shox hasnt made it out of major groups since kato 15 and kenny apex and nbk havent since they won at cluj.

Although IDK where you are getting that Optic won EPL, they won Eleague season 2 and got 2nd at ECS season 2 after that they colapsed at the major

We do have weekly mixes in the ETF2L discord, they arent promoted that much at the moment but they were around the time of the fresh meat cup.

We will look into shirts, however I dont know how useful they would be for making a prize pool as we would need to get them in a large enough number to be able to make it worth the time and money. Plus gauging the number of people that will actually buy one and not just say they are interested is very hard.

Our previous sponsor was not interested. Why would you think we wouldnt ask them?

We want to do another it is just about finding a good spot in the schedule. It will probably be in 2018 though as once S28 ends it gets very close to christmas which isnt a good time due to people seeing family etc over that time period.

Paywalls are things we have considered many times and have many times decided they are not worth the risk of losing a potentially significant portion of our player base. Your suggestion while good on papaer has a lot of issue to overcome for what is essentially not a very big prize pool for just prem.

Also as the 200€ is coming from all tiers so people might feel cheated that the money was just going to prem players. So if you split 200€ accross 4 tiers then at leat 6 players per team you get such a small prize per player that it isnt going to be motivating for anyone. Or at least not motivating enough for it to be worth our resources to either do it manually or create an automated system that does it, there are more worthwhile things for us to spend our time on.

tl;dr nice idea, takes too much work for too little gain especially once the risk of adding a paywall is added

We have published the ETF2L whitelist that is to be used for the remiander of the season. We will have another global whitelist meeting once all the current seasons have concluded.

http://etf2l.org/2017/10/21/new-etf2l-season-28-whitelist/

The global whitelist meetings in their current form are no longer a public affair, however we still are planning to document our decision making processes.

If a map is worth playtesting is far far different to if a map is worth putting in a season. The playtesting bar is rightfully far lower in terms of quality.

can confirm

UGC had an almost identical decline to what etf2l had and they did not change system. ESEA has remained reasonably stable, however ESEA is different as in it is a paid league and has also historically had a far far lower number of teams compared to free leagues. I do not have any data for OzFortress or AsiaFortress.

Seeing OzFortress numbers would be very interesting as OzFortress introduced swiss system for Season 15 which was in Feb 2016 which almost a year later than ETF2L did. If OzF noticed a decline around the same time as ETF2L/UGC or noticed it closer to when they swapped to swiss.

My theory is that around the same time as swapping to swiss there were a large number of factors of which changing system was a minor one. The growing popularity of other games such as CSGO and later OW. It was also around the time that the frequency of TF2 updates dropped. The growing number of people who argue in favour of the tiers and seem to think it would double signup numbers over night are grossly over simplifying.

This isnt really directed at you anymore nuze more just a rant, sorry.

I agree with these three, fog is a nice asthetic but has isnt a good idea in a map aiming to be competitive. A few more/bigger ammo would be a good thing as well.

This reminds me of the video the fragile on the history of NA 6v6 which despite also being very long was very interesting. These kind of documentation with lots of effort put in are always interesting to read.

Would be nice to see ones covering the EU scene or even scenes further afield such as asia or AUS as this and the fragiles video were mostly about NA.

I understand that both OP and TheFragile are from NA and may not know the history of european tf2 very well. There were some things on vanillaTF2 if i remember correctly but since that site went down I dont know if anyone archived them.

The site has gone down temporarily, we are attempting to fix it.

A pastebin text version of the newspost can be found here https://pastebin.com/wzCfD4QB

They almost certainly do read them. They will read any major discussion websites about their game, so reddit, steam forums and tftv are the ones that come to mind.

While some (see most) of the steam forums is trash, they may well have a few useful posts.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/305084455687815169/351418279832584202/DSC_0780.JPG

Would it not be possible to set the STV to be at 15 seconds and have the actual observer in spectate. Or do some of the casting/observing plugins require you to be in STV.

I did mention it because I saw it in CS, and it is very effective there. They have setups where they have 10 pcs with one of each player which they can use for replays.

I understand that TF2 is far far smaller and has far less resources but if we could do the delayed feed that would be amazing and I think it would fix the issues of missing unpredictable sacks and airshots. You could even use a cheat feed with the delayed secondary observer so that they get everything.

Im not sure how possible this would be but if they could have a second observer but delayed by like 15 seconds. I know they had the 2nd observer for picture in picture and a third observer would be hard to do. If they did have this delayed observer they could use it to catch plays that the primary one missed then show it in picture in picture so we can at least see what the casters were going crazy about.