Loosing Main does not = loosing IM
We should have never hopped on CEVO in the first place. The league was ran terribly and every match we played 1/2 of both teams had over 100 ping. We should have taken ETF2L's offer. The solution isn't hopping from one pay league that doesn't care about us to another pay league that doesn't care. The solution is a league by TF2 players for TF2 players.

The point that I think Screwball is trying to make is that with the same winners winning everything over and over again, it does sort of feel like it's kind of pointless to play. And "playing for the experience" doesn't really count for much anymore.

The problem that I see with this is when we have these huge international LANs (whether x or y event is actually happening is irrelevant currently) since there's not really a known "super team" that's known in NA that comes out of hiding to destroy everyone on LAN and just disappear once the event is over. All of the old players that were known for winning everything have either moved onto other games or simply stopped playing altogether.

These huge LANs that define the pinnacle of high level TF2 are what we end up really cherishing rather than if froyo won yet another invite season. To lose those teams that allow us to witness the best that our game has to offer is something that can't really be replaced.

Season 15 was also when the whole bitcoin mining thing happened, and that affected all games that ESEA supported afaik. The number of people playing was going to take a hit regardless of it but as you had said, changing leagues will leave many on one side of the aisle, and those left likely will just stop playing rather than wait for a better thing to come from the scraps that are currently left. It's just a lose-lose situation.

I'm not going to read this thread but this game is pretty much dead, moving somewhere else isn't going to change that.

I don't expect it to revive the game. That isn't going to happen. What i want is to stem the bleeding by making the transition from low level to high level easier and splitting the league into actual divisions again instead of one massive shitshow.

yes lets stem the bleeding by draining all of comp tf2's blood out with leeches.

doing this is just going to be TF2 shooting itself in the foot, again.

none of your points are invalid, but you're also making points based on the idea of growth in this game which is literally a pipedream and shouldn't be the focus of competitive play. The games growth is completely stagnant, and that's not caused by ESEA and moving away from ESEA is not going to help growth in the slightest. The game is 10 years old, get used to the idea that its downhill from here and to keep it quality while it lasts.

secondly, if your priority is to stem the bleeding moving to a free league with no prize pot is 100% not going to solve that. We just spent the last week running around making last minute invite teams to save the invite division because top level competition, whether you choose to accept it or not, is the lifeblood of competitive. The sooner you accept this the better off you will be and the sooner you will realize how important ESEA is to the game right now.

also in terms of

reference

I said this elsewhere but to follow up with #6, historically if that is true then ESEA is likely to keep a Team Fortress 2 division until there's at least than 20 teams. Season 1 opened up with 20 teams with just an Open division, and if they're that committed to keep it going even without an Invite division then ESEA is at least solid until 20. If they want an Invite division then it's solid until at least 24 since Season 3 ran Open + Invite at that amount of teams. Those are basically the comfortable bare minimum amount of teams the community doesn't want to cross until ESEA says an exact amount required otherwise.

e:

At current decline rates it will take ~4 seasons to hit ~24 teams and ~5 seasons to hit below 20 without Valve dropping a godlike competitive update. So another 1.3-1.6 years of ESEA as the worst case scenario.

sidular has put an insane amount of work into getting his league started.. writing it off as a "joke league" is a dick move and not true. besides, it shows a lot of potential.

Why don't we just get a fund together to fund a EUTF2L expansion so they can have something functional in place by next year? Like if we throw a tenth of the money that sid has thrown at tfcl then it should work.

Ya'll should have left ESEA a long time ago. Everyone who threatened to leave the game every time the discussion came up before all left for Overwatch a year ago anyways.

AFAIK ETF2L has zero issues with an NATF2L expansion, the issue has always been that there had to been an NA admin team willing to step up and build the whole thing from the ground up because the EU admins are not going to do it from across the ocean. So far everyone just likes to meekly bleat and point fingers at some unknown "other" person because while everyone LIKES talking about their fantasy league where everything is amazing and the admins always make the same decisions that the person with that fantasy would, nobody actually has the balls to be an admin and make the hard decisions (and when they do, they get shit on by people who are comfortable with the status quo).

alright, it's june 5th and the promises given in the forum post have yet to be realized.

i'm a leader of a tfcl highlander team, aren't there supposed to be servers allocated for scrims, like sid said in his post? if there are i certainly haven't been notified of any.

why is the first match on father's day?

where is the prize money coming from?

where the hell are schedules?

where's the team matchups?

who the fuck am I even playing on june 18th?

honestly, i'm only playing in the league so that me and some friends can maybe have a good time.

because taking it seriously would just lead to frustration and anger.

edit: yay my team folded because people a) think that TFCL is a joke and b) are dumb and can't get along with each other. good.

Didn't we already try switching leagues at a time when tf2 had a larger, growing playerbase and ESEA had just given the community a pretty good reason to ditch it? If an NATF2L happens and the switch isn't carried out absolutely perfectly with zero playerbase fracture then its 100% the death of this game in NA.

you're all idiots if you think swapping from esea to literally ANY other realistic service (including faceit) won't kill this game in NA

TF2 shooting itself in the foot is staying in ESEA and not making a better league.

No he's not making points obased on the idea of growth, tell me, are all active 6s players (pugs mixes other leagues) in NA playing in ESEA? How can you honestly claim that's the case?

Unsubstantiated claim. Do you know the amount of players who are reluctant to play in ESEA merely for the signup fee? I don't, but you seem to think those players are irrelevant, but all players maybe don't have money for the fee, maybe they are young and don't have a credit card yet or don't feel like the fee is worth it because their team is not gonna win anything anyway.

Yet more unsubstantiated claims. Yes the top division is the "lifeblood of competitive" but in ESEA you might as well just donate your money to b4nny, therefore making the prize pot less relevant than if there was harder competition (?) But yeah the sooner you accept that you should stick with the overly flawed league, the better our community will be off.

This is what I said in the previous thread:

Instead of being overly pessimistic about everything maybe you should focus your energy on either improving what you got (which is not gonna happen because there's always gonna be a signup fee barrier) or you move on, and try to mobalize people to play in a better league. Stop being an obstructionist. It seems like you are just making excuses to prevent any sort of change.

#45

The only way to achieve that goal is to do a league that has ALL of the following, day 1:

* Multiple free divisions to handle the entirety of UGC's 6s player base.

* Multiple paid divisions to handle the entirety of ESEA's player base, each with prize pools.
- This also means having people behind this trustworthy enough to give money to and actually handle a prize pool.

* Ideally teamed up with some LAN to host a LAN for the Invite-esque division.

* In-game medals to further entice the free players, along with medals for the paid players (which would look better or have special features to them e.g. paint support)
- This means you need to team up with someone in the community that is good at Workshop stuff to create these medals and communicate with Valve about it.
- Fancy cosmetic medals might also entice players into paying to look special.

* Free, good servers that can be setup and accessed quickly through a website just in case for matches.
- Means you probably gotta team up with tragicservers or serve.me or something if you want to have enough for everyone.
- Probably would still need to pay for more to handle load regardless tho.

* Website
- Website needs to have good match support, including links to STV after the fact and ideally embed the logs.tf page into the match write up.
- Ideally website can track player stats over seasons like ESEA's can.
- Website needs to have a professional layout.
- This either needs to get paid for or provided somehow.
- Is an avenue to provide sponsor advertisements and maybe get some of them on board for some light support. (maybe - somethin akin to what ETF2L had with Thermaltake but for NA)

* Great support staff.
- This means finding great admins who know their shit and won't be biased/crumble at the slightest opposition.
- Also means finding people who are cool with answering tickets and won't suck ass at it.
- This means having a great Anti Cheat team which probably means teaming up with Miggy and his bois.
- This means roping TF.TV's casting squad into casting matches and getting people to write articles for it asap.

* Word of mouth
- People need to spread it to every other 6s team on ESEA and UGC and it needs to be super well known so that people swap.

(Optional: UGC agrees to kill 6s division at the same time in the name of unification.)

If you don't have all of this you either won't grab the ESEA players or you won't grab the UGC players.

It's that "simple".

e: Which is to say, if it isn't obvious, really difficult and would require a ton of people to collaborate together and really sit down and work on it, which seems to be hard because it basically never happens in the TF2 competitive community, everyone wants to go do their own thing.

I think people need to understand the TT thing happened because former head admin Canfo worked for TT and basically provided the sponsorship on very friendly terms. When it comes to securing a real advertiser on purely commercial considerations alone a community website for TF2 is starting from a very difficult position.

Why day 1? I feel like you're just angry and think everything has to be perfect straight away, while in reality it only needs to be better than ESEA.

Why would you require payed divisions? Not many people play this games and the ones that do play it because they're passionate anyway.

You're kidding me? It would HAVE TO have a LAN? I don't see this as impossible (if you could get passionate admins), but honestly how can this be your requirement when ESEA doesn't have it anymore?

This can be done, but still why do you need a fee?

In EU we almost exclusively use serverme, there are no etf2l servers anymore. Having to get your own servers is more of a minor inconvenience.

ETF2L have the option to upload STV demos.
Why do you need imbedded logs? In eu we look at our logs, and some post them in the comments of the match page. Another minor inconvenience I guess.
ESEA website doesn't have a professional layout and it's extremely difficult for a new player to navigate.

People from the community would need to step up.

This would be difficult, but yes.

You wouldn't need all this as ESEA doesn't have all these things, and some things are just inconvenienes. Imo you should focus your attention to the biggest reasons why the ESEA playerbase is failing. From what I've heard the biggest reason is the entrance fee, but I don't know enough to claim that's the truth. With that said, I don't think the ESEA lan is the reason signups are down and I don't think not having good enough medals is the reason.

Nobody said it would be simple.

Yeah I know, I only said it could be an avenue not that it was entirely realistic because I don't think grabbing any sponsor for anything significant at this point is realistic without Valve going all in on the game.

That said, there's still stuff you could do on the website like affiliate programs to receive cuts off of competitive minded products etc that - combined with keeping a (tiny) portion of the entry fee money would be enough to cover stuff like the website and maybe even some extra servers at a discount. I know Miggy does that affiliate thing with his LAN site and it'd probably be more successful if you had the audience of UGC 6s + ESEA combined on there often.

It's been done on ETF2L for a long time, it could be done better (in terms of generating more revenue) because they have legacy design issues that restrict it but affiliation is unlikely to generate anything meaningful to the scene overall even if the entire comp TF2 player base were on a single website. It's just not a big enough scene any more.

Wouldnt it be easier to just copy literally everything etf2l has and call it natf2l? like how pugchamp has an eu website and an na website.

#48

Everything I said in that post makes it either on par with or better than ESEA / UGC. This isn't asking for perfection, it's just asking for the bare minimum.

Without a paid division (at least one) the top end will continue to go elsewhere w/o a semi relevant prize pool, also people actually do make some money off of ESEA so if you want it to be better than ESEA this is actually necessary to have competition.

UGC does not have a prizepool and basically almost all the matches are complete jokes, there's no real skill balancing, and people just fuck around because there's nothing on the line.

The situation here is a tad different from ETF2L who really (to the best of my knowledge) only ever had money in the top div. Any time there has been a 6s league in NA w/o a prize pool it's basically been a meme fest.

It's not entirely necessary but it's an ez way to be better than ESEA and entice the top end to move over, which is about the best way you could accomplish the goal you yourself stated.

edit: It's easy in so far has there's a couple people in NA that could likely be worked with to make a LAN happen, the actual hard part is finding out if enough support exists to help fund the teams to get there. If there isn't, an alternative is just directly using the top end paid division as a way to funnel the winning team over to the next insomnia LAN if those continue to be a thing where each nation meets up in.

a) Yep, however I stated this because ESEA provides the STV demo after the fact so if you want to be on par/better than ESEA you need that feature as it is actually used often.

b) Because ESEA provides embedded logs essentially on every match, so if you want to be on par/better than ESEA you need that feature as it is actually used often.

c) Agreed, so if you want to be on par/better than ESEA you need that, helps bring people over.

Basically almost every single thing I said ESEA actually has or has had. The only thing ESEA has (or once did have) that I didn't mention are the following:

* a client (hurts casual interest)

* PUGs (no one plays them anyways and just uses Faceit/pugchamp)

In fact the only things I said that ESEA doesn't really have are the free division(s) and the medals, both of which are basically necessary if you want to drag the UGC players away from UGC which would be required to have an actual unified American league like ETF2L.

e: I added a part to be more specific, also I am not angry. I'm just being realistic, I have been paying attention to competitive TF2 since before ESEA was ever a thing in North America, when the original CEVO & ESEA split happened, and the most recent CEVO & ESEA split happened. I think I have a good understanding about how you would actually kill ESEA & UGC in North America and unite everyone behind one league here, rather than just splitting it further apart than it already ios.

e2: Obviously barring just working with ETF2L on it which would be wonderful. It'd be so great to have one league site that serviced North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

Or merge it together into one site to make TF2L which has EU and NA competitions together, like UGC for that matter. It'd be better for our image in that regards since that looks like the competitive communities are altogether for this league.

Are you sure it's easier to get 8 teams when at least half of them have no chance of winning any money and have to pay for the privilege?
Are you really sure?

Unless of course you think it is paramount that everyone gets access to Open STV demos as well this seems sufficient.

Well if you think logs are essential to the game then same thing here.

waiting for a wall of text from the b4n man on how you should keep giving him mon- .. keep playing the league

#54

Part of the reason ESEA completely won the original CEVO & ESEA split on August 23rd, 2010 was because ESEA provided way better feature support than CEVO had the past few years, with stuff like easy access to STV demos on every single match page and rather complete match statistics on every single match page along with tracked stat history on every player page. These may seem unnecessary to yourself, but if you want to be better than ESEA you have to actually attempt to copy their feature set and either have those features or do something better with those than ESEA does in every aspect that people actively use, and features like that are well liked.

The North American community is pretty fickle and has gone through multiple league splits that always take way too long to resolve because no one comes in that is clearly better than the alternative right away, stuff like this is important in convincing people to swap and convincing them that the league is better.

It took more than a year for the original CEVO/ESEA split to resolve and almost a year for the 2nd one to resolve. With the continual decline across every league in NA how it is, another significant split that takes a year to resolve would just result in NA TF2's competitive death at this point, so any replacement that wants to accomplish the goal of replacing ESEA and being the uniting NA league needs to come in very strong and be very obviously better.

ETF2L should probably focus on updating their site so sponsors dont think the league is from 2012. After that I think its a great idea to branch out to NATF2L

#56
Clicking on an STV demo to download it seems about as easy as it gets, I don't think that'll be a problem.
Clicking on a link to see stats seems about as easy as it gets, I don't think that'll be a problem.

Do you really think career stats are the all important feature that NATF2L can't succeed without?

I mean, for the most part people are bringing up valid points, but on the the other hand this thread is mostly just euros saying it's time for NATF2L while people in north america are saying pls no.

Not our fault NA is stubborn.