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Video does a great job of highlighting the community effort, but focuses a lot on criticizing Valve for no support.

For a lot of people who donated money to the early I-series, myself included the main incentive was just to see great TF2 events we had to make happen ourselves, I certainly was never expecting Financial backing from Valve and I know some people hoped to see it but realistically people knew what they were paying their money for.

Still a great video, brings back a lot of memories but the slating Valve rhetoric for years for not financially backing the game is tiresome to me, most people figured out years ago there won't be financial and the money they are making tells me they didn't make a mistake in their decision, just they didn't do what we had hoped for in the community, can be a bitter pill to swallow but the community made this game great, not Valve, except Medals were huge bringing people into the competitive community, I still remember the 900 team Highlander tournament like it was yesterday.

Also disagree this game would ever been a Tier 1 eSport, wish well thinking but it does capture that there was something lost in this game without their backing. If anything Valve development support has been the biggest let down, even playing an ETF2L match other week a while after playing my last match and seeing they hadn't fixed the ubercharge bug just sums it all up to me. Won't even go into Matchmaking and decimating Community Servers.

It's always been the community who made this game, if it's actively engaged and able to replace it's best contributors then there will always be a good scene, if it can't replace them it will slowly fade - Only lesson I learn from this is the younger players who just played and watched TF2 should look to step their involvement up to keep the scene going because so many names have dropped off, nobody is going to replace them unless you step up.

Still, a great nostalgic video.

Thing is with this is that if Valve does put money into tournaments as they do for their other games it would be a huge waste of money. The problem is that the ranked matchmaking was a huge failure, tf2center which is supposed to be the hub for newer players gets around 200 players which for a competitive game is fuck all and Insomnia that is the main event gets barely any viewers and in other games, insomnia is seen as a low tier competition.

So with no interest in the game if they were to put the money in that would be a huge waste. Most international lans like for Dota and CS take into consideration how many people will be watching the event and the amount of advertisement and merchandise will be sold so that the prize pool and venue will still be profitable for Valve. If there is no initial interest in competitive TF2 putting that amount of money into their game is just stupid.

As much as I love TF2 and want to see the game thrive, Valve have done as much as they can to try and make it work but the fact remains that TF2 competitive is way too small of a community to make a full competitive scene out of.

In regards to the video, though compared to Doomsday's old videos and his somewhat recent Twitter posts, this is actually a really good discussion piece which is well produced.

Was it a failure because it was done badly or because noone showed interest? I mean, even the existing comp community won't play it because of obvious reasons.

tf2center is definitely not a "perfect" hub for newer players at all. it containes many internal failures and even if you would measure it by player count you're way too late. There were far more players a few years ago (which was more the time valve should have took action)

For a rather casual game which came out over a decade ago to get more than 10k viewers for a main event is not bad at all. It's pretty much impressive tbh.

Not being a Tier 1 esport doesn't equal being no esport at all. Nobody wants TF2 to be the biggest esport there is, most of us really only want to be recognized. No matter if it's a Tier 2 or 3 or 4 esport, there has to be some support from somewhere.

In 2017 (literally a decade after it's release) TF2 was still in the silver tier of the top games as measured by gross revenue of the year on the whole steam platform. This game is far from being dead, there was even a really bad competetive mode added. Valve's organisation and management in just fucking unaware of anything that's happening.

What have they ever done besides adding medals, writing some budget blog posts and adding a fucking broken comp mode (which was basically made in a hurry to prevent people to switch to overwatch)? Valve is no fuckin newborn Indie-studio, it's one of the most famous game developers out there. For a game which generates so much money you should be able to expect more than this.

We managed to have a somewhat healthy and even intercontinental competetive scene for a decade now anyways. Imagine what we could have done with some support

Btw, I also think this video is well made and it gives a lot of insight, especially to people rather new to comp or those, who were there from the start and want to relive the nostalia. Well done Mr. Doomsday!

It's no secret that TF.TV and I don't have the best relationship, and I was very scared when Jimmee sent me this message (I assumed he was being sarcastic). But I'm glad you enjoyed the video!

https://i.imgur.com/Kj1rHcs_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

It was a strange feeling being involed in the early matchmaking beta. At first, Valve seemed to be working based on the feedback that was given by the beta-players (mostly top-level players) by listening through players' streams, but as time went on there were less and less updates to the system, even though it had some pretty big structural flaws. Suddenly, the matchmaking system was released to the public, without any big improvements to the system. I suspect this release was done because players gradually stopped beta-testing. But on the other hand the beta-testing had already been done and people were waiting for the feedback to be implemented. Of course, having no direct communication between the players and the developers makes this a lot harder to communicate.

One of the reasons why matchmaking failed is because it restricted a lot of settings and forced players on higher quality settings. It was theorised back then that having players stream on higher quality settings would make competitive TF2 more watchable, and bring in more viewers. But on the other hand, playing TF2 with high settings causes a lot of FPS issues on older hardware, and generally having the game look nicer can negatively affect gameplay. So there are pros and cons to this, but it seems that a lot of players weren't willing to migrate to matchmaking and this was one of the reasons.

Another reason was the ruleset. Valve did not like any of the competitive rulesets, so they had their own version, simply a best of three on 5cp maps. I have no idea why this ruleset was implemented, it doesn't seem like removing the timer would solve stalemates (assuming they would even happen that much in a matchmaking environment), but it also made games either really short or really long. A game could be 3 minutes or 40 minutes long with that ruleset. Also, since most of the playerbase was already playing their own ruleset, playing matchmaking with a completely different ruleset and no whitelist was simply not worth it because of how different it was.

Soon after the release of matchmaking, it was apparently riddled with cheaters. TF2 didn't have the overwatch tool that CS:GO had to weed out the most blatant hackers. So these people could cheat mostly without consequences, which obviously completely destroys people's experiences. I think this was the biggest factor why it flawed even with the public players who didn't previously play competitively.

It's not a pretty story. It shows how difficult it really is to create a matchmaking system, especially in the environment TF2 had. I think matchmaking could have been successful in TF2, but I think it would have required more open-mindedness and communication from Valve in the early phases in beta testing. I don't want to be overly critical of Valve because the situation was difficult to begin with, so I guess my attitude is, "at least they tried".

Apologies if I got some things wrong, this was three years ago so I don't remember things exactly how they were.

Thank you for putting my grumpy cynicism into calm eloquent words. The game attracted emotional investment and seeing it be mishandled with such uncaring negligence does bring a little bit of pain - a pain that deserves to be spoken of.

As for Meat-Your-Match:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/da/31/9f/da319fed689edb53ced39dcce7c995f6.jpg

The closest analogy I can think of to Valve "trying" to add competitive to TF2 is some fat slob sitting on a couch "trying" to stretch his hand all the way to the fridge without actually moving his body, failing, and then falling asleep. Their shitty system still hasn't given me a single game over months of queuing, even during peak hours.

It's more of an internal justification to not be pissed at Valve for the rest of my life than anything else.

when ur a multi billion dollar company that doesn't do anything except generate passive income epic style.

i thought it was about some sd_doomsday comp gameplay