this @ funhaver

Well you know, Overwatch, Dota 2, CSGO, Valorant, PUBG, Apex Legends and literally any other esports with developer backing is where the players and viewers moved.

The numbers for TF2 have been getting back up with everyone being stuck inside thanks to covid (if they're not out rioting) , but that still doesn't mean valve cares for the competitive community, with the last major update to the game dating October 2017!

u dont know who is casting "except maybe beater" so u clearly dont watch and cant have an opinion on current casters

best team in Eu disbanded so now theres gonna be a new best team, no one knows who it is which is kinda the point of the season, u will know who is best at the end of it. how is it "embarrassing" for the winner to be unknown looool

there still are rivalries
there still are playstyles

tf2 has always had low viewers and no lan support lol valve arent picking and choosing when to start a major based on which prem teams are playing

and yes talking to ppl at i65 everyone still tries their hardest for it. those events are the biggest and obviously all the top teams really care about winning them (except froyo lan dodgers)

i think its the other way around tho like i don't think fortnite would have the competitive and financial system it has now if it wasn't for that viewcount/impact where u see real life people on the street wearing it.

our twitch numbers and percieved interest/hype is the only way to justify them spending time on developing it further

i was saying it was embarrassing for the best team to have 2 americans on the main roster

im saying idk who it is other than dumtum i said i dont even know if beater does it anymore. iv ony seen this guy cast by himself or some anonymous british voice that doesnt know what theyre talking about

it never had 100 viewers low level viewers thats at least like a 10x drop from when i was watching. u want to see it go up, not drastically down. no reason to spend time developing a game that is dying and not improving

but its whatever this tangent is useless

the main point is, are u content with how things are going right now or do u wanna continue whati s already happening, which im always gonna be of the opinion that its shit and nothing compared to what it used to be and ur gonna think its the same thing

is it ever gonna get better is the main question? well i guess what i think your response to that is gonna be is 'noo we didnt get valve support T_T we cannot do anything without them' so theres no real use in me even asking that

???
if we were gonna have a valve major (lol) yea theyd want to see numbers to back up that investment but otherwise not true at all, the next insomnia/cph/potential NA lans are still going to be developed the same amount and have a good bit of hype and excitement leading up to them regardless of your complaint of low viewership for prem games (maybe if u want to fix that u should go watch and tell ur friends to watch instead of talking out of ur ass about how down things have gone despite not even watching)

edit: also how is it embarrassing to have 2 na people on a top roster the same thing was about to happen this season with toemas but the team died, nobody said that was embarrassing cuz toemas is sick (also given the #1 team disbanded it makes perfect sense that the lack of players would lead to new talent that you aren't familiar with or wouldn't expect like na scouts)

i think there should always be scouts in your own reigon that are better picks than having 100 ping ones. not saying those 2 are bad. also defeats the whole EU vs NA thing.

toemas was gonna join froyo?

i mean i explained why i didnt watch the main casted prem games anymore and tried to think of a reason as to why others don't as well when i was saying that most people nowadays would rather watch the actual player streaming their match rather than the official stream, making it kinda useless.

if the viewers rose rather than declined, which it had a considerable potential to do given how popular tf2 gamers gained clout over the past coming years, as in you're no longer mocked for being a top tf2 player like u were before cause of OW and all the other games that tf2 players are now involved in, then i think there would've been some support or at the very least they wouldnt have a reason not to like they do now

nd btw i think that potential still exists. someone linked me that there was this fortnite player trying to get good at fortnite by playing tf2 mge as a kind of kovaaks.

a lot of us tf2 players went to QL for a similar reason but only as a mini practice game - a good proportion of people in that 125fps cup twitch chat were in fact tf2 players and from playing quake today the decent players ive played against were tf2 players like Snapaction. this could and should be replicated on a bigger scale

we should figure out what made the past years so special what made it so good to watch and maybe try to re-create it,and try to find out where it all went wrong so we can maybe go back? also funhaver has a point with the casters only one memorable caster is left and that's TurboTabs everyone else is just a voice not even good ones.

i was just thinking about all the abuse TurboTabs and Getawhale received whilst casting but they would be god-tier casters in today's world and its messed up how much they got made fun of. esp Getawhale who had actual talent and was a highlight for that LAN he was doing with War. that was actually funny

id watch a TurboTabs casted game regardless of wat was on the screen at this rate

but yeah regardless its stupid to just pin the blame on valve and act like we couldn't do anything/can't do anything now obviously but if most people think its just valve then idk banny should just go back to school then. the whole banny situation is an absolute mystery to me, which again yeah, is none of my concern, but its interesting to me

TL;DR: ETF are committed to making another international LAN, but COVID has made that a bit difficult.

Hi all, just thought that this thread would be a good opportunity to make some clarifications regarding at least some of EssentialsTF's plans for approaching LANs in the future. Unfortunately most of what we laid out for the year has been suspended because of the ongoing pandemic. We'll make official announcements when we can.

As many of you will know, the main thing ETF is known for is iSeries which we have always pushed to be an international event. At i65 we had the opportunity to bring Ascent.NA over to compete, although other teams were contacted who either declined or didn't respond. For future events we were more than interested to bring not only teams but also talent over from regions not only in NA/EU but from our friends in Australia and even Asia. In addition, we're interested in having a more global impact outside of purely European competition, both online and otherwise.

So in response to the original question, we are at least committed to having another international LAN and I know our friends in other orgs like TFTV and Phoenix Red are also. Obviously it would be nice if the community itself helped out to support that, but nevertheless we will at least try.

Now to address some points:

• Developer support at this stage in the game is unreasonable, its best if we focus on improving for our own internal benefit; not to appease someone who isn't interested.
  
• I think that people are looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, and that will get us nowhere
  
• As much as we would like to give more notice for iSeries, it is simply impossible since planning for the Summer series only happens after the Spring event which happens at the same time as CPG, to give you an idea.
  
• Numbers going down is expected as a game's lifetime progresses, especially one that does not maintain relevance within a modern gaming market. There is consistent decrease in viewership even in Casual streamers and content creators, its just more prevalent in competitive due to the already smaller audience.
  
• Every popular caster who ever moved on from the game had to start from some degree of inexperience and irrelevance. Support your Casters (& Producers)

EDIT: Formatting

Is anyone else beginning to read funhaver's posts and then kind of losing track of what he is talking about because he is not using punctuation marks I mean it is really annoying and I cannot understand how someone can write like this it drives me absolutely crazy

People don't like it when I do, people don't like it when I don't.

Maybe people just don't like you.

yeah i know they don't. originally i thought it would be a good idea to just not post in it and wait until the top invite people i wanted to respond did, give me the info i wanted and thats it. it was bad to give my own opinions on things but people got offended by something i didnt even mean to offend ppl with

funhaver is brilliant he has an idea of what so say but he just can't express himself

The. Thread. Is. Not. About. Me. Its. About. The. Facking. Game.

If you think intercontinental competition isn't still hot and ready in modern era TF2 you clearly did not watch the utter back and forth between Ascent, Ascent.EU, and Se7en at i65. I know I'm a little biased because of how exciting going to Europe was as an American in general, but I heard feedback from so many people at the event that it was one of the best iSeries events in a long time, competing right up there with past events and certainly ETF's best since TFTV were the iSeries TF2 organizers. BTS was a fantastic opportunity to take that one step further and I think it's safe to assume that it was beyond the majority of the community's control (outside of 3 people who are no longer associated with this game's organizing scene) as to why that event was actually cancelled. If it weren't for the pandemic I know that global TF2 would be a much different discussion than it is right now.

i65 was OK BUT i63 was NUTS it had a very old school energy it was honestly amazing one of the best lans that we had in tf2 on the level of i52 i55 i58 etc

my current opinion is formed from the fact that i61-65 were the only iseries that i was bored out of my brains watching and i watched hte whole thing just like i do the normal ones just expecting to have that same feeling as the ones before it

but it. does. not. matter.

the whole idea of this was just to see some sort of talk of this between banny and whoever the top euro team leader is ino rder to come up with some agreement as to where the lan is and when it will be all of that shit

This will never happen. b4nny has made it more than clear that going forward he will only be supporting Invite LANs which narrows the current LANs he will attend next year to only RGL which wouldn't, to my knowledge, allow european competition as that is a playoffs for the RGL season. This idea of THE LAN is not a good idea when the community doesn't even know if and when there will be a next one.

what. the. fuck.
do u think the team leaders are the people who organise lans LOL

its not that hard to understand just read what drhappiness just said

its about where he wants to go otherwise all the people who organise the events, the production and all of that don't matter obviously if theres no players willing to go

theres a stalemate and no ones talking about it

I'm gonna stop after this otherwise I will keep going, but there isn't really a stalemate. If froyo don't want to go we'll just find someone else. It doesn't effect us all too much, and whilst it would be nice to have the best teams from each region attend, sometimes this just isn't the case.

I don't wish to waste time on a team who will only attend if a specific set of demands are met when there are teams that are far more keen, but need support to come over. Ascent was a great example of this. The event always takes priority, the teams attending are a bonus. Obviously the sign-ups are extremely important for longevity but the invite teams are not as crucial as other aspects of the event. So long as we can put on an event for the community to watch & compete both at the venue & at home and my staff are happy throughout, that's all I care about.

Where has he said this? In the short term yes I'm sure he prioritizes RGL or similar invite LANs over RGB or whatever, but did he actually say that froyo does not intend to attend any further iseries/cph/international LANs? Would be an unfortunate development for the game, unless there end up being more cali LANs that froyo would presumably be more likely to attend. The main reasons for them not attending iseries as far as I understood was blaze didn't want to spend the money and time but by all means the new team might have completely different priorities (i.e., skeez and jay would probably be keen to go, definitely moreso than shade and blaze in the past)

he said on stream at one point that he doesnt support insomnia lan among other things (like pugchamp) because they "encourage stagnation". presumably he means in rulesets, though this doesnt really make sense.

that and he doesnt wanna go to europe again so its gotta be in america

society has progressed past the need for b4nny