tri ran out of fire extinguisher fuel for the servers

it's pretty insane that we pay for a service that
1. doesn't update its anticheat
2. has a scheduling system so poor that dying teams can fuck over their opponents for like 3 weeks
3. has an incredibly invasive client that not only causes weird lag on not-esea servers, but will randomly fuck over players (i've personally had 3 different players on multiple occasions be unable to join games for literally no reason, leading to reschedules and forfeits)
4. has left this stupid fucking stv bug completely unaddressed for over a year
5. literally turned their client into malware at one point, it's fucking psychotic that we treat the fact they used paying customers machines to mine bitcoin as a just a joke. what the fuck.

esea is so fucking garbage its unfathomable to me that our best players continue to use it, and i cant help but wonder if it's part of why so many top level players stop taking things seriously. remind me again why people stuck around with esea instead of moving to cevo when we had the chance?

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1061/1924/files/Money_Bag_Emoji.png?9898922749706957214

CEVO GOTVs are actually worse than ESEA, assuming tf2 was the same as CSGO, it would actually be a downgrade to the STV experience.

ESEA either works or doesnt

CEVO doesnt sync its self so the casters can be desynced to eachother and out of sync with their producer, you have to join through the client, which doesnt tell you its live until everyone joins, so sometimes you get in asap and still miss the first round or two. And cevo will also occasionally outright kick you from the gotv making you reconnect and again be desynced. And when I say desync I dont mean like.... a half second. At one point me and my co caster were off a solid 4-5 seconds from each other.

I dunno, confused casters doesn't sound like a downgrade from literally no cast. Maybe it's less frustrating from the production side, but as a viewer, being able to reliably watch the game sounds like a big win, even if it's not perfect. Not that it matters at this point anyway; that ship has sailed.

Was CEVO not offering prizes? I legitimately don't know. How hard would it have been to stick around for a season or two and convince them to let us pay into a prize pool? Not like ESEA ever offered huge amounts of money anyway. Surely it would have been worth the tradeoff of a significantly better league for the top teams not getting their prize money pittance.

At this point ESEA has been so awful I'd say even TFCL is looking like a better option right now. They offer prize money despite the low participation rate, and most of their problems (outside of their terrible website) just stem from nobody using them. Meanwhile, it's run by an active member of the community, which means it's actually capable of changing and improving over time. That's something ESEA clearly isn't willing to do. I mean, fuck, since nixing the open fees ESEA isn't even capable of reliably delivering matches for open teams anymore. There were living teams that didn't play a single game for the first three weeks of the season, and ESEA, as usual, hasn't even acknowledged that it was a problem. They look set to let the exact same shit happen again.

It's not a popular topic, but even if I'm wrong and TFCL isn't the solution, something has to be done. This shit has gone unanswered for so long, it's infuriating.

My question on TFCL is whether or not they make a profit (or make even). It's great and all if they give out cash prizes, but if it's out of their pocket, well that pocket is going to run dry eventually.

And yes while esea has its issues, it is a fairly well known competitive league that gives a certain amount of validity to Tf2 in the esports scene along with FaceIT. It is thought that these companies provide room for possible expansion and growth that community-driven projects (TFCL or PugChamp) don't provide. You could argue that Esea hasn't helped our growth which is a fair statement, but if we did have a swell in the player base it wouldn't be ridiculous for us to get lan back.

That isn't all to say that community driven projects are worthless, but they come from a place of personal drive and love for the game. This is something that I love about Tf2's community is the plethora of love present for this game in community events, groups, and scene. Eventually, though, that love runs out or it doesn't become feasible for them to offer the same service without some compensation. Sometimes there is someone to take their place, other times there aren't. I just don't think that has the same stability that a company would provide, however, I might be wrong.

More importantly, CEVO caused divisiveness and the community couldn't all transfer from one service to the other leading to two small leagues. I don't think that would change now.

CEVO (to my knowledge) did offer cash prizes, but ESEA offered more cash. As most of you know, money talks, and people tend to go where the money is. People are also naturally resistant to change, especially if there's a long standing history of what people are used to.

I'll agree that the way ESEA is set up (especially this past season in Open) has made things more difficult than usual scheduling wise, but people are going to stick with ESEA unless a clear alternative opens itself up (with TFCL being the most likely candidate). Would it be nice if something emerged that offered a better service than ESEA? Yes, but I wouldn't count on something coming out that would immediately (or even soon) that changes how people play in leagues.