive OW...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CqJnikDXYAExOAe.jpg:large
Nevermind, I'm dumb.

Most ow teams aren't even bothering to go to i58 cause they're busy practicing for the multi hundred thousand dollar tourneys occurring.

I think it's extremely easy to blame Valve for everything but for me there's a lot of other reasons the game hasn't really taken off. I think the financial structure of competitive tf2 is extremely inefficient. There's a lot of really talented people in the community who contribute immense amounts of time and get absolutely nothing for it. I also think the pay to play leagues.... Aside from esea their price points just don't make any sense. Nothing is free, if it's free somebody else is taking huge hit.

People act on incentive, and there is zero incentive for tf2. Both for Valve and longtime community contributers.

You're definitely right, but a fair part of the reason there is no incentive for community members is because valve has done essentially nothing for a game competitively. Very few games ever get anywhere as an "e-sport" without that, and since there's no money from either valve or money from people from valve's advertisements of the game.

You could say Valve has no incentive to support TF2, and directly, they don't. But there is the potential in this game, as much as it feels as if it's being wasted, and that could be huge for Valve. I'm not saying TF2 could become DOTA or even CS:GO level e-sport, but being even a tenth of the size of counter-strike would just exponentially increase the revenue TF2 could generate.

But no new community members are going to step it up with the lack of incentive right now, and I feel like even in it's small size right now, TF2's scene will only shrink without incentive

For me I just don't give a fuck about valve at all they are weak and ineffective and they don't know what they are doing with this game anymore... That can be traced back to when they gave the Pyro airblast and the spy the DR.. They can go make HL3 or something. We don't need them. We could do our own thing through syndication, especially considering the amount of "equity" we can attain if you look at the donations have been raised over the years.

We had a great opportunity with cevo to go big, I was involved with it early on but we disagreed on prices I put on a counter proposal and they didn't climb up at all so I wished them good luck but had to opt out because I knew at that point it was probably going to fail.

The game is on a decline with lots of players not caring about the game, competitve has only been run by it's community with no help with valve up until they came out with this update. Eventhough we haven't needed them all this time, people have realised year after year going through the many i-series that tf2 has stagnated and not gone anywhere as opposed to bigger e-sports such as Dota and LoL with the big international tournements, it's venues, prize pools, sponserships and viewercount on twitch. Like rocket league is a bigger e-sport than tf2, it's a joke.

Don't talk shit about Rocket League

it is literally flying cars hitting around an oversized soccer ball what do you want people to think about it being an esport compared to a game people have put thousands of dollars and hours into

rocket league is exciting to watch but it's hard to quantify how much is skill and how much is RNG imo

then again i have never played the game and this is my observation from watching a few hours of pro play so idk lol

I mean, the team isn't really "too small" when 90% of the things added on updates (weapons, maps, cosmetics) are community created.

ya and this game is literally a brain damaged retard jumping on top of rockets while some cackling german scientist shoves a magic beam up his butt

what do you want people to think about it, clearly ARMA IS THE BEST ESPORT because its so REALISTIC

people can put effort into whatever they want

He's watching the Game Theory video. I'd recommend getting in here.

=

tf2 is full of white males

There are lots of games that experience a competitive renaissance late into their life-cycle.

TFC had pug groups running fairly regularly out of their IRCs late into 2012, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 has an international ranking system and regularized on-line tournaments now. Smash of course is another big one.

If you expect tf2 to rise to the level of OW's corporate sponsorship you're sadly mistaken. The reality is that is a new game and there were 10 million players at one point or another as of July - and the game is still too young to see if it will have any sort of staying power. Lots of shooters have come out over the last 8 years that garnered sponsorships, buzz/hype, and even had LAN tournaments, but ultimately have died or failed as competitive games (Titanfall, NS2, and Ricochet in particular and many others).

I know the update was disappointing for a lot of people - but really the idea that the game is still getting updates at all is pretty amazing to me (even though I dislike a lot of their content - mainly because I tend to distrust new things). Just peruse a list of games that came out the same years as TF2 did and see how many of them are still receiving active dev support - I would wager the list is incredibly small. Hell, there are probably lots of games from 07' that aren't even playable anymore due to server shut-downs.

Isn't the biggest thing it comes down to is that there just isn't enough money in the scene? If Valve in some way could show that they'll provide a cash flow, that would make the biggest difference. A lot of top players don't care enough to try, a lot of top players have left because there's been no indication they'll ever be able to make a reasonable amount of money by investing lots of time into the game.

Hell, if Valve had committed to giving 25% of the revenue from competitive passes (only needed to be purchased by players without mobile authenticator, $10 at first and $20 after the initial sale is over) to the i58 prize pool, it would have been the statement of intent a lot of players have been waiting nearly a decade to see. The talent drain at the top level of the game is painful to watch.

Valve could also have done something as simple as sell cheap cosmetic badges, for each of the teams at i58, with revenue going half to the teams and half to the prize pool. Of course these are just small initial steps to what we need, but we aren't even getting that. Valve have been (slowly) improving the game and setting up (with a fair amount of difficulty) the groundwork for the playerbase to see the game more competitively, but there needs to be some sort of monetary investment or we'll stay stagnant at best

it wasnt money that drove this community all these years, sure it wouldnt hurt to have a bit more financial support but throwing cash at this ain´t gonna turn it around.
that been said instead of throwing money at the prizepool for the players how about give a little support $$$ to the production crews, because those are the ones that are actually keeping competitive alive...

Valve is a business not a charity. We can go ahead play the victim card and blame Valve for all our problems and never get anything done or come up with our solution. I honestly think it's lost cause at this point because of how everybody wants cash handouts in a game.

There is a lot of money in the game. Especially if we did pay to play highlander, and other things that would go to a long term growth. But we are not smart we are stupid if we get any money we spend it all instantly and never have anything to show for it. Why we think that would change because of valve is silly.