But it's more like gum, it doesn't help you at all. If you wanna support competitive, you support 6s and make changes when it's possible.

Edit: Ah great, I created the 6th page with a vague and late comment, cool.

Things I have done as a steel 6s admin:

- Spoke to a team leader who had no idea that there was a way to play TF2 outside of league-scheduled matches. He literally had no idea that there was a way to arrange to practice against another team
- Explained to someone that 3:30-7:30 pm EST was not an appropriate time to expect your opponents to reschedule matches to, at which point I was told "well our player has bedtime at 8:30 EST so we really can't play later than that"
- Explained the concept of mentoring, what a demo is, how to record and retrieve one, and how one might review it to improve
- Moderated a bunch of matches that went back and forth in regards to whether they actually could or would play the match or not which ended in multiple reschedules or attempts at playing it
- Provided servers that I pay for out of my own pocket to some teams that were having troubles getting a server or starting their match because of connection issues.

Look, I don't really give a shit about what league ends up "on top". UGC, TFCL, NATF2L, I will happily admin for whatever league ends up bringing in fresh blood into the scene because I don't have any particularly strong ties to any organization, and I just want to see the community and the scene continue. I ran a last-minute team drive for ESEA prior to the beginning of last season while also being a UGC admin. I want new players to get into whatever league they will have more fun in and for those particular players it happened to be ESEA and so I tried my best to help them network so they could have teams to play on. But if you think a bunch of 14-year-olds with bed-times at 8:30 EST who don't have the slightest idea about how running a team works are just gonna flood ESEA the second we kill a "redundant" free community league, you're in for a bad surprise. Yes some people might jump in immediately into a 3-month, 5 night a week commitment and thrive in it, but the vast majority of people new to competitive can't or won't. Players who are too immature, young, inexperienced, busy or broke rely on the free community leagues where they can reliably spend a little bit of time developing their interest while maturing and finding ways in which they can accommodate the increased demands of their new hobby.

I have tried since I took over, to my best ability, to instill the idea that playing matches and learning from them is considerably more desireable than forfeits and rule-lawyering, and that accomodating your opponents, when possible, is the right thing to do. So far my steel matches get played any time between Tuesday to Saturday on the regular, the teams trying their best to work out a solution. A couple of teams have actually come to me this season to ask if I could reverse their forfeit win so they could reschedule their match to play it out instead. Hopefully this kind of a flexible environment will allow them to become more interested in competitive TF2, take it more seriously, and move to more competitive and demanding environments (whatever those may be) when they build up a bit more skill and confidence. Blaming it for the "demise" of competitive TF2 is absolutely unfair.

I enjoy highlander and am currently trying to get into 6s as a med main (i play engie in 6s), but it's stuff like this that is just dumb and petty and makes me question that decision. Do you people really think less of me because I play HL?

It's still TF2, is it not? It's still something that prevents people from calling this game "dead", isn't it?

If you want HL players to play 6s, then don't fucking insult them for playing HL.

i feel like 'hl is killing 6s!' is more a way to justify hate of offclasses tbh

What are you on about? I don't think anyone hates offclasses, but just hates when people run them 100% to piss their opponents off.

EDIT: or to bait their own team

my bad, should have said hate people who play offclasses. i personally don't like when offclasses are played, but i don't try and fuck with them and say 'you shouldn't play this format'. if they enjoy it, just let them play hl/7s/4s.

One day I'll win the lottery and host a $100,000 ultiduo major mark my fucking words

Why are people -fragging a person that reached into his own pocket to host a fun ulti cup?

because he probably won't win it.

Wait why are there 9 teams in invite right now I thought someone told me recently invite only needs 8 to live. Or was that incorrect?

Tfw u save invite but accidentally kill im by moving up too many teams

don't take it personal, you dim-witted professional victim.

http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/993/875/084.png

u just took a phrase that already pretty much meant nothing and made it even more meaningless congrats

So this thread seems kind of derailed.

What I can gather from it:
Most 6's players have no interest in pursuing a league other than ESEA even though many of the players can't afford to play in ESEA... ? (based on the call for donations in the Invite Happenings thread)

UGC will continue as usual so long as people decide to do something other than pub all day.

Competitive TF2 is clearly in decline, although the trolling "former bigshots" from the old days are extremely rude to disregard all the people who still want to play comp TF2. (that's my nice way of summing them up)

and most importantly.... ESEA S25 Invite, is it happening or not? Do we have a lineup of teams yet? Edit: just noticed that scheduling has started even though it appears that teams aren't paid up. So these INVITE TEAMS are final?

A lot of 6s players are elitistic cunts that don't hesitate to show their toxicity and arrogance in your face.
That may or may not appeal to newcomers

I completely agree that many 6s players are / do that, but you're absolutely wrong if you think that is even a minor reason for the lackluster competitive scene. I feel like anybody who says this has never played another game competitively, because it's much worse in every successful game.

you mean the retard that organized the whole thing and threw 400$ of his own money into it? You mean the retard that created the first ever community funded prize pool in TF2? Not accepting paypal was a tax/financial decision given to me by my accountant, of whom I generally don't disagree with.

maybe I've missed something since being away but what have you done, karl, other than have an opinion? talk is cheap bud

Infinite why do you always sound like a condescending douchebag? Sure dude you put your own money. That really is cool of you, but take some responsibility for just one mistake lol

damn.

except people shouldnt be sandbagging so its not the moveup's fault but the sandbaggers.

Is being a moron a requirement to be head admin of ugc or something?

Like I thought kumori was just some random asshole but I'm starting to see a trend here.

That's not a reason in itself but it definitely doesn't help.
Im not even talking about ''mr die white girls'' and his cute behaviour

Infinite sigafoo also put up his money for a retardo league ur not special

Not cool whymeo it was even just said:

P. sure the only reason I kept with highlander was because I started out during Snowblindfrog's tenure. Any petty bullshit that might've happened with a different admin making retarded decisions I probably would've stopped playing in UGC.
But yeah sans him there's always been a problem in Head Administration in UGC.

according to infinite if u think the admins are assholes you're just wrong because there's no way they could all be assholes lol

*

The problem with this argument (which is really common) is those games are well supported by their developers and their competitive scenes don't lack in players interested in it because the games overall are well designed for competitive play and interesting people in it with features that do that, so they can actually afford to act that way because even if you turn off some people through bad behavior there's way more people working on replacing that space (in the bigger games you have many multitudes of people more than TF2's entire active peak population to go off of). These are games where generally the Ranked modes are the main way to play the game and a significant (if not vast majority) portion of the player base plays it.

TF2 still has a bunch of players with no impetus to play comp, a lot of the ones who do generally start in Highlander and eventually branch over to 6s once they get their feet wet, and it can't really afford to lose people due to that behavior nor has it really been able to afford that for quite some time now since the overall competitive community has been declining since late 2013-early 2014 and there just isn't enough people interested in playing to replace the amount of people the scene is losing. (hence a decline in teams) You have to entice and interest people into playing competitive and a big part of that is making it easy for them and helping them out/making it a fun open experience.

I think it is disingenuous to say it isn't even a minor issue, when you have a majority of the player base not interested in comp, acting poorly (especially on sites that everyone actively tells people to go to to get into comp like TF2C or on pubs) will drive them away. Highlander - the biggest format the game has ever had - received so much hate over the years and that was by far one of the best methods for transitioning people into 6s. There are plenty of people in ESEA right now that started in Highlander basically. There could have been way more of those people. There's no doubt in my mind that there were people that would have easily played 6s but the poor attitude of people disinterested them. That's just ignoring pubs & TF2C (& even going back to TF2Lobby) which are other avenues of lost players since that's where a lot of people enter competitive from as well.

Basically, if you're as hard up for players as competitive TF2 as a whole has been for 3 years now, being hella egotistical like you're actually a big competitive game and telling people they suck dick, yelling at them, lolhl spam, and whatever other things you can think to say that are mean just isn't going to make people swarm in droves to it. TF2 does not have the compelling competitive feature set or developer support to convince most people to ignore or work through that shit.

That said it isn't the major issue, the major issue will forever be that Valve is not hardcore supporting competitive Team Fortress 2 when every other "e-sport" has hardcore developer support.

but you have to recognize that a game will never be big if the community's toxicity (that is MUCH less extreme than other games) is considered an issue. it's really that simple.