I'm confused by the idea of starting an HL introductory tournament when 6v6 is literally going to be in the game client at the next major update. People know about 6v6, Valve are putting it in the game and calling it competitive, /r/tf2 is being covered in 6v6 twitch clips and a league wants to introduce people to structured competitive play in HL.

I just don't follow the logic.

The British electoral system results in large numbers of people's votes not counting in most routine elections. A referendum is a rare opportunity for your vote to count the same as everyone else's in the country.

There won't be a trade war, we will bend over because we need access to their market.

It won't be spiteful, it won't cost their industries, it sends the message that there will continue to be benefits to membership, it doesn't prove any such points.

They're going to make an example of the UK to try to discourage similar things happening in other member states. I doubt attracting new members is much on their minds right now, survival of the bloc is.

It sounds like it's from the Trueskill bayesian rating system. My experience is that it doesn't work very well, ymmv

Can we get a Pugchamp UK now?

It doesn't include undecided or non-voters

They kept showing this Amish guy too. No idea why

Given your expertise with comedy I'm surprised you didn't notice the sarcasm in the reply. Anyway it's been lovely, thanks for the thoroughly engaging and mutually enlightening exchange

I would never have predicted that you would be the one to bring Hitler into it.

I'm sorry Robin Walker backed up what I said but really, that doesn't make him a Nazi.

Sure, if you haven't watched the video linked at the bottom of page 3 it should answer some questions, Robin Walker puts it better than I ever could. It also addresses content similar to the battlenet forum post you link in some respects, in that they probably want to tell people more about matchmaking and mmr in order to inform players and therefore make the quality of community discussion about it more likely to be useful when developing the game. Valve have done that for Dota and may do it for TF2, although I don't think they've said much about CS. It's important to recognise that stuff like that isn't done just to be nice or useful, they expect to get something back.

If you're not talking about the kind of hype type marketing that other companies put out as "communication" then questions about involving marketing decisions at an early stage don't arise along with the organisational problems it might cause. Outsourcing that kind of thing is hard because they take a long time to plan and they want concrete information while the devs want the flexibility to change things and also to ship early. There's inevitable conflict there and it's very much a dev driven company so I think that's limited to events like TI.

The frequency of blog posts is also addressed in the video towards the end - the less frequent the better because of rarity value and I think they would treat Valve visits and b4nny teases in a similar way. I guess what they've allowed to leak through b4nny is what they're comfortable with people knowing, although for some it's obviously not enough.

I could do without the cool beans. Also I don't think anybody outisde Valve has anything like the whole roadmap. I think they've taken what they feel they need from meeting with b4nny and geel probably just invited himself.

I was going to reference it earlier to someone's very angry reply but didn't think it would be worth it

Although now I've realised the irony of it being a video with Robin Walker explaining everything I wish I had

I wouldn't say that was the fairest summary you could have written