the cynical part of me says that valve won't respond and just continue to dangle the idea of money and support in front of everyone's faces

hopefully i'm wrong though

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valve are obviously opposed to our way of playing the game with class limits, weapon restrictions etc. i have a hard time seeing them pump money into an event where the game is played in a way they don't approve of

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This didn't need it's own thread
But good on you for emailing them.

I had already sent them something earlier, hopefully they reply to either message.

I suppose it would be better if this letter was sent on behalf of TFTV, which would probably increase the chances of Valve at least _replying_ to it.

did they even reply to that letter lange talked about

You're wasting time hoping valve will throw cash at it, they didn't grow to be the company they are by handing out money to community events. I'm fairly positive valve doesn't even want to tote our version of 6s as the best way to play 6s in TF2 (hence matchmaking having no bans and us seeing zero previous tourny sponsors). You're more likely to make a medal, ask them to sell it in the store and send the creators split of profits directly into the prizepool than you are to get a hand-out for it. Also considering you aren't a direct representative of the event, they have no reason to feel obliged to respond to you either.

I think it'd be great if they did do something to help out, but the focus should be on if the community can make it happen on their own before we try to bank on valve suddenly caring. That said, it's good to see people reaching out to them so we can at least let them know.

For me, the first step to getting any kind of support and cooperation from Valve, is to fix the clear issue that exists with regards to communication.

Somehow we need to get them conversing with us and the overall community much more often and much more candidly. A proper two-way discourse (and not just us complaining, as we often do).
Once we get proper communication, I think it's much easier to show them our world, and they'd be more receptive to showing us theirs; their challenges, problems, thoughts and ideas. Once we know what we're working with, we can move forward in the best manner and imo this would infinitely help the situation.

Probably the only way it can be solved is through the more known members of the community leveraging whatever contacts they have in order to set up a discussion with Valve, specifically about the communication issue.
Maybe Valve fears getting our hopes up, maybe Valve feels there isn't the money in it, maybe they are unaware at the harm that a lack of communication does, maybe they're not interested, or maybe they don't know how. The problem is, we haven't a clue. I think the community/comp community needs a closer working relationship with Valve if anything is to get done long term.

if valve were to host a tournament it wouldn't be the tf2 that you want to see. them adopting our abstraction of the game, i.e. class limits, whitelist etc., would be them basically admitting that their game is broken.

can't we just get valve to host a major with no whitelist and no class restrictions but have all the invite teams agree to run our current team class restrictions? inb4 crowns take advantage of the rules and run 4 scouts lul
but on a serious note i don't think valve is ready to pour money into this game, it would solve all our problems if they did so but i don't think they'll directly profit from it

and yet even blizzard, the kings of pretending that a casual game is competitive, put class limits into their game. They were so careful to design their game so that the casual experience is as similar as possible to the competitive one, and yet they threw that tenet out in regards to class limits because they realised how damaging class stacking is in a competitive game.

Making the game better to watch and play should be the goal, and class limits and weapon bans currently do that. Ideally soon we won't need to ban weapons anymore but that's dependent on valve as well.

After a few attempts to contact them, they gave community representatives the April 2015 meeting.

There's nothing wrong with class limits; not having class limits is a more broken idea than class limits.

i dont think enforcing class limits in casual is the way to go, all youd be doing is confusing and frustrating newer players. the issue lies within the fact that a lot of pubbers, who are generally young, dont understand why you shouldnt be playing a certain class at a certain time. both war and funke already touched upon how poor the player introduction is for newer players in tf2. its probably better to teach people why playing spy 24/7 isnt gonna work if you want to win rather than going "sorry, this class is currently full!"

Class limits is fine, class limit 1 on all but pyro, soldier and scout would vastly improve MM.

For the new players, you just need add some sort of note that gets them to buy into the idea, something like "to encourage fluid gameplay and discourage stalemates, defense and support classes are limited to 1".

And for the players with literally less than 1 hour in the game need to be directed to something like tr_walkway, where you can see for yourself what everything does.

little timmy cant pick sniper or spy, boohoo uninstall, who gives a fuck

hey valve.

literally hire me and i will fix your game for you, double your revenue and work for very little.

class limits of 3 for offense and 2 for defense/support in casual. 2 and 1, respectively, for matchmaking.

admit that balance changes in the past weren't designed for competitive play as a cop-out for having shitty balance. thoroughly look at every weapon banned in any league, evaluate why it was banned (not just the fact that it was banned), and revise it against those complaints.

while a source 2 port is definitely a lot of work there's still a lot that could be done to overall smooth framerates, and the preset graphics options could be way more thorough so people wouldn't need to use graphics configs at all.

the STV experience is also fucked. there should be a special spectator mode that anyone connecting over STV gets automatically, that loads up shit like StatusSpec without needing insecure (but that only works when connected to an STV relay). there should also be a game menu button for connecting as a spectator.

most importantly this shit shouldn't just be added one by one.

1. make a draft of concepts, showing how the HUD should look and how it should interact.
2. find a way to explain away any flaws so you don't have to admit wrongdoing because you're valve.
3. start an overhaul of the UI following the drafts strictly without changing anything.
4. playtest thoroughly and revise the live version based on feedback from the PTR that should be brought back for stuff like this.

I know it seems silly to spell out how to develop shit, but honestly valve it looks like you need it.

A high profile tournament with everyone abusing the shit out of unlocks and class stacking would probably do more towards bringing attention to what needs to be balanced than anything else tbh.

But then again this is valve so maybe thats too optimistic

That would do more harm than good for us and for valve.

I've never been able to think of a simple way to make it so that class limits are in place but not for scout soldier, but it makes so much sense to have limit 2 on offense, 1 on defense/support. And it's not even remotely confusing of a concept.

TBH I think we should focus on making league prize pools bigger before we do anything LAN related (not that another huge LAN isn't good), a somewhat similar thought to what warhuryeah brought up in another thread.

Think about how many people would sign up for open with just a $30,000 prizepool. Easy money.

With that being said I'm sure I'm oversimplifying it to an extent, but still.

This has been suggested many times by many people for a long time as the simplest way to explain class limits to new players; it's definitely not new. With the upcoming Pyro rebalance, this could even be really cool in "our version" of 6s. If Pyro's airblast was less of a "stuff-them-back-into-the-doorway" mechanic and could be used more offensively and the class had more lightning gun mechanics, you might just see a Scout and a Pyro or even two Pyros being run on select maps instead of the regular two scouts.

Gives Valve a class limit excuse, creates more gameplay variation, forces a proper Pyro fix and unifies Valve's vision with ours. One can but dream.

I don't think Valve would support a paid league (as shown by them refusing to put ESEA medals in.) That could have changed by now but it seems really unlikely to me they would put any money into ESEA. They might for ETF2L but I feel like a tournament is better promotion and the more likely and beneficial of the two options would be Valve support for a major

if valve won't respond to people like thorin and semmler concerning cs, an established and popular esports series generating mad revenue just through the competitive side of it (current tf2 comp revenue for valve: $0 - excluding MM passes obviously), why would they respond to us? Thorin himself made a video recently concerning this lack of communication from valve. if csgo can't make them listen we have even less chance.

csgo valve and tf2 valve are different people

Then they should fix the broken unlocks ffs

I'm pretty sure that w/e response valve gives their thought process would be "but what makes us think that a lot of people would want to watch tf2 even if we did invest a lot of money into it?" I think making an argument for that rather then "cmon bud youve got the cash and we deserve it our small group of 6's players rly like the game" would be a better idea. Obviously a money incentive would attract more competition and whatnot but how do you get people to watch?

not that i really think the game can get big but i mean you have to empathize with them because they're kind of in control of the entire thing, they were pretty much a pc gaming monopoly for a while just because of steam so you really gotta take that stuff into consideration they already get money from tf2 but how will they get A LOT MORE money from tf2?

http://i.imgur.com/BwWvs0H.png