I'm sorry you consider the fundraiser to be poorly promoted, It's a shame because a lot of work has been put into this by myself, Uberchain, soda and the rest of the content team. You say there isn't an official thread: here's the newspost for it which I've tried to keep bumped and up to date, I've also regularly been keeping the official i65 thread updated with news of the event and the fundraiser, we've had nearly daily tweets, had a stream promoting it and it even got a mention on the official Team Fortress blog. So I'm not really sure what more we can do.

We've had a setback in having to cut at least a portion of the fundraiser short so we can give Belong the money for the fundraiser as I know keeping it open as long as possible will help, we're working on making sure we can at least keep raising money for Ascent past the deadline this Friday, as always keep your eyes peeled on the official thread or our Twitter for news on this

People generally consider coach to be the cheapest, but at the downside of taking twice as long as a train, however having had a quick look at the National Express (a coach company) and trainline (a train comparison site that some people don't like lmao) and they both seem to be around £7 to £30 depending on what time and day you wanna be travelling, so you might have to shop around, Megabus is another coach company you can try too.

There's a bus and train station near the NEC but Birmingham New Street is a pretty popular train station too so you might find cheaper going there rather than straight to the NEC.

So that we can send the money over in time for it to be added to the prizepool we'll be stopping taking donations for it on Friday 16th.

We're fairly sure that the fundraiser itself will stay open until after the event so you can still support Ascent if you'd like to. But we'll keep you guys up to date with any changes.

Here's our Tweet about it: https://twitter.com/TF2Essentials/status/1161313967354126336

I'm not 100% sure about on the Monday, but for Sunday evening you should be okay with a day/weekend spectator pass as long as you can get a BYOC guest pass from someone who has a BYOC ticket. I imagine that it'd be the same deal for the Monday since people will bring guests in the help them pack away but if you want to be sure insomnia support is your best bet.

(Funs Pog btw)

We don't have any reason to believe 'managing your youtube' would lead to anything nefarious but if you'd rather play it safe you can log in with another service, logging in with Twitch for example only allows access to your email address.

As requested we've added some more physical merch to the marketplace! Check out my post in the official thread here for details!

We've added some physical merch items to the fundraiser! You can get yourself a poster made by Uberchain and Stegmolak, we also have a limited run of posters that will be signed by players and production staff at the event!

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/585493372114829322/609448141590233099/i65_twitter_poster.png

Alongside the poster we've also added three new shirts on top of the shirt we already had up!

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/585493372114829322/609654181455724544/i65_shirts.png

You can get them and more donation incentives here! We've reached our first funding goal of $500 so all contributions going forward up to $1000 will contribute to the prizepool so if, like us, you'd like to see that prizepool as high as possible please consider donating and/or buying some of our merch and other donation incentives!

Shouldn't be too long now, we've got a pretty good idea internally on what's going to happen so I imagine once the last bits are ironed out it'll be released. Heny's in charge of this one like he was at CPH so I wouldn't expect things to be too different.

As far as I remember it always said that the prizepool was participation dependent, as with all of their games apart from R6 Siege, it did say £6k on the tweet though. That being said this is only insomnia's contribution and isn't factoring in contributions from the fundraiser etc.

We definitely have plans for physical merchandise, both made-to-order through matcherino's system (similar to teespring) and exclusive, signed by players and staff etc. That should be added soon, as was said this a bit more work that what is currently offered and we felt that we needed to get the fundraiser out asap.

If you're interested in merch for the event keep your eyes peeled on the official thread: https://www.teamfortress.tv/52986/insomnia-65

Our fundraiser for TF2 at I65 is live! The money will be helping Ascent.NA come over and represent North America as well as contribute to the prizepool for the event! The best way to support the event as a whole, is to purchase some of our Matcherino Marketplace items.

Check out our tweet here: https://twitter.com/TF2Essentials/status/1150866856745611264
Donate to the fundraiser here: https://matcherino.com/t/i65tf2/overview
Check out the marketplace here: https://matcherino.com/t/i65tf2/marketplace

I'm sure they might but the announcement went live without anyone knowing, Essentials aren't involved with running the tournament at all so all I can do is relay information that I've been given, I do know that they're happy for TF2 to use Toornament and that should be going live soon.

Hey guys, it might be worth holding off on signing up on battlefy, if the admins that we have proposed are officially brought on as staff then we will be using Toornament, battlefy is what Insomnia use by default so it's probably there as a placeholder until our admins are officially made a part of Insomnia's staff for the event.

No you wouldn't need to, all our volunteers get a staff pass which in previous years has allowed them access to all areas apart from the YouTube greenrooms or whatever. At the very least you'll be allowed into the expo and BYOC area for free, we can also secure an indoor camping spot and camping equipment for our staff should they need it.

If you're interested in helping out and volunteering at the event please fill out this form here!

Please note that we currently cannot offer any full staff positions to people who are playing in the tournament, however if you're interested in being on the guest talent list, to either do analysis, be interviewed etc. we will be releasing another form closer to the event where we can pool together everyone who's interested. We're currently more short on production staff than talent or content staff so keep this in mind if you were considering applying for more than one role.

If you have any questions about the production please direct them to either myself (ArchRhythm#0001 on discord) or soda (soda#1071)

CU@ :)