lft

Is there a limit on how many teams have to sign up for people to play like the NA one, or would people play anyway just without a prize pool?

It will be 16 teams minimum to run the monthly. This has been the same for all our monthlies so far and going forward.

yo nerds cup is tommorow go sign up?

lft fr fr get me tf in

5 teams? Really? Are both the NA and the EU monthlies gonna die together? Why tho?

more teams will sign up eventually, i know that svift and us will at least

lft

My team can't play cause our calling man is casting

I can merc any class high+

lft!

Just make mix teams guys its not hard. Ive done my part cya tomorrow

bump to remind people to sign up

we signed up, 7 more teams please (:

trying to put together another pug team. anyone still lft, add me

i can't because there's gay pride today

lft medic add me anyteam im very good :o

We're currently 4 teams short of making this cup happen. If you missed it, the new place to sign up is https://essentials.tf/tournaments

Assuming De Danske and tamam are still going to sign up, that means only 1 team left

literally just got 6, heres hoping i get in before signups close

if any of u euros wanna sub for team freedom hmu fam

i count 16 teams on the page :O

so is this thing happening or

you need to check in on discord

I have to start off by saying how much I'm thankful for everything WolfMachina and the other staff at Essentials are doing for the scene right now. I think the fact we aren't consistently and easily getting 16 teams for these monthlies is indicative of how this community goes beyond looking every gift horse it has ever received in the mouth. It's more like we fucking cut out our eyes and shove them down the horse's mouth.

Unfortunately, while I could write paragraphs about how frustrated I am with the community, that's not what I'm here to rant about. From the perspective of a team captain, this weekend's European cup was a god damn disaster. The only saving grace was that it didn't actually die like the NA cup did earlier this month, and I haven't seen it acknowledged in any capacity just how much of a failure it was.

From the top: these monthlies have next to zero advertisement. Do you guys make any attempt to find other players to play your cups? Like, maybe make a Reddit post or something? The only place I see these cups advertised is on a TFTV thread that isn't even stickied, so I feel obligated to come up with some bullshit to post and bump it for visibility. I don't know exactly what's going on behind the scenes there, but it would surprise me to learn that TFTV isn't willing to help out. I'm more inclined to believe that Essentials staff simply haven't reached out.

Player feedback. You guys are clearly making an attempt to iterate on your tournament format month by month, but besides general response forum posts, where are you getting the data upon which to make those decisions? I've never seen any specific requests for feedback. Especially with numbers dwindling the way they have been, don't you think it'd be important to try to find out exactly what's going on? Maybe ask what days would be most convenient for players, or if your whitelist is driving people off, or if people are just taken with happenstance, like needing to take exams or something? Speaking of the whitelist, have you actually gathered any data whatsoever on how often those unbanned weapons are useful? Have you watched demos of them being used, or maybe just looked at the logs? Because near as I can tell, you haven't asked any players how they felt about the weapons being used. Even the cow mangler, which was unbanned and tested less than 5 seasons ago and found to be frustrating to play against, continues to be unbanned in your cup, and to what end?

That leads pretty well into my issues with communication. Maybe you have done all this stuff. Maybe you have been advertising heavily on some other platform, maybe you have been asking for feedback on your Facebook page or some shit, but it hasn't been here. As someone who exclusively uses TFTV (and very, very occasionally Reddit) when it comes to TF2 related stuff, I have seen nothing on those fronts. But your communication issues don't stop there: the greatest failing actually happened this weekend, during the tournament itself. I've no idea if anyone outside the teams that played this weekend are aware, but the Essentials website broke after round 1 and teams had to sit through an hour of doing nothing while waiting for the Essentials staff to try to fix it, fail, and eventually just recreate the entire cup on Toornament. No ETAs on the next round. No clear communication on what exactly had broken. Actually, there was literally nothing for about half an hour, not until players started spamming the monthly chat in discord out of boredom. Me and my players just sat in mumble, playing around, expecting another match any moment, that entire time. No moderation on the monthly chat, forcing me to go back and scan through a ridiculous amount of spam in order to find out what was happening. Mods themselves contributing to some of the spam. And even once Toornament was up and running, I had to go back to the Essentials site to find out who was on the other team in order to get the match set up! My team came within an inch dying right then and there. And while I managed to keep everyone together through 3 more rounds, by the end of the day, we did die, along with about half of the other teams that had signed up to play. It's hard to blame any of those players for quitting after the unmitigated shitshow that was the start of the day.

I dunno. I've no doubt running this shit is hard. And, thank god, after the first 2 rounds the rest of the tournament seemed to go by relatively painlessly. But this shit needs to be addressed, because I really want to see more of these cups in the future.

Just to quickly clarify the tftv stuff: We are willing help EssentialsTF with promotion on the tftv site itself when prompted, that they also have all the components ready to facilitate said promotion (i.e. dates, graphics, info for articles, events) and follow rules and guidelines we have.

The June monthly events were requested at Friday 15th at 22:02CEST and posted the following morning.

Hi, I will be making a long post about these concerns and others soon. But rest assured, your complaints are heard and will be addressed. Thanks for spending the time to air your thoughts about this.

This is the recap of the Statement, full statement can be found here

In summary:

• NA Monthly was canceled due to low signups and we were not willing to host a smaller tournament with no prize pool.
  
• EU Monthly was a perfect storm of issues, confusion and inexperience with the system coupled with trouble converting to Toornament led to a bad experience. There will be a review into what happened to ensure this does not happen again.
  
• Promotion will now be done by our Social Media team, outside of a few exceptions.
  
• All player feedback is considered, but both Players and EssentialsTF will have to put in the effort. Feedback from all players will at least be considered, but not necessarily implemented. A full description/reasoning text on Whitelist may be written if interest is there.
  
• All communications with EssentialsTF is done through the Discord, although more specific channels may be added to encourage discussions.

Again, we wish to apologize to those who had a bad experience with this whole debacle and us as an organization promise to continue to improve to ensure that any experiences that you have with us are positive in the future. We will do better.