no

Sounds like a pretty good idea actually, especially since most 6's teams could just get each player to chip in 2 ref if they don't have much individually,

I like it, but how would etf2l go about actually selling all of the ref? maybe convert them to keys and sell them then? not sure if ref is that easy to sell for money.

good luck getting 200x6 players to pay 2 refined, and i am not talking about it being to costly but the administration effort

I'm sure there could be some kind of trade bot put in place to signing up? So that in order to sign a team up for a div, they need to pay the ref first, not sure how this would work but just an idea

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Having every participant pay a minimum fee of 1 refined is a system that has worked very well for my ultiduo tournaments so far. I made it so that signups are allowed to pay more than the minimum amount if they wish, and I've encountered some very generous and enthusiastic players more than happy to increase the prizepool by much more than the minimum 1 refined. The signup donations literally more than doubled the initial prizepool for my latest tournament.

I could see a similar system working for ETF2L, but I wouldn't make it obligatory to pay a signup fee. Reason being that in my experience I've encountered a lot of disappointed players who were not aware of the fact that they had to submit a signup fee and never got their teams into the tournament. Consider this point my opinion as the process of adminning my tournaments is 90% manual - I don't have the ability to chase every single player and remind them to submit their donation. ETF2L do since they can send emails to their players. Another reason I would have it optional would simply to give every player, no matter how new or experienced they are to TF2, an equal opportunity to signup. Last thing you want to do with a dwindling playerbase is not allow someone to play because they just don't have a spare ref.

Bots and a working system could make adding this feature to ETF2L and maintaining it near effortless once development is finished.

Paywalls are things we have considered many times and have many times decided they are not worth the risk of losing a potentially significant portion of our player base. Your suggestion while good on papaer has a lot of issue to overcome for what is essentially not a very big prize pool for just prem.

Also as the 200€ is coming from all tiers so people might feel cheated that the money was just going to prem players. So if you split 200€ accross 4 tiers then at leat 6 players per team you get such a small prize per player that it isnt going to be motivating for anyone. Or at least not motivating enough for it to be worth our resources to either do it manually or create an automated system that does it, there are more worthwhile things for us to spend our time on.

tl;dr nice idea, takes too much work for too little gain especially once the risk of adding a paywall is added

And what about fresh meat/archimedes cup? is that going to be a thing again?

We want to do another it is just about finding a good spot in the schedule. It will probably be in 2018 though as once S28 ends it gets very close to christmas which isnt a good time due to people seeing family etc over that time period.

It could be so that ETF2L-Low players don't have to pay but dont have prizes either, and from Mid onwards its 2 ref per player going directly to prizes... i mean, even if its some silly ingame items or a few keys, a small prize is better than nothing
i think its worth experimenting in a 6s cup with this concept as snack did in ultiduo
edit: why not just put a etf2l poll and see what people think

Can we just wait till S30 and do a big promoted fundraiser like S20.

If you could administer such a system it's a good idea.

Even if all the prizes only went to Prem - and therefore kept the incentives at the top - I think it would be worth doing for sure. Open players don't really need prizes as an incentive imo as we're all keenos still.

IMO A fundraiser every season like in s20 would work really well, if you got enough money to fundraise for tiers that aren't prem you would also get more teams to signup rather than risking losing a fraction of your playerbase.

Would definitely support this idea. Even a little price might give some players extra motivation.

https://twitter.com/MidnightMick/status/908349469867040770

Better than fundraisers or paywalls imo

people that leave the game because they don't get rewarded financially won't come back / stay for 200€ more split over 4 tiers and several teams with 6 players each

anything similar to archimeded cup is always gonna benefit the scene

maybe etf2l endorsed newbie mixes could be a good idea so that everyone interested in trying out competitive will find the same initiative on the main league website, outsource the administration to reputable community members

While I agree that the fee you propose is reasonable I doubt a prize pool increase alone will make people who do not play currently suddenly want to play, unless we talk about blizzard amounts of money.

It wouldn't even make a difference to premiership players IMO. Say you add 200€ for prem winners, that's 33,3€ more per capita. It does not make the difference between playing as an amateur and living off TF2.

But the prize pool would surely only go to prem so whats the point in open teams paying for prem prizepool

do another fresh meat cup

there are newbie mixes every saturday on the etf2l discord but there are always the same people playing because noone knows about it. and those people who play arent even new so its a normal mix actually and im not really up to date if its still lead by dr happiness. there is actually no way to find out about the etf2l discord i checked their website i see no link to it there that might explain why there are never new players...

edit: i found a discord link hidden inside a news post maybe make that more visible lmao.

I don't think the metal will be a problem to be honest. If I understand the item drop system you only have to play 10 hours each week to get like 8-10 items each week. So 4-5 weeks of just playing TF2 will probably give you enough items to craft 2 refined.

I've seen streamers just delete items they got because their inventory is full, but to actually use these items in a prizepool is a pretty cool idea. It takes time to craft the refined metal, but at least the items are going to be used for something useful.

maybe admins should just approach previous sponsors if they are still interested because most of those secret names are actually still around in the scene but i guess approaching them takes too much effort #bringbacksonnyblack

We do have weekly mixes in the ETF2L discord, they arent promoted that much at the moment but they were around the time of the fresh meat cup.

We will look into shirts, however I dont know how useful they would be for making a prize pool as we would need to get them in a large enough number to be able to make it worth the time and money. Plus gauging the number of people that will actually buy one and not just say they are interested is very hard.

Our previous sponsor was not interested. Why would you think we wouldnt ask them?

i am not talking about Tt sponsoring, i am talking about the kind people that actually funded the big chunk of the price pool for multiple seasons.

I think you didnt approach most of them cuz when speaking to menty about this a couple weeks ago he told me you guys didnt.

I spent the last 10 mins crafting my drops from the last month or 2 and I now have enough metal to pay up my entire team for S29

@hiipfire https://scrap.tf/ auto weapon scrapping :^)

neat

imo paying 2 ref is a good idea cause its really not much and u can probably get just one guy from the team thats not into hats to pay for the whole team and also every little bit helps.

ETF2L can't do prize pools anymore as they haven't given out previous prizes. They also can't do fundraisers anymore because they haven't fulfilled previous donation incentives.