nvm someone on my friends list linked me the graph 6 minutes after posting this

=

Can we see the graph?

Yeah sure. It was from this thread: http://www.teamfortress.tv/41143/visuals-for-league-size

The specific graph I was looking for was: http://i.imgur.com/17hMH2E.png

woah, that's really rough for HL. anyone here who plays highlander that can speak to why this is happening?
[edit] inb4 sigafoo 7v7 or overwatch meme

I'm going to eventually get around to UGC NA 6s vs ESEA but I need to get the numbers from snowblind still and I'm currently taking a break from numbers/graphs to do actual fun things.

#6 I wouldn't really say it's largely due to overwatch (OW came out before S19 so there is a drop to be noted though), but largely just that people are getting burned out either from having nothing to play for or not enjoying the skill gaps.

Highlander's top end hemorrhaged because there is nothing to play for, a lot of the teams that get first place plat have died once they've received enough medals - ginyu/knd/mts/. DK is basically the only "good" team left and they don't seem to really take it super super serious anymore because there's no one that really competes with them, back when Gold existed there were plenty of people that actively avoided Platinum because there's no prizepool so there's not too much reason to not just sandbag Gold instead if you don't care about medals. enough people have left at certain tiers of play outside of the very top that there's just massive skill gaps outside of Steel which makes some people burn out on attempting to climb.

It's a lot harder to pin point because the seasons prior to the ones in the graph are so out of sync with one another in exact dates, but it bears mentioning that ESEA experienced a substantial drop (ESEA's team amount hasn't been this low since 2014) last season a little while after Highlander did and this is not unusual - after all every peak record of teams ESEA has ever had occurred about 2 seasons after Highlander took off in North America (it gained like 20-30 teams), these two formats + leagues correlate quite a bit actually in population overall.

So Highlander dying is likely not a good thing for 6s, considering there are plenty of people who go HL main to 6s main but almost no one who does the reverse, 6s is slowly losing one of its better ways to transition people into it by giving them a relaxed method of getting their feet wet at taking the game more seriously and getting into the competitive swing of things.

(Prolander won't help much at all with a pay barrier.)

e: I'm just saying that Prolander won't be a viable replacement to transition people over to 6s to as Highlander continues to wither and eventually dies out. Hopefully Valve's 6s is a real thing by then. Not trying to Prolander meme.. ):

I still can't fathom how he expects people to pay money to play his shitty format like you already know banny and some hl nerds are gonna be the only people who care to try and win

I don't know what this says about me

HL is dying because every team leader would rather get forfeits than play, 18 people can never connect in a timely manner, and it is filled with sandbaggers

Before playing 6s, I tried joining 3 HL teams to play casually, and none of them really worked out for me because I didn't spend a lot of time online and didn't really have any friends, I just came to play

I started as a soldier in steel and was cut for someone objectively worse

Then I tried playing sniper in silver and got cut for a known hacker who was VACed during the season

Then I tried playing as a soldier in Gold and was cut for an IM player as soon as the possibility of playoffs rolled around

#11 since hl skews younger player wise and people dont have a monetary reason to show up teams usually want people to be online and around often, it's not like esea where people will expect you to show cause you dropped money on it etc

you also just have bad luck or something, i've been a part of 15 seasons of highlander and been cut 0 times.

e: but I feel for you, Steel and sometimes Silver can be extremely volatile, there is a lot of incompetent team leaders around.

S14 to bitcoin gate. All of my hard work. LUL

Looks more like a missed opportunity to me than anything else.

As dumb as it sounds bitcoins almost single handedly killed tf2's growth
there was other stuff that slowed it and such but bitcoins had an immediate impact within 2 seasons that's super obvious and since it happened tf2 has more or less stagnated or shrunk

I think there are many factors; for me it was a silly issue.

When i was young I had no problems recruiting children off of pubs, communities, mumbles, other teams, lobbies etc. But after years of playing I feel too creepy trying to get into kids little circles just to recruit them onto the team I had going for years. One day I was gonna wake up and see Warpy in the mirror. I had to end it.

While I'm sure it didn't help (duh, I'm sure it actively hurt getting new players into competitive TF2), I don't think it's the actual reason for the decline in S15 & S16 because every single league in every format experienced a drop in that S16 time period of various degrees (~March - June 2014, some leagues the drop just persisted for the rest of that year). Even if you could sway me that for some reason ESEA's bitcoin drama somehow affected NAHL (NAHL lost 37% of its peak players in this time period and S12 was even the monetary prizepool season), I don't think you could make a compelling argument as to why it would affect ETF2L/OZF as well.

I personally think it was a combination of other competitive games (the end of S15 is when CSGO finally broke 100k players and it'd only take off hella from there etc), it being Winter for S15 (Winter seasons usually have less players), and a bunch of the old player base reaching adult ages where they didn't want to/couldn't dedicate to something like this anymore.

which one do you mean?

#18 i don't know what you mean, if you mean season I mean the previous season of ESEA. If you're confused about the wording, the drop was substantial but the time frame it occurred in was a little while after Highlander's drop. I am not saying the drop was little, altho I guess I could have said "shortly thereafter" instead. Sorry for any confusion.

for HL, nobody in the top really cares about getting better anymore because the best team, dK, hoards most of the best players on their roster. dK is basically a team that beats almost anyone without trying, seeing as they haven't lost a match in 2 seasons. Because of this, players from dK lose interest, leave the game, and the cycle continues. Nobody sticks together long enough to grind up to dK's level, and instead good teams die and reform over and over each time with more players quitting or roster riding. Also, because the gold division got removed, more players that used to be the skill of "low gold" got forced into platinum or they couldn't play with their friends in silver, so a huge chunk of them quit. The factor of teams dying over and over could be remedied by a prizepool, but at the same time that would just make dK even stronger by them snatching up all of the best players onto their roster, guarenteeing the players a 1st place badge and in return dK would get the 1st prize season after season. There really isn't a solution to HL's dying numbers.

The solution is simple let's kill dk

As someone who played last season for dK and quit after Spu hit it on the nose. I already was losing interest in hl in general (1000 hours of one class not viable in both formats that has a reliance on luck will do that). I decided beforehand that I wanted to try my hardest to win my last season and that would be that. In that season, every match that wasn't against mM the other team just trolled because they knew they would be destroyed or they didn't really put up a fight (No offense to them). Not a lot of players have the drive to become as good as dK, especially in a gamemode considered either inferior to 6s or way more casual.