It's Valve's MO that they wait for organic growth, it's actually unusual for them to make this kind of push and it's probably to do with the threat of Overwatch. They have addressed a short term goal in providing a ladder grind that Overwatch does so players don't have to jump ship to get that experience. It's worth keeping in mind that even if it doesn't go any further what they've done will have worked for them in that sense.

In terms of the game's image Reddit's attitude has totally changed in the last 2 years, /r/tf2 now gets plastered with competitive clips every time there is a decent tournament. They're not entirely representative of the whole of the TF2 player base, but it's an example of progress being made and it's in no small part due to Valve giving competitive tacit backing by making the MM system.

Leveraging that Reddit growth to move to the next level is a potential step, can we get the resources to hold more Lan tournaments regularly that capture people's attention? The problem is it all relies on volunteers who are burned out, and Valve could make a very cheap difference by quietly supporting that kind of grass roots activity.

There just isn't the ecosystem developed to support it. For whatever reason Twitch has not taken off for TF2. The game is easily big enough in terms of player base to have comparable viewing figures to many other games yet it frequently lags behind Farming Simulator in Twitch viewer counts.

Twitch is the key because it's the marketing channel that makes esport events worth it for a publisher. The vast majority of TF2's players have embraced items, trading and other non-competitive activities but they haven't embraced giving a fuck about being good at the actual game.

Valve made the official blog post and posted in game alerts for every stage of i58. IIRC viewing figures were down on last year (probably mostly to do with the OW exodus), the message to the vast majority of players just isn't getting through.

If you're making these kind of decisions on TF2 at Valve how could you successfully lobby to get resources to fund competitive events when most of your players demonstrably do not care?

Going back to the Enigma visit to Valve, they stated that they wanted to use MM to try to get people to think in a more competitive mindset, care about the game and improving personally, and hoped that would start to drive engagement on Twitch. That's presumably why casual became strongly structured with the MM update, and why the strength of backlash to that must have been dismaying for them. If the whole approach doesn't work they have little incentive to keep pushing it.

It always has and always will be a numbers game

But you land at John Wayne airport

Everyone who attends gets 250k, then it's an extra 250k for each map won and a million bonus for winning the competition. The observers and casters all get a golden ticket to the Valve chocolate factory.

You're golden with hope. Give it a couple of years of soul crushing corporate exploitation and you'll be kicking the University's door in

Bump for anyone that missed this yesterday, matches start this week

Beater made a typo with his price so I had to correct it myself without consultation. My opinion of War as the greatest living TF2 player may have influenced things

After the relentless pace of i58, Beater has stepped up once again to admin ETF2L Season 25 Fantasy TF2!

SIGN UP HERE

There are only a couple of days before the first scheduled game. Transfer limits should be 4 players in a week, but be aware that any transfers made from the first moment your team is created count against this total. Make sure you're happy with your initial selection.

For reference etf2l first week schedule can be found here http://etf2l.org/season-25-premiership-fixtures/

Every. Fucking. Time

Presumably the catalog of complaints against tf2c wouldn't happen, not unreasonable seeing as they seem to be primarily about individuals closely associated with it

Spend a little bit of time before you start writing to plan out the content, the points you want to make and how they follow on from each other and how you develop ideas. This should give you a rough idea of how many words you need to get out of each area you want to include. If the word-per-point/area count is very high you're going to be doing a lot of padding which will probably result in a shitty essay, so see if you can add some more meat to the content before you start if that's the case.

This is relevant to English language tests even with short essays because it will allow you to have shorter sentences with a clear structure instead of rambling long sentences (that will put your grammatical skills under pressure) searching for something to say just to hit the word target.

The problem is that "not tf2c" isn't enough of a selling point when the site is dead. They don't need anything special, a hardcore of maybe 50 committed players to make sure it's populated and running games as often as possible means that when people drift in now and again they will be able to play and stay, and over time a normal population develops. There's no one dedicated to doing that though.

OW was always going to decapitate the top of the TF2 competitive scene. It's not nice to lose most of your best players to the better funded higher profile competitor that people won't stop talking about but hey, Canadian Football is still a thing right?

ESEA's ruleset is managed by a plugin and supporting software that would require ESEA to spend programmer time on changes for a comparatively dead game instead of working on their CS cash cow. The plugin is private, so someone would have to write an open source plugin that cloned the behaviour, then ETF2L and others would have to start requiring all match servers to use it.

I'm not saying there isn't someone insane enough to spend their time doing this, but the ESEA ruleset is not optimal and it would be widely adopted simply because it's not in the interests of a company to spend money to improve their offering because there's nothing in it for them. That doesn't seem like the right reason to make that kind of change.

The whitelist changes, even if you don't like them, are something that's easily done for every league without expenditure of software engineering effort.