Sorry, I mean specifically challenging/questioning them and trying to get them to communicate more. Are they just not at all receptive to the idea of even a one-off discourse between them and a number of high-level players, with the goal of discussing how they can mutually grow the scene and the game as an eSport?

I presume that members of the community have tried to have a proper discussion with Valve and been rebuffed.

I actually mentioned that this meeting did in fact happen in April 2015. Here's the TFTV post: http://www.teamfortress.tv/24792/valve-and-competitive-tf2

Ok I guess it is mildly comforting to know that there's a 50% chance that our kids might be able to play tf2 matchmaking and it won't suck.

Slin just tell them to put streams on the main menu then it's totally esports. Also if those dang invite players stopped using aliases in ESEA that people didn't know them by, Intel would be sponsoring teams right now. Wake up sheeple.

Tbf, it is a tad tricky to get into comp/playing 6s, despite the great efforts of the comp community. You either play the in-game matchmaking system (and in all likelihood get destroyed a lot if you're a newer player due to rubbish ranking systems), or you try and get into proper comp via joining/forming a team and joining an org. The problem again is that proper comp isn't easy for the uninitiated, and I think it's a little intimidating to get involved with initially. You've probably minimal experience of playing the format, you're likely to be up against players that are a lot more experienced and skilled, and it can even be tricky to get into a team due to your inexperience and the simple and unfortunate fact that you have to sign up to various websites and post in the hope that some team wants you, if you're not fortunate to have 5 friends who want to play.

Now, if the game had a good introduction to 6s, with guides and with newer players being matched with actual similar level players, they'd be more likely to sink time into it. Thus they'd get a better feel for it and feel more confident in going out and joining a team. Ideally, the game itself would nudge you towards the external orgs. I've been in this situation myself. You do a lot of scouring for information and posting on forums, and very little playing. And that is without ever having any decent exposure to 6s.

Oh okay thanks.

A real shame that the communication wasn't to last.

In Valve's defense, two of the players that they talked to quit the game for Overwatch. Extine and Mana are still a part of the community but B4nny is by far the most active one of the three and is the only one currently playing in Invite. They actively included B4nny in discussions regarding the development of the matchmaking system, and they're still talking to him while adding a few more people to the list. So the conversation is still going, but not with the original group that visited Valve.

if they wait a few more years maybe the rest will leave too

I feel like after 9 years of the game and 6 years of competitive, to wait more with "Valve time" to figure things out is really going overboard. I think people's patience has run out, and to drag out this discussion even longer is eventually result in whoever's left in the comp scene now leaving for another game that has better support and investment from the development team.

I agree with this completely.

I think to consider the younger generation isn't ideal for Valve and TF2 at this point. The talent (the people I drew inspiration from) have moved on, and I don't feel like there's much competition left. Also, with Overwatch (as well as other games better supported), I think it's quite difficult to maintain the TF2 player base when there's more options coming up.

As for the kindergarten analogy, I feel like TF2 is more like an ancient, old elementary school, who doesn't have enough faculty to keep an eye on the "kindergartners." Without much of anything to hold them down, won't the younger generation go towards a better area that's louder, more colorful, and seemingly more exciting?

Honestly, whichever way you look at it the response from valve has been underwhelming.

I wouldn't have much of an issue with valve creating their own 6v6 competitive format- and ultimately no weapon bans would be a good goal (still not convinced about class limits) if valve balanced them properly.

However, ultimately- valve actually has to create a functioning mode that people want to play. We can give them huge amounts of feedback. The idea of "relinquishing control to allow them to set the ruleset" is all fine but they actually have to create a ruleset that they're happy with, that people want to play. In other words, if we want to move from being a "grassroots" game to one controlled and supported by valve, valve need to create something that can actually compete with current 6es.

I have extremely high doubts that they will ever do so when they released out of beta a matchmaking version that was incredibly easy to troll by leaving- had no actual skill ranking that put players in games of equal skill level, was rife with cheaters, locked basic commands that are standard in almost all games like zoom_sensitivity_ratio and mat_monitorgamma, and had a memory leak that caused players' fps to drop and eventually crashed the game. Some of these issues still aren't fixed.

Asking the players to abandon any current gamemodes or rulesets for ones that are pretty CLEARLY worse is ludicrous to ask until valve make something actually tangible materialise. Sure the players can test various things that valve try and give feedback- but the current approach feels like "you the community come up with everything; we say yes or no and then implement a bad version" as opposed to "we come up with something, we gauge response and listen to feedback, we tweak and implement it". In the meantime, I think a large portion of the playerbase is starting to lose patience.

Definitely agree with you there when you say that it's ludicrous for either party to abandon what they've built so far. What I mean by that is, it's ludicrous for us as competitive players to abandon our form of 6v6 TF2, and it's ludicrous for Valve to abandon the pub game that they've spend a decade developing. What you're seeing is two factions that are slowly coming together.

We actually made a HUGE leap by unbanning as many weapons as we did this season, so I think we're good for now. Next season we can take another look at the whitelist but I don't expect it to change much. Right now it's Valve' turn to make the next move, but I'm not sure how much time people are willing to give them at this point.

Still, will that change anything? If Valve takes forever to make their changes, will you quit TF2? I think that a lot of competitive TF2 players are just enjoying the game and having fun with it while it lasts. There's no denying that time is running out for Valve, and they are definitely keeping track of their player numbers throughout this process. (http://steamcharts.com/app/440)

I suppose they have, but it would be way better to be more inclusive and for them to make some effort to discuss things with the comp community as a whole. I think that would even placate a number of the disgruntled.

Whilst pretty unrealistic, forum posts from Valve (of course not along the lines of 'neato') would be tricky and open them up to a lot of shit, but if they were clear that their posting would continue on the condition that discourse remain civil and with the goal of being productive, it could be fruitful. Obviously this in theory, because none of us expect it after all this time.

IDK, it just seems like they need to be drawn out of their shell, and into engaging with the comp community as a whole if anything is ever to improve. I can't see much progress otherwise.

why does the pub game have to be in comp matchmaking though, there is a distinction between casual and competitive already so why not tailor the casual mode towards the pub players and the competitive towards the existing competitive scene. They dont seem mutually exclusive to me.

Sorry, I'm not saying that the two game modes have to come together. We know that many esports are successfully able to develop both competitive and casual game modes for their respective games.

I'm saying that Valve only has X employees working on TF2 as a whole. They can't assign their entire team to supporting the competitive format, especially since casual players are such a large portion of their playerbase. If they stopped supporting casual that would create a big problem for them. Thus, some portion of their time and resources will have to be spent supporting the casual scene, and the casual scene will likely (unfortunately) have some kind of effect on their balancing decisions. My understanding is that they're always designing the game around small team sizes like 6v6, but they also have to appease players who dedicate themselves to a single class.

X=5

I counted at least 12 when I was there back in June, and they said a few people were on vacation. You've got a couple artists but the rest seemed like game designers or something. I hate the misinformation though cause I think it's hard to get an exact number. Definitely a small team though.

.

Lol every time these fucking threads, all these words about how to fix tf2 and what to do next, but nobody ever does something, this is getting really stupid by now....

did you not notice the whitelist this season?

granted I'm not sold on the idea but you can't really say no one is doing anything

it's a shame someone hasn't simply time traveled 6 years into the past, bought out valve, and allocated more resources toward tf2 as an esport

one of these days

Well the obvious answer is that it can't bring in less players, so of course advertising something will bring more attention to it. The question is, will advertising playcomp.tf matter? Should you be paying to advertise the game?

My response probably belongs in the "unpopular opinions" thread but sponsors have been signaling to the community for years that competitive TF2 isn't really worth investing in right now. Most of the money that flows into the scene comes from ESEA's prize pool and the rest of it comes from the players themselves to fund various events. Not a lot of people play the game right now so sponsors aren't putting money into the scene, and since there isn't a lot of money flowing into the scene, there isn't a lot of outside interest being generated like you see in other games like Overwatch.

The reason people aren't advertising the scene right now is because there's too many barriers to entry. In order to get into the competitive game you have to jump through a lot of hoops and sign up for third party services. That's not very appealing, and that's why you see new multiplayer games making it so easy to hop in and begin playing in matchmaking services. People don't want to do a lot of work in order to play -- they just want to start up the client, click play, and get moving. The problem with TF2 is, even though we have that now, it's not perfect. The competitive game mode seems half-baked and it needs work.

Valve is looking to change this whole situation but their approach is different from Blizzard's. Blizzard created a brand new IP, made their very first FPS game, and dumped a ton of money into their game. Success. Valve, on the other hand, is taking an existing IP, when they already have a more successful FPS game launched, and they're only investing a small amount into the competitive game in order to gauge community sentiment. Will people be upset that they're turning TF2 into a competitive title? Are they liking it or are they hating it?

Only time will tell. People from the competitive scene clearly want Valve to dump a ton of money into the game but it doesn't really make sense for them to introduce a ton of money into TF2 and potentially ruin the game that their casual playerbase enjoys. If they mess up TF2, they've just messed up their 5th most popular game on Steam. It makes sense for them to tread carefully.

Still, they've successfully been able to develop the competitive scenes in both DOTA and Counter-Strike. I trust them with Team Fortress.

Slin keeps on posting as if the people who don't have faith in valve to suddenly make tf2 an esport are impatient and short-sighted.

Yet, the idea that a 9-year old game that has languished in obscurity could suddenly compete with a game that came out in the past year and already has major sponsors, big lans, a league in korea, and a league in america is ridiculously naive.

What you are calling for is not just rare in the history of competitive gaming, it is literally unprecedented. Why should people believe that it's going to work out prior to something positive actually HAPPENING?

Even if valve spreads awareness about competitive tf2 to people that don't know about it yet, why would they themselves take the plunge on playing a game that came out when the biggest titles were brood war and counter strike 1.6?

For a long time, the challenge was merely to try to expose pub players to the competitive side of things more, and to create a matchmaking system to bridge the gap more easily. Now, even the pub population is fleeing to greener pastures, and the world of esports as a whole has become far more monopolized and with much higher entry fees than a few years ago.

Expecting tf2 to get big in 2016 is like thinking that David Hasselhoff will win an oscar or something

The TL;DR of your essay is that you think valve wants us to test different class limits, either because they've told you that or more likely because you think adding proper class limits are the natural next step in the development of matchmaking. Also, we shouldn't expect a functioning matchmaking system for another ~two years.

I just think the valve devs don't understand the game because they're bad, and this kind of delay on implementing basic things like proper class limits just proves it. I've been slowly losing faith in the TF team and this is pretty much just the last in a long line of idiotic things they've done... or more likely not done when they should have.

And I'm not going to waste my time playing 6s with 4 heavies allowed, and nor is anyone else on tftv. We know what works, we know why it works and if the tf team is too lazy to put in the time to understand it then they're never going to be able to develop a successful esport anything.

The obvious solution has already been suggested elsewhere -- rebalance pyro to be an actual offensive class and then limit offensive classes to 2 and defensive and support classes to 1. Simple. But you can bet that valve's not going to do that because Eric's a pyro main who probably thinks that airblasting players off cliffs is the epitome of skill.

Are you just saying this because this was the response Thorin gave you in his AMA? :p

The original DOTA "languished in obscurity" but it spawned two huge mobas in LoL and Dota 2.
CS:GO was terrible when it first came out and then they made some big competitive updates to it and it really grew.

Here's a quote from Sirscoots in reference to CS:GO's turnaround:
"For years Valve did not care at all, because it was a mod of their game, and even when they bought it and made Source, they didn’t really care,” Smith says. “It took forever to get things patched - it was community driven. It was fine, it thrived without them, but to have developer support of your game - especially an esport - is an incredible added bonus, especially nowadays."

Source: http://www.pcgamesn.com/counter-strike-global-offensive/how-counter-strike-global-offensive-is-turning-into-the-worlds-most-exciting-esport

We all agree that pyro needs to be reworked and so does Valve. In fact, pyro won the pyro vs. heavy war and it'll be the first class to receive this rework. So we already know that this is going to happen and I have no idea what you're talking about. Source. Source2

Secondly, think about the situation objectively. Does it really make sense to limit some classes to 2 and other classes to 1? I think it makes much more sense to limit everything to 2 or limit everything to 1 and then rebalance the classes so that it works.

I can't tell if your entire post is a troll or not. Obviously nobody here wants to play with a class limit of 6, but Valve isn't lazy. If they were lazy, they'd just copy our game directly. Instead, they're trying to put in the time to understand why class limits of 6 doesn't work, so they've created a game mode where you can run 4 heavies to gain a better understanding of why it doesn't work. This is the exact opposite of laziness.

sadly, this only has tangential relevance to the question I asked Thorin, but he just skimmed it cuz it was so long and didn't really give a satisfactory answer (definitely the worst I saw so far)

first of all, dota definitely did not "languish in obscurity" it was bigger than tf2 ever was or will be by at least 1 order of magnitude

second of all, the success of lol was mainly because they were lucky enough to recognize early on that twitch.tv was going to take off and the top players took advantage of it and got massively popular

third of all, even if you accept the premise of this point, it still took ENTIRELY NEW GAMES to get people interested. is all this valve meeting stuff in preparation for tf3? if not, its not going to matter

CS:GO was indeed terrible when it first came out. it also

a) was, again, an entirely new game
b) had carry-over from 1.6 and source, two of the larger esports up until that point, which had already had many international tournaments and a few tv broadcasts as well
c) really started to grow less than a year and a half after it came out (again, tf2 has been out for NINE YEARS)

you're taking this quote so much out of context it's ridiculous. scoots isn't talking about "cs:go's turnaround here", he's literally comparing it to 1.6 and source. I agree, it was definitely possible to have a mainly community driven game in 2001, that is not up for debate. the point is, when the new title came out it had developer support basically from the moment it was released, and it also had a successful scene to piggyback of from the era when DIY scenes could still grow

what we have to acknowledge about tf2 is how unfortunate the timing of its release was. it came out in late 2007. why does the date matter? well, it was long after the complete wilderness of competitive gaming, when new IPs regularly sprouted up with completely grassroots support and supplanted the market share of incumbent titles. quake, cs, starcraft, warcraft, halo, cod, and a few fighting games were already hogging a lot of room, and it was hard for a new game to dislodge them, especially one that required so much of a departure from the standard way of playing to actually be balanced for competitive play. yet, tf2 came out before the wave of entirely developer-sponsored games, when we saw sc2 really pioneer such a business model. valve is good at making money in an extremely conservative manner, and they were clearly the last of the big 3 developers to embrace this top-down approach. tf2 was just a product of its era. did blizzard go back and fund warcraft 3? I don't believe so.

of course, this has nothing to do with tf2, or how much we like it; this sort of thing happens in any market all the time. my dad, for instance, is a computer programmer who was the lead developer on NFL Challenge, the first ever NFL-licensed football computer game. However, it came out in 1985, which some nerds might recognize as the heart of the great video game crash, prior to Nintendo and their Japanese ilk swooping in and righting the ship. at the time, such a product might appeal to a few niche consumers but wouldn't exactly hit Madden numbers. I'm sure my dad is proud of the work he did and the official stamp of approval he got from the NFL, but sometimes life isn't fair. grow up now, guys, it'll save you in the long run.

comparisons made between dota2/csgo and tf2 make me sad. the circumstances were never and will never be similar. the game is 9 years old and its update history isn't conducive to a competitive game. they're incredibly different. both csgo and dota 2 were new sequels to games with larger and more established competitive scenes than tf2.

i would also argue that copying 6s and leaving the game entirely open to interpretation are equally lazy. especially when the latter isn't regularly updated.

are you suggesting that a company trying to crowdsource their labor to unpaid players in order to change the most basic elements of a 9 year old game that a 30 minute email chain with b4nny or someone could explain instantly is the opposite of laziness

the problem people have is that it seems to take them forever to understand why those limits don't work, it's been over half a year since the beta how long till they realize? another year? there won't be anyone left to get information from at that rate. there are more people on pug champ than valve matchmaking sometimes

Dota was not "languished in obscurity". The game had a gigantic audience in asian countries and it was by far the most popular warcraft 3 mod. Counter strike had international LANs before CSGO, the only thing that ever really threatened counter strike's stability as an esport was the players rejecting every version after 1.6.

It's naive to compare TF2 to these games when the origins and circumstances for each game is so wildly different. Lets not forget that for every success story in esports, there are tons of failures. Enemy Territory? Tribes? L4d? These games all had sizeable competitive scenes at one point, where are they now? How about quake or any RTS other than starcraft? Hell even starcraft is on life support these days.

It's been stated so many times in the past, but everything valve is trying to do is 5 years too late.