https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAKSgWQ6AeU

Literally perfect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VBSXYuOkms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMfLZ-cOvbI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYW4oBZsHxA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENruOrM01CQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SctEKhiX5J8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTN_zYeAh2M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9ut-Ypo6A8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FODganUq41I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkZLJeQ1Nhc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNVScskmwDY

Yeah #63 is basically what I was going to post, like even in lobbies (where accuracy will obviously be higher because shittier players + significantly worse job at contesting/controlling Sniper) bo4r only ever topped out at like 59% for like, 1 game and it was a massive roll with a VERY bad enemy team. Generally in lobbies he hovers around ~50--54% but when there's actual super close lobbies it's the way more realistic 40-45%. (obviously your accuracy will be higher too if you mostly go for bodyshots, but this guy gets almost all of his kills from headshots)

Basically this guy was worse than me at Sniper (a feat in of itself), disappeared for 2 months, and then came back and played better than bo4r/Axiomatic/m4risa/Max!.

No.

I agree that it sucks it took this long (esp. due to Visas) but the twitter is saying they got it out as fast as they could and there was paperwork that was holding it back, e.g. there was likely contractual reasons somewhere preventing them from announcing it any earlier.

Once more details come out this might become more apparent what the exact hold up was.

I sent you a PM on Reddit, check it out yo.

#58 I'm a bit sleep deprived so maybe I'm not making my opinion super clear, so I'll retry and hope people actually read this. I'm not angry and would genuinely like to discuss this.

1) I would really like an "NATF2L" whether that's a complete league replacement of UGC & ESEA & TFCL or an American based modified league that piggybacks off of ETF2L, or just a universal league that services every single nation group that plays competitive TF2...I don't really mind. I want to make this super clear, I have approx. 0% attachment to ESEA, I have only played there for S8 and part S16. The stuff I am saying is not all the things I need to win me over or whatever, because really I don't care about a prize pool (I mean, I've played Highlander for 15 seasons now, and I've done 6 seasons of UGC 6s and 1 season of TWL 6s) or most of that stuff personally.

2) I think it depends on what you mean by successful. As large or larger than ESEA? Not really required, no. However, I think it is something that is very doable (I mean a site just like that exists for TF2Center lobbies) that mimics an ESEA feature and would only help bring people over and ensure it's overall success. I'll admit I should have formatted the post in another way because some of that stuff doesn't create the same amount of value as other things and so they're not all literally equal, but oh well.

3) My overall worry is that North America is not Europe. The only other competitive league you guys have ever had to the best of my knowledge was ESL which was a wash out. North American 6s currently has three 6s leagues at the same time. North America has not had only one league to the best of my knowledge ever in its entire lifetime, it's always had some form of split, between both free and paid leagues, and occasionally between paid leagues and paid leagues. The community has never been united under one roof.

Collaide posted the question of what you would have to do to have the North American equivalent of ETF2L - ie everyone under one roof - and I answered that based on everything I've seen in North America's history in a complete manner. The reason I went with something complete is because - again - both CEVO & ESEA splits took so long to resolve and a free league is also directly competing with UGC for players, and with 3 leagues already existing here adding a 4th league could be very poisonous to the community's health if it isn't completely successful in killing the other 3 and merging the player base near immediately. Going off of the decline trend ESEA has - barring Valve intervention (lol) - ~1.3-1.6 years before it gets to so low of teams the entire game would likely be cut from the league, and both CEVO & ESEA splits took about a year to completely resolve.

The only way to complete the actual goal Collaide posited of making an NATF2L while minimizing the risk of destroying competitive NATF2 as we know it (by providing a 4th league that splits the 6s community even further) is to make something so complete that UGC & ESEA & TFCL unite under one roof and thus is so completely competitive to the other 3 leagues that it's obviously better than all 3 leagues right away. (or close to right away, like within the first 2 seasons)

With all your experience with NA's community & leagues I would instead ask you (or any other Euro posting instead) what you would do instead to guarantee the vast majority of all 3 of those leagues (thus killing all of them) come to this hypothetical NATF2L. It's great to just think my point is foolish or downvote or whatever, but put forth some of your own ideas based on objectively how North America has reacted to all its previous splits so we can hear your viewpoint instead on how an NATF2L is going to compete/kill UGC 6s & ESEA 6s & TFCL 6s.

#54

Part of the reason ESEA completely won the original CEVO & ESEA split on August 23rd, 2010 was because ESEA provided way better feature support than CEVO had the past few years, with stuff like easy access to STV demos on every single match page and rather complete match statistics on every single match page along with tracked stat history on every player page. These may seem unnecessary to yourself, but if you want to be better than ESEA you have to actually attempt to copy their feature set and either have those features or do something better with those than ESEA does in every aspect that people actively use, and features like that are well liked.

The North American community is pretty fickle and has gone through multiple league splits that always take way too long to resolve because no one comes in that is clearly better than the alternative right away, stuff like this is important in convincing people to swap and convincing them that the league is better.

It took more than a year for the original CEVO/ESEA split to resolve and almost a year for the 2nd one to resolve. With the continual decline across every league in NA how it is, another significant split that takes a year to resolve would just result in NA TF2's competitive death at this point, so any replacement that wants to accomplish the goal of replacing ESEA and being the uniting NA league needs to come in very strong and be very obviously better.

#48

Everything I said in that post makes it either on par with or better than ESEA / UGC. This isn't asking for perfection, it's just asking for the bare minimum.

Without a paid division (at least one) the top end will continue to go elsewhere w/o a semi relevant prize pool, also people actually do make some money off of ESEA so if you want it to be better than ESEA this is actually necessary to have competition.

UGC does not have a prizepool and basically almost all the matches are complete jokes, there's no real skill balancing, and people just fuck around because there's nothing on the line.

The situation here is a tad different from ETF2L who really (to the best of my knowledge) only ever had money in the top div. Any time there has been a 6s league in NA w/o a prize pool it's basically been a meme fest.

It's not entirely necessary but it's an ez way to be better than ESEA and entice the top end to move over, which is about the best way you could accomplish the goal you yourself stated.

edit: It's easy in so far has there's a couple people in NA that could likely be worked with to make a LAN happen, the actual hard part is finding out if enough support exists to help fund the teams to get there. If there isn't, an alternative is just directly using the top end paid division as a way to funnel the winning team over to the next insomnia LAN if those continue to be a thing where each nation meets up in.

a) Yep, however I stated this because ESEA provides the STV demo after the fact so if you want to be on par/better than ESEA you need that feature as it is actually used often.

b) Because ESEA provides embedded logs essentially on every match, so if you want to be on par/better than ESEA you need that feature as it is actually used often.

c) Agreed, so if you want to be on par/better than ESEA you need that, helps bring people over.

Basically almost every single thing I said ESEA actually has or has had. The only thing ESEA has (or once did have) that I didn't mention are the following:

* a client (hurts casual interest)

* PUGs (no one plays them anyways and just uses Faceit/pugchamp)

In fact the only things I said that ESEA doesn't really have are the free division(s) and the medals, both of which are basically necessary if you want to drag the UGC players away from UGC which would be required to have an actual unified American league like ETF2L.

e: I added a part to be more specific, also I am not angry. I'm just being realistic, I have been paying attention to competitive TF2 since before ESEA was ever a thing in North America, when the original CEVO & ESEA split happened, and the most recent CEVO & ESEA split happened. I think I have a good understanding about how you would actually kill ESEA & UGC in North America and unite everyone behind one league here, rather than just splitting it further apart than it already ios.

e2: Obviously barring just working with ETF2L on it which would be wonderful. It'd be so great to have one league site that serviced North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

Yeah I know, I only said it could be an avenue not that it was entirely realistic because I don't think grabbing any sponsor for anything significant at this point is realistic without Valve going all in on the game.

That said, there's still stuff you could do on the website like affiliate programs to receive cuts off of competitive minded products etc that - combined with keeping a (tiny) portion of the entry fee money would be enough to cover stuff like the website and maybe even some extra servers at a discount. I know Miggy does that affiliate thing with his LAN site and it'd probably be more successful if you had the audience of UGC 6s + ESEA combined on there often.

#45

The only way to achieve that goal is to do a league that has ALL of the following, day 1:

* Multiple free divisions to handle the entirety of UGC's 6s player base.

* Multiple paid divisions to handle the entirety of ESEA's player base, each with prize pools.
- This also means having people behind this trustworthy enough to give money to and actually handle a prize pool.

* Ideally teamed up with some LAN to host a LAN for the Invite-esque division.

* In-game medals to further entice the free players, along with medals for the paid players (which would look better or have special features to them e.g. paint support)
- This means you need to team up with someone in the community that is good at Workshop stuff to create these medals and communicate with Valve about it.
- Fancy cosmetic medals might also entice players into paying to look special.

* Free, good servers that can be setup and accessed quickly through a website just in case for matches.
- Means you probably gotta team up with tragicservers or serve.me or something if you want to have enough for everyone.
- Probably would still need to pay for more to handle load regardless tho.

* Website
- Website needs to have good match support, including links to STV after the fact and ideally embed the logs.tf page into the match write up.
- Ideally website can track player stats over seasons like ESEA's can.
- Website needs to have a professional layout.
- This either needs to get paid for or provided somehow.
- Is an avenue to provide sponsor advertisements and maybe get some of them on board for some light support. (maybe - somethin akin to what ETF2L had with Thermaltake but for NA)

* Great support staff.
- This means finding great admins who know their shit and won't be biased/crumble at the slightest opposition.
- Also means finding people who are cool with answering tickets and won't suck ass at it.
- This means having a great Anti Cheat team which probably means teaming up with Miggy and his bois.
- This means roping TF.TV's casting squad into casting matches and getting people to write articles for it asap.

* Word of mouth
- People need to spread it to every other 6s team on ESEA and UGC and it needs to be super well known so that people swap.

(Optional: UGC agrees to kill 6s division at the same time in the name of unification.)

If you don't have all of this you either won't grab the ESEA players or you won't grab the UGC players.

It's that "simple".

e: Which is to say, if it isn't obvious, really difficult and would require a ton of people to collaborate together and really sit down and work on it, which seems to be hard because it basically never happens in the TF2 competitive community, everyone wants to go do their own thing.

I said this elsewhere but to follow up with #6, historically if that is true then ESEA is likely to keep a Team Fortress 2 division until there's at least than 20 teams. Season 1 opened up with 20 teams with just an Open division, and if they're that committed to keep it going even without an Invite division then ESEA is at least solid until 20. If they want an Invite division then it's solid until at least 24 since Season 3 ran Open + Invite at that amount of teams. Those are basically the comfortable bare minimum amount of teams the community doesn't want to cross until ESEA says an exact amount required otherwise.

e:

At current decline rates it will take ~4 seasons to hit ~24 teams and ~5 seasons to hit below 20 without Valve dropping a godlike competitive update. So another 1.3-1.6 years of ESEA as the worst case scenario.

#10 hypothetically the changes would be so immense that there'd be no point to even calling it Turbine anymore, because it would resemble an entirely different map.

I don't agree because things can be an issue without being big roadblocks or the sole downfall - I mean this is the whole point of something being a minor issue in the first place. If being elitist assholes turns some people away - in a small community that actively needs way more players to stem a significant decline, compared to games who have 12+ million players a month - then there's no way that it isn't at least a minor issue. Hell, I'd say toxicity is a minor issue in all those other games you're likely talking about too.

I am NOT saying that Team Fortress 2 would be some magical huge game if everyone was sunshine and rainbows (because this isn't close to the major issue blocking TF2 from being a big game, that's all on Valve, also that's impossible to ask for), but that 6s would undoubtedly be more populated than current if overall people were nicer to the people they were wishing would play competitive in the first place.

Saying it isn't a minor issue at all is saying that you believe that the competitive scene wouldn't be more populated at all if people were overall much nicer. Do you really think that is the case? That no one has ever been turned away by the overall competitive community attitude?

FWIW, I mostly hold this viewpoint because I:

* was a player that almost didn't get into competitive due to people from this community who were dicks on my pub of choice back in 2008. I only got into competitive personally due to the 6v9s I played in so that was on Cerious and Yz50 and Blaze pretty much.

* was around before HL really existed and remember what the pubber perception of competitive 6s was by the vast majority of those guys pretty thoroughly (hell I still meme about it with "you just gotta adapt" but people nowadays don't even get that meme. This was like the common pub argument against weapon bans for like 3 years rofl, I still remember when the first weapon ban in 6s happened with the Sandman and there was this huge SPUF thread about competitive players suck and they just gotta adapt to getting stunned in place)/still actively engage in pub communities to know it hasn't really changed that much at all.

* know pubbers who tried to get into competitive through Highlander and quit due to some of the attitudes they encountered.

* know Highlander players that refuse to give 6s a try due to some of the attitudes they encountered.

* know former high level players/staff who quit that partially don't want to come back due to the attitudes they've encountered. (the other more bigger part being Valve sucking)

This is basically most of my "inner circle", and I'm really the only one left still actively playing out of all of them. These are mostly people I've known since 2008-2011, which is way before the competitive decline happened. So basically, my perspective on this is shaped by that heavily. Likewise, I'm sure you know plenty of people currently playing competitive that don't really care about it and so you think it's less of a problem, so that shapes your opinion.

The problem with this argument (which is really common) is those games are well supported by their developers and their competitive scenes don't lack in players interested in it because the games overall are well designed for competitive play and interesting people in it with features that do that, so they can actually afford to act that way because even if you turn off some people through bad behavior there's way more people working on replacing that space (in the bigger games you have many multitudes of people more than TF2's entire active peak population to go off of). These are games where generally the Ranked modes are the main way to play the game and a significant (if not vast majority) portion of the player base plays it.

TF2 still has a bunch of players with no impetus to play comp, a lot of the ones who do generally start in Highlander and eventually branch over to 6s once they get their feet wet, and it can't really afford to lose people due to that behavior nor has it really been able to afford that for quite some time now since the overall competitive community has been declining since late 2013-early 2014 and there just isn't enough people interested in playing to replace the amount of people the scene is losing. (hence a decline in teams) You have to entice and interest people into playing competitive and a big part of that is making it easy for them and helping them out/making it a fun open experience.

I think it is disingenuous to say it isn't even a minor issue, when you have a majority of the player base not interested in comp, acting poorly (especially on sites that everyone actively tells people to go to to get into comp like TF2C or on pubs) will drive them away. Highlander - the biggest format the game has ever had - received so much hate over the years and that was by far one of the best methods for transitioning people into 6s. There are plenty of people in ESEA right now that started in Highlander basically. There could have been way more of those people. There's no doubt in my mind that there were people that would have easily played 6s but the poor attitude of people disinterested them. That's just ignoring pubs & TF2C (& even going back to TF2Lobby) which are other avenues of lost players since that's where a lot of people enter competitive from as well.

Basically, if you're as hard up for players as competitive TF2 as a whole has been for 3 years now, being hella egotistical like you're actually a big competitive game and telling people they suck dick, yelling at them, lolhl spam, and whatever other things you can think to say that are mean just isn't going to make people swarm in droves to it. TF2 does not have the compelling competitive feature set or developer support to convince most people to ignore or work through that shit.

That said it isn't the major issue, the major issue will forever be that Valve is not hardcore supporting competitive Team Fortress 2 when every other "e-sport" has hardcore developer support.

i apologize 6s players, i wouldn't wish infinite posting on anyone.