Imagine splitting the meager scraps of prize money between 9 players instead of 6, not to mention the elevated costs of sending 9 people to LAN also, that is if some people actually believe that HL is the direction competitive TF2 needs to work towards.

Holy shit sigafoo is actually retarded. He doesn't realize that most of his complaints are a testament to why HL is a flawed format. Plus why does he think balancing weapons around HL is a good idea ???

Basically no one with brain cells thinks that, everyone decent/smart who plays HL understands why HL can't be the direction competitive TF2 will work towards.

i do wish if over the past few years instead of treating hl as an enemy and doing dumb shit like lolhl (same for lol6s spam from low tier hl players) the community at large would just embrace each format for what they are. At its peak NAHL had 408 teams which is 3672-8568 players that you could just try to tap into 6s, but when NAHL tried to get a prize pool going people just shit on it mostly because of Infinite and spammed lolhl a metric fuck ton and it never came close to hitting its goal (which wasn't even that high) and it just turned off people from even bothering with 6s. Highlander is like the easiest gateway drug into 6s that there is for pubbers (well, until the competitive queue I guess but idk how effective that is being), but people just focused too much on the whole "it's not super serious/joke/flawed" aspect rather than embracing that.

That's not how Valve feels though

What sigafoo meant is that our esport needs to grow, and he thinks that to do that we need to find the best gamemode for people to watch. Valve isn't not supporting because "you aren't playing right :)", they're not supporting because our esport is not large enough to warrant supporting.

Because valve's screwed competitive tf2 over at every turn over the last 9 years. Not because it wouldn't succeed if they actually gave a fuck about it or at least got out of the fucking way rather than giving casual idiots every reason to argue that tf2 wasn't intended to be competitive. Look at random crits. Look at fucking robin walker's public comments about how lolhl is a better representation of tf2. Not to mention his garbage about how he wanted the game to turn into dota.

If they spent 1/10th of the time it took them to add a million fucking awful looking hats into the game and 1/10th of the time it took them to think up the garbage quickplay system and hell maybe 1/100th of the braincells to realise that shitfest 12v12 pubs maybe aren't the best representation of the depth and strategy of gameplay that tf2 can offer then I would bet money that tf2 would be a more popular esport than csgo right now. Not that it's that hard given how little attention they give that game compared to vr and other irrelevancies.

nopeSAVAGE

hey guys, instead of banning this broken unlock, let's force everyone to run a full time heavy to counteract it. this surely will not make the game less fun for spectators and players. thank you for your consideration

-Free NA league
-Promote it to shit
-Medals as incentive for newer players

UNITED GAMING CLANS
also, personally idc that much about medals

This is very subjective and I don't think you should effectively sign off with what is obviously just your personal opinion. It undermines the rest of your argument. The obvious rebuttal for geel would be that yes TF2 as an esport isn't large enough to warrant support, but a large reason for that is because of their lack of support. It goes both ways.

I understand why the devs do their own thing but man this situation would be easier if notable community members could just sit down and have a round table with them. It's not like we have to fly people to Washington, just get in a mumble and tell us what you think competitive tf2 is about. Fundamental shit like class limits, maps, game modes.

I think the majority agree that for any official support we'd need to be playing their rulesets, but if for example they're never going to implement class limits we may as well just part ways with them now and stop pandering to them with whitelists that a majority of players don't like (On the off chance they choose to tune in to "This game used to be fun" vs whoever and see an engy cheesing a last hold by rr'ing their sentry from spawn and agree that it might need a small nerf, though one that won't piss off pubbers), in hope of some future monetary support.

Aside note: I wonder how much more intimate the devs and players would be if the majority of people that played were competitive? I imagine the weight of the casual community is quite overbearing. Pushing an update that focuses solely on competitive focused weapon and class balance is probably quite daunting, especially with the ease at which entitled gamers can post ridiculous shit on reddit and such. Redditors know that in a lot of cases if they complain enough they can revert changes, regardless of if they're bad or not. It's insane. I'm honestly scared of how reddit will react if they give pyro a proper rework.

I guess every time someone visits the Valve HQ there needs to be a thread about it. If you haven't realized, Valve barely gives a shit if anyone, even banny visits.

You can round up the whole invite squadron and they might give you some free TF2 cards for the effort, otherwise they have other shit to deal with such as how to ruin CSGO even more or how to "balance" Dota 2 patches.

P.S: Bottom IM players can win HL blindfolded.

There just isn't the ecosystem developed to support it. For whatever reason Twitch has not taken off for TF2. The game is easily big enough in terms of player base to have comparable viewing figures to many other games yet it frequently lags behind Farming Simulator in Twitch viewer counts.

Twitch is the key because it's the marketing channel that makes esport events worth it for a publisher. The vast majority of TF2's players have embraced items, trading and other non-competitive activities but they haven't embraced giving a fuck about being good at the actual game.

Valve made the official blog post and posted in game alerts for every stage of i58. IIRC viewing figures were down on last year (probably mostly to do with the OW exodus), the message to the vast majority of players just isn't getting through.

If you're making these kind of decisions on TF2 at Valve how could you successfully lobby to get resources to fund competitive events when most of your players demonstrably do not care?

Going back to the Enigma visit to Valve, they stated that they wanted to use MM to try to get people to think in a more competitive mindset, care about the game and improving personally, and hoped that would start to drive engagement on Twitch. That's presumably why casual became strongly structured with the MM update, and why the strength of backlash to that must have been dismaying for them. If the whole approach doesn't work they have little incentive to keep pushing it.

Until Valve themselves issues a statement we can't be truly sure of their plans.

But the way I see it is, if Valve are truly waiting for the game to reach its optimal game mode, they have no fucking clue of how to treat TF2 and we should all ditch ANY expectations we have and give up on the idea of this game ever being a big esport, because we've been playtesting this broken-ass game for 9 fucking years and we've basically figured out how it should work, sans the mythical perfect whitelist (and we'll probably never reach it because of balance changes and personal preferences etc) (obligatory "fuck global whitelist").

Yeah, we could play more of x map, and ditch y map because its literal AIDS, but in terms of rulesets we've pretty much got it figured out and if Valve can't see that, then they're either going to take way too long to reach the same conclusions on how the game should be played that we have and the game will die off, or they change the way the game is played and honestly fuck that after sinking several thousand hours into this game and being in the LOWER quartile for total play time in the comp community there is absolutely no way that we don't know what's best for this game. If Valve can't see that, we're fucked either way.

Valve pls use our rules because Overwatch is so shit I just wanna airstrafe and have customisation and have movement that isn't poopy tyty.

Yes, definitely, I agree with everything you said. Rereading my comment I was too vague with that statement. They're support has definitely picked up, which is cool to see. When I said lack of support I guess I meant in the past. Like 2-3 years ago, when they were going full ham on the cosmetic updates and such, as Nope eluded to. There was a massive shift in the way the majority of gamers view TF2 and what valve are doing now to try help could unfortunately be too late to rectify the games' image.

Dont u guys get bored of these threads? Some nerd has money left over, flies to valve, they don't give a shit and don't tell him anything new but he feels like the next b4nny competitive spokesperson so he lets us know that valve don't care but with a twist, then there's 10 pages of the same "future of competitive tf2" thread that makes up like half of tf.tv now and in the end, the whole thing gets 0 attention from valve and everyone forgot their own posts by the time the next thread happens and they post the same things there.

http://www.aradani.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/wotlogo.jpg

It's Valve's MO that they wait for organic growth, it's actually unusual for them to make this kind of push and it's probably to do with the threat of Overwatch. They have addressed a short term goal in providing a ladder grind that Overwatch does so players don't have to jump ship to get that experience. It's worth keeping in mind that even if it doesn't go any further what they've done will have worked for them in that sense.

In terms of the game's image Reddit's attitude has totally changed in the last 2 years, /r/tf2 now gets plastered with competitive clips every time there is a decent tournament. They're not entirely representative of the whole of the TF2 player base, but it's an example of progress being made and it's in no small part due to Valve giving competitive tacit backing by making the MM system.

Leveraging that Reddit growth to move to the next level is a potential step, can we get the resources to hold more Lan tournaments regularly that capture people's attention? The problem is it all relies on volunteers who are burned out, and Valve could make a very cheap difference by quietly supporting that kind of grass roots activity.

How ironic

r/tf2 gets plastered with clips yeah but they dont get nearly as much attention as shitty memes, the general populace of tf2 doesnt give 2 shits about comp because they have no reason to.

its like buying a lottery ticket it's more about imagining how cool it would be than expecting anything to happen

i just wanna point out tha dota is pretty excellently balanced rn

its the same shit with why tf2stadium is dead
"wahh tf2stadium is dead i hate tf2center"
"we should arrange times we play on tf2stadium together to get it going!"
-they never do that and the next day the same thread appears

feel like i've seen threads like this before

If anything I would want them to help fund teams to lans 2 NA, Top 2 Aussie Teams, and an asain team<----(the true dream)

yes the great contient of asai

Some people here are fucking delusional. A community doesn't have to be 100% toxic players, if there is a vocal enough toxic minority, the community is perceived as toxic. And looking at this whole thread several times mentioning how sigafoo is retarded and attacking him for saying he likes highlander and saying that the 6s community is toxic (which it IS), you are only proving how toxic this community is.

He basically agreed that there should be one competitive format and that it should be 6s, or some form of it. Even though he is a highlander player. And yes there is a stigma against 6s from pubbers and HL players, guess why. No, it's not because "HL players are unfairly toxic towards 6s" (LOL), it's because 6s players are toxic towards everyone else. Just look at every time HL is mentioned on this forum and there goes a "lol highlander" response with 50 +frags, every time some newbie posts a pub related video he gets told to go back to r/tf2.

The point is, what sigafoo said about how it's the community's fault for the scene not growing as much as it could is true and the overly defensive reactions in this thread only prove it imo. If you look at it from Valve's perspective, I wouldn't put money into comp tf2 at this stage either.

people on a competitive gaming forum downfragging pub videos and disliking a format that has so hindered the game :?? so toxic

we should be more nice like the BIG esports cs and dota community (such untoxic lads!!! (thats how they got big))

It's a joke not a dick, stop taking it so hard

shocking that you would use the term delusional then follow it up with with what could only be sheer delusion. there will literally always be toxic players in any game and it's your choice if you'd like to focus on only the negatives and toxicity, which in this case is the not even very vocal minority. I don't know which metrics you're using, other than this thread, to measure how "toxic" the community is, but using an indoctrinated meme like "lol hl" as anything other than what it is, a comment used to farm +frags, is fishing. nevertheless, if you choose to look past all the good things this community does that you would be hard-pressed to find in any other community this size, and instead focus on the average TFTV 6s player's opinion on highlander, you've literally destined yourself to blanket the community as toxic. most people take the newbie mixes, esea payment threads, and the like for granted because if they don't use the facilities, they're irrelevant to their tf2 experience. however, a community isn't toxic because there are a few comments that personally upset you, because you aren't the center of the universe, and there are probably far more people affected positively by this community than negatively.

the last paragraph is just so triggering i can't even properly respond so i'm only going to tell you that I envy that kind of ignorance, as this topic of "why valve doesn't support tf2" has been discussed so much on this forum that if you're still confused as to why, and blame it on THE COMMUNITY and potentially its toxicity, then you've chosen to be stubborn and there's nothing anyone can to do change your mind

TF2 isn't the cleanest of the pile, but given the games around it you could certainly do with far worse

at the end of the day, even under the assumption that highlander was flawless and filled with only the skilled of players top-to-bottom, it isn't caster-friendly, and that's always going to be the death knell. you can't have a successful competitive game if there's no feasible way of it getting stream traction--6s already has that issue in some ways, HL has it multiplied by a thousand

If you disagree with someone's assessment that your community is toxic then you are only proving that it is true!!
I don't honestly care one way or another whether anyone thinks the 6s community is toxic, as it really doesn't matter. The only relevant factor is Valve's willingness to support the game.
Call of fucking Duty is an esport, I can't honestly think of a game with a worse reputation for having a "toxic community" than that. If Call of Duty can have that kind of reputation and still be an esport then anything can.