I don't think vurt knows to bump this but he is still lft and he would be a good choice on demo for an upcoming new-to-open team.

http://i.imgur.com/ml3IoQ2.jpg

pretty good player

Going to play devil's advocate here.

This is the fault of the site, not the users. They didn't hack or use the site maliciously, they used an option that was mistakenly made available to them.

Occasionally sites like Amazon accidentally prices items at much lower than they should be, and people buy them because of it being a good deal. Amazon still has to take the loss and honor this agreement to keep their reputation as a reliable service.

If anything, bets from the match should just be nulled and the items returned.

Ry4n has one of the best attitudes toward this game I have seen. I've never seen him rage or get bitter over a match. He improved greatly during his first season of open and will definitely continue to. If we didn't main the same class I would probably be trying to play on a team with him this season.

Could this be Pankeyman's time to shine?

talk about things

i know its already been said but this is really important even if it sounds simple just talk with your team about things that happen without being salty while doing so because it always helps in the long term

also,
dont ever try to play your hl and 6s scrims on the same day, you will have to prioritize one gamemode per season and that should usually be 6s if you're paying money for open

don't have egos. that applies to every level of the game but especially low open because dealing with inflated egos after being rolled is the least fun thing in tf2 in any form of team-based competition and in low-open you will get rolled relatively often

2 weeks left until the deadline isn't nearly enough time left to organize and find teams for a tournament.

Maybe instead announce a prize pool on the UGC forum to pay league fees for the top finishing teams in steel/silver/gold playoffs this season. This might also be difficult, since the final matches for this season are the same night as the deadline.

:(

This means that the deadline to have your teams ready and paid up is 18 days from now. By this remaining time in the last offseason, there had already been official announcements confirming that TF2 would still, in fact, be played in season 18.

What makes this offseason so unique?

The answer is: the offseason itself is only 3 days long. ESEA LAN ends on the 19th. The implication of this is that there won't be any announcements or warnings about team signups like we have been accustomed to getting. ESEA's staff will be too busy preparing for LAN to deal with us.

This decision to shorten the offseason was made at the behest of ESEA's Counter-Strike community, who were bored with the long wait for season 18 (which was caused by Dreamhack delaying ESEA LAN).

They seem to be doing fine with the change. There are currently 218 CS:GO Open teams signed up for next season. The other divisions are empty but team rosters should be moved in from S18 as soon as playoffs end. For comparison, there are currently 3 TF2 Open teams in the division, and 0 players paid.

Why am I so worried that a shorter offseason will ruin league signups?

It's already happened before. CEVO TF2 died because their deadline for team signups was too soon after LAN, with too little public awareness of the deadline.

The number of living Invite and IM teams is also a major cause for concern. We won't have an accurate count of how many of these teams exist until 3 days (?) before the deadline hits, when rosters are moved into S19 after season 18's last matches are played.

Please don't let TF2 die again forever. It is imperative that you get teams for next season ready before LAN ends, or we might not get a next season.

6:45 PM - JeRm: If we didn't get anything, you wanna just bump that old-ass thread?
6:45 PM - JeRm: :B1:

Or they would just go 0-16 and go do something else instead like most sane people who find absolutely no success in a pursuit do.

Open is too big for brand new players and most of them won't find it fun to sit through the 4-6 weeks until they can play against teams that don't roll them when hugbox leagues that let them play matches with (theoretically) sane skill gaps exist.

The good points were that the team somehow made it to the end of the season and that we luckily weren't the worst surviving team in open, at least by rank.

I think most teams that die mid-season do so because their players go in with an inflated sense of self-worth which leads to them getting easily frustrated with their early results. My team was free from this malady because we had no self-worth to begin with.

If I call that I am bombing through choke to force the enemy medic's uber, then while jumping clearly call that there is a sticky trap in choke, I don't expect our medic to +forward brazenly through choke and drop uber to the trap.

I don't expect to go a month without seeing either of our scouts' names illuminate in my mumble overlay during a scrim or match. I still don't even know for certain what Hydroflouric's voice sounds like and he was our team's topfragger until metalworks week.

I don't expect to deal with our team cancelling scrims because I was the only one on the team willing to skip highlander scrims in favor of ESEA.

The team I was on failed to meet even the lowest of expectations but hopefully my next one will do better.

Enigma if you are reading this please please please add a scrim forum to TFTV. Scheduling scrims in advance without a simple and visible way for people to post what times they can actually play is a mess, and IRC is inconsistent as fuck. By the end of the season we were almost exclusively scrimming vs high-end UGC teams because we could get rounds off them it was so much easier to set up games using their forum.

As someone in the unhappy corner of the bell curve skill-wise, I feel unqualified to talk about this.

I guess.

On paper it seems much worse than other leagues. A bitcoin-mining spyware anti-cheat client (side note: when was the last time the ESEA client caught a cheater in TF2?), apathetic admins, no medals, questionable servers, having to spend $30 to fund a LAN you will not attend and a guarantee your division will be won by washed up former invite players all sound like a very bad time.

The only explicit way that sub-invite ESEA is better than any other league is that the players themselves care about it more. This upside is actually worth more than all of the grievances above.

I would honestly only recommend it to players who feel that they have outgrown existing free leagues. All of the people here who recommend jumping straight into ESEA after a few lobbies and a newbie mix are insane. Maybe that works for the occasional scout with wunderkind aim but everyone on our team and all the teams ranked near us had seasons of UGC under our belts and we still sucked so it would probably be even worse for truly new players.

To get good.

I think the no-show problem was more of an issue with the target audience than a rules issue. 2 of the players originally assigned to my team in the last WBR (out of 5 total players including backups) had less than 200 hours in TF2. Both of them signed up through an ad on Reddit and then forgot about it. We had to get replacements for both of them because they had no interest in playing in the tourney anymore. Maybe it would be better to only do "reaching out" advertising on strictly tf2-related communities?

We were actually able to play all of our practice matches, but in the actual tournament we had more ffws than actual games played. My guess as to why the teams died is that most of the team leaders stopped caring about the tournament after they found out nobody else on their team knew or cared about it.

League fees might not be a great answer. Players new to competitive would be hesitant to pay league fees when, with no comp experience at all, they would be wary of getting rolled by teams just slightly under the experience limit for their bracket with no hope for returns. This happens even with much more established leagues; look at the shitshow ESEA has every season about not having enough teams paid before the deadline.