Also a lot of interesting points have been raise, though many not new.
The whole Valve letter, having read it, the impression I got was it was more of a charity appeal than something that will actually interest them. Without revealing the content of the letter, it's split into 3 parts about our achievements as a community, our challenges and how the authors of the letter want to go forward with Valve. If we were a Charitable organisation, telling them about our history in Africa digging wells, the challenges we face getting fresh water to starving children and how we can go forward with their support to build more wells, we would get more of a response because the ethics of supporting a charity would at least be good publicity. Supporting 0.5% of the TF2 total playerbase to play a video game they enjoy doesn't offer anything, not even good publicity.
The tone of it is all wrong, it's an offer to Valve to spend time on something that isn't profitable and against the direction they seem to be taking the game. They are a business, they are in it for profits, competitive TF2 in it's current format offers virtually nothing to them. Most of us know this, but I want to re-iterate the point again as I will explain further below.
They have thrown us a bone in the past with various smaller updates and support of in-game medals. Remembering for in-game medals, the first time this was used, we must remember it brought in 10,000+ new people to comp TF2 and formed a new competitive gamemode (well not new, rejuvenated an older format) all from a simple idea with one blog post from Valve to market it - that took virtually no effort for them and had a big impact on player numbers for us. The fact they have done this is MORE than we can realistically expect from them.
Robin Walker meeting with eXtine & Sal a couple years back opened some form of dialogue, gave honest opinions and feedback on what we have created as a competitive community. I have yet to see any major competitive league attempt to implement that. As somebody pointed out, what we have developed has been driven by years of influential people in this community pushing the game in a certain direction and Valve going in another direction. The flaws of competitive TF2 (in every format) have been raised a number of times and even Valve support would not fix them in order to make TF2 a comparable e-sport as in it's current format, as Gentlemen Jon has put it, "Nobody cares".
Good news is the future, like with everyone's life, is in our own hands. We can go a number of directions, we will continue to be driven by influential individuals who run our leagues, streams, LAN events, content, community hubs and of course our talented technical individuals who create amazing things. This has been said before in many different ways by many different people.
- As a community we might be driven to take the "FUCK Valve" approach and do it ourselves and make ourselves the best we can be.
- The more controversial view is, goodbye competitive TF2 as we know it. Change everything from the ground up, if it means kill current formats, so be it. This sort of major change is nearly impossible to be implemented without some official support form the developer.
If you want Valve, do it their way - All we are to them is a homeless person trying to survive asking for some spare change for 10th time. Only way we can reach them is if we can benefit them in some way, we don't.
To Lange personally - You are an inspiring individual and the effort you put into the community was beyond words to describe and we all greatly appreciate it. I wish you luck in whatever avenue you wish to pursue.
But the letter to valve, though heartwarming to me, was frankly not very good at achieving its desired aims, I find it unlikely to bring anything more than Valve throwing us another bone.