We've been working towards it last 7 years mate. Turns out naive dreams like yours don't work well in reality. Sorry, but "when that era will come depends entirely on the top level player base and their attitude towards the game" is the biggest load of bullshit I've ever heard. The only things that will ACTUALLY grow tf2 are outside our reach and power, sorry.

EDIT: I'm getting downfragged but you nerds know its true, we've had one of the best if not the best community in the world of gaming for YEARS and guess what, we're still where we are

why are you still posting

Contributing a lot to the discussion man :)

Like, we have high lever players spending their own free time organising games to teach new players, we fund entire teams by ourselves to go to lans, we organize everything, streaming matches, a professional tier casting despite pulling nowhere near the numbers and money other games do, we even consult valve on what to do WITH THEIR OWN GAME because they don't really seem so smart. Our community is godlike, and I actually think we literally could not have done anything better. We gave our best.

=[ ]

By "we" I mean the community's interest in streamers, pugs and increasing exposure. We did a great job of it during i58 season

We can work as hard as we want but the simple fact remains tf2 is considered a joke by the wider gaming community and competitive is by extension.

You can produce the greatest quality streams but that doesn't make an ounce of difference when average Joe sees the tf2 finals with couple thousand viewers and just thinks, wow people play that hat game competitively? ROFL.

Even most tf2 players think comp is a joke. And actually it doesn't matter at all how professionally our top players act because they have no following. My mate in tier 8 csgo has more fans than bottom prem players to be honest.

I'm not saying don't put work in, but do it for the love of the game because if you're only there to hope it'll be a huge game one day, you're going to be disappointed in almost every timeline.

yes grow tf2 but block ads on tf.tv fuck this site

Who fucking cares lets just play what we love and enjoy it for fucks sake.

As somebody who got into competitive fairly recently, imo you have to improve the systems for getting pubbers into competitive. As good a job as all the people running leagues do, it's very tricky for the following reasons:

1) Pubbers don't know about competitive
2) If they do, they have to do a solid amount of research to know to go to etf2l (for example) on the the website, make a profile, do a rec post, or make a team, and that's a lot of effort for (likely too much for currently casual players). It seems straightforward but to somebody who is new, it's fairly time consuming and you're uncertain about each step.
3) They're likely terrible and have no experience, so a lot of teams won't want to pick them up and they won't even get a good impression of comp.

Imo that's why the fresh meat general concept was brilliant. Whatever form it takes (be it a league or just a guidance section of the website), I think there should be some kind of system putting together fresh meat teams or new players, and every team should be allocated a buddy who is experienced and can help.

tl;dr
- You need to improve pubbers' awareness that comp exists and how good it is
- You need to improve the systems for getting players who are interested in comp into teams and playing

It's incredibly difficult but there is room for improvement and it is possible.I know a lot of players who have just got into comp.. I'm talking about what we can do. Obviously Valve could do a lot more.

tbh, while getting more people into the tf2 scene is a great initiative, the real problem with tf2 is that there's a lack of money/sponsors within the scene.

Getting more people into the game isn't going to do much when there's barely anybody who's willing to chase around sponsors, because sponsors aren't going to suddenly emerge when more people get into the game. While one of the reasons that there's a lack of sponsors in tf2 is obviously from the fact it's perceived as a small community, it's also because it seems that people have trouble giving up a bit of pride when it comes to putting themselves out there to small grass-roots sponsors as opposed to trying to make it big immediately by landing one massive sponsor/org, this coming from both the players and community organizers. I do understand that it might feel kinda useless with NA Invite having all these "random" orgs sponsoring teams but it's a great stepping stone towards getting more big orgs interested in the scene when they see that there's other people out there willing to take the jump into supporting the tf2 scene.

Not to shit all over stuff like Newbie mixes, the Fresh Meat Cups and other projects like that, because if it wasn't for the people organizing those groups and events we probably wouldn't have even been able to exist as a scene for as long as we have.

literally nothing matters until valve isnt retarded and god bless the people who put in the work to keep the scene alive without that happening

lmao no

In terms of having an an actual scene where you could dedicate more than 2-3 hours a day and have it be remotely worth it, yes

By the way, if you come from pubs, did you play them with valve's system or were you a regular on some community servers? I'm out of the loop and don't know if these are still a thing in 2017

I disagree, that's exactly what sponsors do. If there is players, there is viewers and audience and therefore money. But obviously, we're talking numbers much much bigger than TF2 ever achieved. To attract money the game would have to have weekly streams followed by like 10 000 people at least (roughly what SC2 draws at the moment for example, and it's a dying game economically)

You do realize that the only reason valve jumped so hard on supporting on dota 2 and csgo was because of the big grassroots scene(and then relatively big tournament organizers jumping on that before them) that it had previously right?

Like we don't need valve at all, obviously it would be great to get dev support into the game, but it's not the only route that the scene could take to becoming "big"

Tbh I was quickplay scum. I only really played that.

I'm not quite sure how I even found out about comp. Probably from watching various youtube vids and just randomly coming across comp vids.

Money doesn't magically appear at 10000 viewers, we can get more money into the game right now, just not the 100k major people are hoping, instead we need to gradually work up to that goal while working with other small orgs.

Something really understated in TF2 is that the lack of money causes TF2 to have really poor player retention, the reason why the scene has managed to stay alive for so long is that we somehow were able to keep getting new players while also constantly losing old players. I personally feel like one of the problems is that many TF2 players even in the lower divs have issues justifying the time they put into it due to the lack of money in scene, so I think that while trying to grow the scene/keep it alive is important, we need to not sit on our asses just hoping for sponsors to come knocking on our door.

ohh yeah I forgot to shoutout Jarlow who I forgot to mention earlier who's been awesome to get more orgs into NA TF2.

The biggest things stopping people from getting into the comp side of tf2 are (i) a lack of (watched) streams to stumble upon and (ii) that the game lacks an easy to play comp mode (the closest atm have got to be TF2center, and playing via an external website etc is too much hassle for lots of people).

my friend tf2 is a shrinking game, it pulls less players now than it ever has before, competitive is experiencing no growth since years and years. We've lost like 30% of our users in the last 2 years or so and competitive signups in europe are on a downward trend since 2011.
There is nothing you can do to make sponsors arrive for a 10 year old game that's losing players - put yourself in the shoes of a serious company with actual capital, you hear a pitch like that you're not gonna go in on that, that's like buying a business that loses money.

once you start growing the game again you can have a discussion on whether it's possible to grow competitive. That's in valves hands. Once you're growing competitively, you can have have a discussion about meaningful sponsorship, until then you're just living in a pipedream. Nobody would invest any money in a game which doesn't project any growth.

Except that CS and Dota weren't advertised and balanced to fuck and back worldwide as "wacky casual hat simulator shooters" by Valve. It likely wasn't as hard for their grassroots communities to take off because there was no negative stigma attached to the game and no major difference between the competitive and pub modes.

TF2 is not like this. It's been advertised and balanced around casual play for the last decade, and it definitely shows in the playerbase when people are more likely to vote up a "rate my pyro cosmetics loadout" thread on reddit than a sick med drop clip from an i61 match. It's going to be infinitely harder to do anything on our own especially with the game's ever dwindling numbers with each fuckup valve seems to make on a per update basis and the fact that the only people still playing the game are casual players who have no incentive towards supporting competitive because "they're all tryhards".

I'm just gonna throw this idea in the mix: don't spend your time in TF2 with the preconceived notion that its dead or that it will turn into something big - just make the most of your time.

If you really care about the game, you should be willing to spend what time you can in it to make it somewhat better, and if you just wanna play a video game, just enjoy it. It shouldn't matter what role you play in the community, just pursue your interests to the best of your ability. Time obviously plays a factor, and I don't recommend sacrificing massive amounts of your time to better TF2, but if you are one of the many that spends a lot of hours in this game regardless, why not try and make something of it?

If you are a low level player who plays 30 hours a week anyway, maybe its time you try a bit harder to improve and put a bit more thought into your development. If you're getting into something like streaming or casting, try looking for feedback and working on your weaknesses rather than enforcing your bad habits. Even if you've already made it to a high level of play, don't get complacent and jerk yourself off about the tiny amount of fame or respect you've gotten - just keep getting better or try to help others do so (do you really wanna inflate your ego for 20+ hours a week just by beating worse players in mge/pugs? Is that really the best use of your time?).

I'm being a bit harsh but there's so many people that waste so much time in this game with minimal effort and minimal return, and its just dumb to see that that is the response to the few people in this community that put in ridiculous amounts of effort and time. I don't expect TF2 to be around forever and I'm not gonna make it the center of my life by any means, but I want to be able to look back on my time with the community and say that it was time well spent. Maybe it goes somewhere but I don't really care if it doesn't. I know I've developed as a person and built good relations on the way - and that is way more finite than any promises that you, me or Valve could make at this stage.

edit: hey man, you're being productive by making a podcast so keep doing what you're doing

Refer back to my post about player retention

Also, just because signups go down it doesnt mean that sponsors aren't interested, if people would never even consider sponsoring tf2, how did essentials get all those sponsors for i61 then? How could essentials be organizing a LAN with that swedish esportsarena? How do NA teams continue to find sponsors?

https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/6z235b/thought_id_draw_myself_as_my_medic_im_pretty/

this game has been out 10 years and the biggest factors stopping it from being competitive are still valves fault, while the community has tried harder than any other and launched so many initiatives and projects to try and gain players. its been 10 years and we still have to

1) ban weapons because someone thinks its a good idea for the sentry to get triple health or scout to go invincible with ignorable/no downsides
2) mutilate our games graphics to even get them to run at a standard framerate
3) use third party sites to get an experience remotely near to "competitive"

if you think these are problems that dont require valve to fix them idk what to tell u

Which ones did they get?

watch a i61 vod

I know that there were sponsors. What I mean is that the headline sponsor is arranged by Multiplay, so did the other sponsors come through that channel as well or did essentials acquire them independently?

If they did acquire them independently, are they "true" sponsorships with ROI considerations and performance expectations or are they essentially private donations channelled through a route convenient to a wealthier community member (this would not be a new thing if it were)?

I'm not expecting essentials to spill the beans on their financials, and I'm not trying to piss on anybody's chips, but if you're going to cite them as evidence of commercial interest then knowing where they came from and why they have shown up is important.

On the subject of the Swedish lan funding, Heny is open that it's funded by government grants. One of the unfortunate aspects of this is that TF2's volunteer operational basis is a big part of getting funded, so if there were ever an opportunity to do things on a more professional level then this specific funding would probably drop away. Whether Heny would be able to work his magic on an alternative in that case I don't know, but as it stands that's a Catch 22 to growth.