I don't think they are stubborn, just afraid of losing even more of the players from the comp scene.
Many of us would be willing to swap, but many of us are worried about opening the wound even more.

OR we can move to europe and all play in etf2l. I booked my flight already

ICTF2L-Intercontinental Tf2 League?

Na division, Eu Division, Au Division, Asia division, South American Division, with International Lan finals?

PogChamp

#58 I'm a bit sleep deprived so maybe I'm not making my opinion super clear, so I'll retry and hope people actually read this. I'm not angry and would genuinely like to discuss this.

1) I would really like an "NATF2L" whether that's a complete league replacement of UGC & ESEA & TFCL or an American based modified league that piggybacks off of ETF2L, or just a universal league that services every single nation group that plays competitive TF2...I don't really mind. I want to make this super clear, I have approx. 0% attachment to ESEA, I have only played there for S8 and part S16. The stuff I am saying is not all the things I need to win me over or whatever, because really I don't care about a prize pool (I mean, I've played Highlander for 15 seasons now, and I've done 6 seasons of UGC 6s and 1 season of TWL 6s) or most of that stuff personally.

2) I think it depends on what you mean by successful. As large or larger than ESEA? Not really required, no. However, I think it is something that is very doable (I mean a site just like that exists for TF2Center lobbies) that mimics an ESEA feature and would only help bring people over and ensure it's overall success. I'll admit I should have formatted the post in another way because some of that stuff doesn't create the same amount of value as other things and so they're not all literally equal, but oh well.

3) My overall worry is that North America is not Europe. The only other competitive league you guys have ever had to the best of my knowledge was ESL which was a wash out. North American 6s currently has three 6s leagues at the same time. North America has not had only one league to the best of my knowledge ever in its entire lifetime, it's always had some form of split, between both free and paid leagues, and occasionally between paid leagues and paid leagues. The community has never been united under one roof.

Collaide posted the question of what you would have to do to have the North American equivalent of ETF2L - ie everyone under one roof - and I answered that based on everything I've seen in North America's history in a complete manner. The reason I went with something complete is because - again - both CEVO & ESEA splits took so long to resolve and a free league is also directly competing with UGC for players, and with 3 leagues already existing here adding a 4th league could be very poisonous to the community's health if it isn't completely successful in killing the other 3 and merging the player base near immediately. Going off of the decline trend ESEA has - barring Valve intervention (lol) - ~1.3-1.6 years before it gets to so low of teams the entire game would likely be cut from the league, and both CEVO & ESEA splits took about a year to completely resolve.

The only way to complete the actual goal Collaide posited of making an NATF2L while minimizing the risk of destroying competitive NATF2 as we know it (by providing a 4th league that splits the 6s community even further) is to make something so complete that UGC & ESEA & TFCL unite under one roof and thus is so completely competitive to the other 3 leagues that it's obviously better than all 3 leagues right away. (or close to right away, like within the first 2 seasons)

With all your experience with NA's community & leagues I would instead ask you (or any other Euro posting instead) what you would do instead to guarantee the vast majority of all 3 of those leagues (thus killing all of them) come to this hypothetical NATF2L. It's great to just think my point is foolish or downvote or whatever, but put forth some of your own ideas based on objectively how North America has reacted to all its previous splits so we can hear your viewpoint instead on how an NATF2L is going to compete/kill UGC 6s & ESEA 6s & TFCL 6s.

Maybe because it was evening/night/morning in america

ESEA had a EU division 1 season if I remember correctly. It wasnt a success

skeez/rando/saam/lucrative's posts are all the truth unfortunately

You simply can't switch leagues in a declining scene / old game, because you're not gonna get even 75% of the teams to switch unless there is a huge incentive like LAN and/or prize money

The difference between CEVO and an natf2l league is that CEVO wasn't free. With an natf2l we may lose top players due to the lack of prize money but there will be literally no point for UGC which could create more league unity than we have ever seen in this community. For 95% of us league prize pots don't matter and league fees are just discouraging people to sign up. If we create a natf2l the 85$ self signed death ticket to b4nny will be a thing of the past and maybe invite teams will stop dying. Creating natf2l will create more unity, make it easier for newer players to rise up, we could have more divisions and stop paying for what really is just a shitty tf2 service. Or we can keep paying b4nny's mortgage and waste money on league fees until this game dies (which will be sooner with esea).

All but maybe lucrative have the incentive to say that because they will lose money if there is no prize pot. People shouldn't play this game for money lol, it's 2017 if you are still playing this game its because you still love it (that's the mindset of the rest of us).

I think the best thing for our community as a whole would be to have all of our leagues and pug services on teamfortress.tv. Having everything all in one spot would make things considerably more convenient for new players.

ppl need to stop bringing up CEVO because ESEA still had a LAN back then and the game was significantly larger

switching to ETF2L would reduce the playerbase by like 50% probably and kill the game in NA but it would be a better league than ESEA, people just dont care enough to bother to change

a plus is that ETF2L doesnt give a fuck how many teams they have unlike ESEA who has forced our community into an awful toxic mindset of playing on teams they dont enjoy playing on or playing at all just to avoid being blamed for killing the game lol

Honestly the greatest point you bring up is the prize pool/sandbagging. This is an interesting issue because people who play well and reach the top of IM don't wanna head to Invite because they don't want to face the best of Invite and lose 80 bucks for fees just to die in the first few weeks or not even be a contender for the playoffs, so they reform in Open and take away the chance for others to climb to that sweet Invite dream.

Overall, the solution I see for one of these regards is to reduce the league fees in Invite so there's less of a downfall for not being top-of-invite caliber. Invite Prize Pool is important to the top of invite, but the steep fees seek only to undermine the playerbase of Invite.

How does removing the league fees and the buggy client reduce playerbase by like 50% how do u know this will happen. In fact i think it will be the other way around since people who have resisted playing due to the league fees can now play. sandbagging wont be as big of a problem anymore since people dont have as big of a reason to do it.
The only big reason i understand would be the prizepool for the invite division.

Now my daydream:

If supposedly the Natf2l were to happen, to convince the invite players to change leagues and not quit the game we would need a decent amount of prize pool and we would need a pretty generous sponsorship to support this game.
Why cant VALVE sponsor the league?
I know this is really dumb and will never happen but its just a thought i had. Considering the fact that tf2 team wants to help competitive tf2 but dont have the resources and the manpower to fix the game for themselves they could just fund this league. I mean it is just as beneficial for them as it is for us since the game wont die as quick and mabye it will even keep it alive until they can fix their game to point where they can host lans. It will also get a lot more recognition by the casual community.

All they will need to do is add a case with content created by the competitive scene into the game where %50 of the money goes into fundraising for the league.

http://i.imgur.com/M1hGpHV.jpg?1

I don't have much to add here but why hasn't prem tried just having teams pay up and using the money they pay as prize money?

I don't know if they've tried this or not, I just think that it's probably one of the better solutions.

Screwb doesn't even know how to keep his teams from dying. What makes any of you think he knows how to keep the game from dying too?

Moving from ESEA to anywhere else at this point in time is literally a terrible idea. The NA scene would not survive it. The only thing that we can currently keep doing is trying to get newer players to make teams and stick around and pray to god that Valve (by some miracle) doesn't manage to screw the game up further.

so bottom half of prem having to pay se7en to play in the div? i mean it would just cause the same problem people have in invite, why pay $80 fee to play in a season just for "b4nny" to win it.

I guess when you say it like that yeah you're not wrong, if one team is clearly going to always win well shit why pay. But I guess I thought they all teams would want to aim and work towards that goal to take that money for themselves rather than let another team take it.

why would moving out of esea kill tf2 lol

The moment ESEA dies so does NA TF2

Having a prizepool in ESEA doesn't stop a 5-9th place team wanting to give up the second week in because they refuse to try putting in any more effort than that. I'm all down having a league that's just completely about people playing for their love for the game, people who like being competitive. People who lack those qualities and play in Invite will never be able to touch Froyotech or EVL. Most of these problems would be solved if new invite teams stop having the mindset that they won't beat certain teams.

When ESEA is done, I'd much rather go for TFCL. Sidular is putting in tons of work, and he's still constantly looking for feedback. He already spoke of a LAN, and and the league has prize money. He doesn't give top players any sort of privilege (which I think is very important). I think he should try getting more help on the site, but the amount of passion and work he put into that website makes me believe it would be very reliable when ESEA is done with TF2.

I appreciate all considerations ETF2L staff may make towards a NATF2L. As someone who has played in ETF2L multiple times, outside of some players (and HL) that ETF2L couldn't really help, I've had a great time. If you guys are looking for an extension of ESEA though, I really do believe in TFCL.

I appreciate that they've invested into our community for a long time, and that means a lot to TF2 when you consider the businesses that dangle their toes and inevitably leave. That said, we all know they don't take us seriously.

#NATF2L

Surely there could be a merger of the two with the tfcl assets being used in NATF2L and Sidular getting an admin spot. The ideal (IMO) would be that there could be an ITF2L (International TF2 League) with conferences for each region. Additionally, with a community league, it would be possible to have official finals at LAN. I'm not familiar with AU, but NA has access to 3 major lans ranging from the 2 small ones (RGB LAN, fLAN), and a major LAN (ESA). Considering the main organizers for the small lans are tf2 figures with TheFragile at RGB, Miggy at fLAN, and samiface/b4nny at ESA. I don't see a reason that we can work similar to how CEVO worked with GXL LAN. The same thing in Europe could potentially work with the DHS and DHW lans, Gamer's Assembly lans, as well as the obvious Insomnia LAN for an international Grand Finals acting as a yearly major.

Just my two cents on the issue, but the grassroots league could bring back playoff lans and with the combined assets of ETF2L, TFCL, and ESEA, as well as any other leagues like ozfortress, AsiaFortress, etc. this could be pretty great

Even though ESEA serves no purpose anymore, as it's clear the game is going nowhere, you still risk losing players by switching leagues. I'm sure there are many people who are hanging onto TF2 by a thread, and if one thing changes, they're probably done. You'd have to hope the new influx of players makes that worth it.

Saying NA players are stubborn for not wanting to leave ESEA is exceptionally closeminded. If ESEA opened by supporting EU as well as NA, and offered identical support, there would be no ETF2L and European players would be dealing with the same dilemma as you are now. You're going from a league that has been the primary league for the region for 7 years, with prestige and money, to a community-run league with no precedent or veteran support staff to work with it.

For the record, I think you should ditch ESEA, because paying money to a shady league for the 8th year in a row, without any chance of the game growing or becoming an esport, is depressing to imagine. They're continuing to collect, while never updating their rules/system to include map bans, a more flexible map list, a more varied map pool that doesn't repeat itself every week, a DM plugin for pregame, etc. It's just much harder than you probably think, and it's a unique situation compared to ETF2L, considering ETF2L has been the primary league for that region for a very long time, and ESEA was never a real alternative for them, as they proved they didn't have the ability to support both regions when they last tried to support EU.

Agreeing with Clockwork that we have to work towards our optimal future, but playing devil's advocate, there's a ton of work to be done to spin up another league and there's a lot that people who play in ESEA take for granted. ESEA has created the infrastructure for NA to play online tournaments reliably for years, and while they're not actively trying to grow the pie, they are helping to keep us alive.

Side note, it annoys me that a lot of the people who are pushing to leave ESEA are Europeans. If NA makes the jump and fails, ETF2L will still be around. Sure the global scene shrinks but NA players are risking literally having nowhere to play cause lol UGC, so the new league better be rock solid. For those of you guys who are saying "someone" will step up and run the league, look around. It takes a lot of volunteer man hours to execute whether it's organizing the league, the prize pools, the live match-night support, etc. In order to make a league happen, someone has to decide not to play that season and spend their free time making sure you have an enjoyable experience.

I've also looked into running a league myself, and even the payouts are kind of a bitch. If you want to do it right, you have to collect tax forms and stuff, plus there's website maintenance and anti-cheat concerns... Sure ESEA has never caught anyone but I wasn't convinced I had the technical know-how to catch anyone either.

To many people it's just easier to pay the $30 each season to save themselves the grief of doing it themselves. $10 a month isn't even a bad deal, and we all know that ESEA only has the infrastructure to support this because they're utilizing the existing CS:GO infrastructure and their owner likes the TF2 community.

sigafoo 7v7 is the only way tbh

u guys realize that esea winnings make up like 10% of bannys income at most right

totally agree with the point in OP post. the best shot tf2 has at this point as far as surviving and "growth" (lol) would be a solid free league. unfortunately it would probably just turn into another UGC.

lets be honest, most of us here that post on tftv look at other tf2 players like outsiders. even people who play tf2center, we think they are 'cancer' or just too nooby. (of course there are people here trying to bridge the gap, im all for bringing in more players, but you cannot deny that too many people on our side of comp regard other tf2 players as casuals, bots, w/e).

going with what i said above in #87, if we wanted to focus on sustaining our community and keeping traditional comp tf2 alive, we would be better off looking into founding a new free league. i imagine something small, maybe designed specifically for tf.tv (Team Fortress TV Cup, for example) would suffice, however, we would have to keep in mind that the playerpool and quantity of teams would diminish. it would be an "in-house" thing, but, given the circumstances of the current comp TF2 scene, it might be beneficial to throw something like a "TFTV Tournament" together. at the very least, its free.

ESEA isn't going to grow and UGC 6's isn't going to grow. If ESEA players moved to a free 6's league, presumably UGC 6's players and new players would join that free league instead of UGC.

It seems to me that combining the two groups of players would be a good thing, as it would allow us to have three or four skill divisions again. We'd definitely lose some ESEA players, but we'd overall have a larger group of players that could let NA tf2 live a bit longer.

I've wanted to start playing ESEA and start playing on a serious team, but I've either not had enough money or time when the open season begins. i think having a free league that is better than ugc would be perfect for lower level players that aren't ready to dedicate all the money and time that's required for playing in ESEA right now.