I for one, am shocked the two "masterminds" behind throwing a match trying to scum ShiningStar out of playoffs seasons ago would be acting like this.

You know for a league that does a ton of questionable shit on a case-by-case discretion basis, this sure seems like a bizarre time to go strictly by the books.

That's an instant classic.

Damn the content for Main is insane. Good stuff guys, excited to see how Main shapes up this season.

Any map where the trains could kill people (teammates or enemies) is an insta-pick in my book.

Hello! We are looking for some subs. Specifically: Scout and Demo.

zbra has Highlander (disgusting), so you'd see playing time most Sundays and some Mondays.
Muse has work, so you'd see playing time every Wednesday until ~10:30 EST and some Mondays.

As usual, we'll cover any fees if you're required to play a match with us. Contact me on Discord at Tery_#5544.

Website with a million rosters because you have to make a new one every season is slow as fuck, who could have possibly seen this coming.

I'd rather die getting two rocketed every single time than die because the Soldier swung a melee weapon in my general vicinity that instantly KO's me.

During my study abroad semester in Hong Kong, I made a matches-only pugscrim team to play in ESEA because that was the infamous bitcoin season and Open was going to die if it didn't have enough teams (I think it was 30 teams exactly including mine). Thankfully I only had classes three days a week starting in the afternoons so I was somehow able to schedule matches around that.

So yeah I'd say playing a season's worth of matches at 10:30AM my time, pinging 150-180 to ESEA LA servers, helping save the league is pretty up there.

I'll not to write a thesis here, but I've talked about the rulesets as far back as 2014. But it boils down to rounds mattering more, forcing aggression, and the aforementioned time management aspect.

It's not like we don't already use this ruleset in scrims, events / cups, and community LANs. And it's also not like teams don't already park the bus or play slow in scrims let alone matches let alone playoff matches No playtesting is required, unlike other things we've thought about in the past like tether speed removal, shortened round timer, etc. .

You could play playoffs earlier under the NA ruleset, but that just means you either have less scrim time or scrim earlier, neither of which are very appealing options. Does it really make a difference if you finish at 3AM or 4AM? As for the whole playoffs on weekends thing, I imagine that top Invite players don't want to spend an entire week scrimming and then play on the weekend after that. Not without LAN. We haven't had an Invite LAN in over six years by the way.

Yes, halftime is good but their role can be entirely replaced by tac pauses, something I think doesn't get utilized nearly enough (nowadays or ever). Give each team a five minute tac pause that they can use to assess the situation / make gameplan changes. I guess halftimes on KOTH maps would be fine, though I don't really understand why we play to four to begin with. Having first to two halftime for KOTH is fine, but I think I'd rather play to three without them. And pauses can still be used on KOTH, too.

It's time to move on from the old ruleset. We had it because of ESEA. We had lots of things because of ESEA. But now we have more freedom, and we should take advantage of it.

This will be the only reason I ever cheer / support froyotech winning, as b4nny can become the first player to ever win Invite on all four classes.

If we simply used the ruleset of 30 minute maps, we can achieve both a BO5 grand finals and give the upper bracket team a map pick/ban advantage. In fact, if you started a BO5 at 11:00 EST, had each map go the full 30 minutes, and then had 15 minutes break between each map everything would be finished by 2:30 AM. That's an hour and a half faster than what we had yesterday by the way.

Coincidentally, now would be a good time to mention that the most recent RGL survey has a question regarding halftime / ruleset. Get on it.

Really solid core of players that are extremely driven to improve, win, and have a good time while doing so. wbacon has proven that he's a capable team leader, which is an extremely rare breed in this era of TF2.

Okay true but harbleu played games in Open S6 before jumping to Invite. There are also likely others from the earliest days of ESEA but Jojo said those existed before record-keeping so we don't know if those seasons happened.

It's been six long years, but froyotech was finally slain in grands. Witness Gaming's performance tonight is up there in the all-time greats. Right next to Classic Mixup at S10 and S15 LAN. artist becomes the first player to win Invite in his debut season (edit: in a looooooong time).

#WitnessDeezNuts