After only 4 days of fundraising, we have met our goal for the i63 LAN campaign! All milestones will be fulfilled. I'm sure some people are still hoping to claim perks, so we will allow a 1 week grace period for final contributions, ending firmly after July 12th at Midnight PST.

Don't forget, to claim all perks please join the froyotech community discord (https://discord.gg/dz2dTz5) and post in the #i63-perk-redemption channel, and I will get in touch with you about coordinating your perks.

Thanks to everyone who supported us on this campaign. Looking forward to a great LAN showing.

Fundraiser page: http://i63.b4nny.tv

WE MET OUR GOAL AND ARE NO LONGER ACCEPTING CONTRIBUTIONS

froyotech will be attending i63 LAN this summer!

Roster:
b4nny
arekk
habib
yomps
garbuglio
cookiejake

Fundraiser:
In order to make this happen, we are fundraising to help cover the costs of travel, lodging, etc. Our team's total expenses come out to $6200, and we are looking to raise $2000. We will be accepting contributions in the form of cash or keys, as well as selling merch. Fundraising will begin today, July 1st, and will conclude on August 15th (or sooner if we meet our goal).

Our fundraiser features two simple bundles with personal perks to claim (raffle entries, weapon signings, demo reviews, interactive events, etc), but the main focus is on 40 milestone events - every $100 raised will unlock 1 event fulfilled by the team as a whole, and 1 event fulfilled by me personally. The milestones mostly center around special streams and videos that everyone in the community can enjoy and partake in. I will update the spreadsheet daily with our current fundraiser progress. An overview of all perks and milestones can be found below, as well as all avenues of contribution.

Links
Perks/Milestones: http://i63.b4nny.tv
Buy Merch - Teespring Froyoshop: https://teespring.com/stores/froyoshop
Froyotech community discord for perk fulfillment: https://discord.gg/dz2dTz5

It's been far too long since NA has been crowned champion of an i-series tournament, so let's change that. If you have any questions feel free to ask on here, twitter, twitch, discord, etc. Thanks to all of you and to Essentials.TF for their help in organizing the event and coordinating with us :)

Correlation is not causation. For a simple example, your post being upvoted doesn't prove that you made it simply to manipulate people into upvoting you. While I can't speak with absolute certainty about your intentions and you can't speak with absolute certainty about mine, given all of my words and actions, though, there should be plenty of evidence that assures you I am genuine in my desire to grow competitive TF2 in a way that is beneficial to the bigger picture. It's quite possible there would be other benefits that follow, but those don't undermine the genuine intentions at the foundation. Your doubt of that is indicative that you don't understand the situation in full and your frustrations are unfortunately misplaced.

I get no monetary benefit from FACEIT whatsoever. Cooperating with FACEIT is purely motivated by the desire to grow competitive TF2.

This community needs to decide if they want the game to expand or if they want it to stagnate and die. Your words say the former but your actions say the latter.

You're rejoicing over steps backwards.

It's true though.

While I have my disagreements with your pros/cons list, this is by far the best way to help improve things. Follow Kev's lead.

Attempting to further fracture the community is what will actually do harm.

S1 Frag Video
The S1 highlight video, edited by Cyanic and featuring frags from all divisions, is out now! Check it out:

https://youtu.be/OFYrjuUiwPU

Increased AFK Cooldown
The cooldown penalty for not joining a game has been increased to 1 hour in an effort to further discourage dodging matches.

S28 Invite Teams/Players Admittance
All players now playing in ESEA-I as of S28 are also granted access to the TF2PL Invite division. If this applies to and you would like a join link for yourself or a teammate please get in touch with me.

If you have specific feedback about cp_cardinal, I'd suggest you post your elaborations here: http://www.teamfortress.tv/35238/cp-cardinal-5cp

Throwing games is still a bannable offense and players who prove they're unable to handle an upper division through losing the number of games required to delevel that low, they would probably be kicked from the division and unable to queue.

As division level ceilings are still in place at this time, you cannot queue into a lower division than your current skill level, and most invite players are level 9/10.

Division Join/Queue Level Restructuring
We have made a change to the level requirements for joining and queueing in the Advanced and Amateur divisions, as follows:

Advanced
Join: 8-10, Play: 1-10

Amateur
Join: 4-7, Play: 1-7

Beginner
Join: 1-3, Play: 1-3

Basically, this makes it so that once you have adequately leveled up to earn a place in an upper division, you will be able to continue to queue there even if you lose and level down. For players that were on the borderline between levels, this should be especially helpful. In the Advanced division, this will make Elo purely a visual quantity, similar to how it is in the Invite division. For example, explicitly losing games and leveling down to 7 will no longer prevent you from playing in Advanced division. For most people this means you will only need to earn a place in an upper division once. However, obviously some players may not be able to quickly acclimate to an upper division and continue to derank after initially earning their place in an upper division. For players that are deemed to be unable to handle the upper division, they may be removed at admin discretion and have to repeat the process of releveling until they can rejoin the division. We will work on developing more clear criteria about how that process will work.

Also, this should be extremely beneficial to division moveups. We will no longer need to wait for FACEIT to adjust player Elo in order to add players to upper divisions. The unsustainability of relying on Elo adjustments was the main reason we discontinued Amateur division moveups, so we will be considering reopening those because of this change as well.

Increased Server/Map Voting Time
Captains will now have 30 seconds to ban server location and decide on map bans/picks, to match the amount of time they had for each of their player picks. Hopefully this eases some of the pressure of map voting and provides ample time for well thought out picks.

Advanced Division Region Restriction Removed
On an experimental basis, the region restriction on the Advanced divisions in NA and EU has been removed. If you meet the level requirement (8-10), you may now freely queue in either region at any time. Given that people playing cross-regionally may be disruptive to their non-native region’s games due to high ping or language barriers, we will be closely monitoring any incoming reports from Advanced division games, and will revoke access for any people abusing this privilege.

I’ll be playing more EU games these days, feel free to join in.

Chat moderation is quite relaxed, but our rules disallowing clear sabotage efforts, aggressive advertising, harassment, etc will all be enforced. We'll take steps to make sure these chat rules are more clear so you won't be confused in the future if your messages are removed.

That quote juxtaposed with the impulsive decision to quit the team a day later is the most Nursey thing imaginable.

Glad we're finally getting a new map in the mix and establishing a procedure for improving the map list each season. Given that so many of the maps that once entered ESEA as beta versions ended up being revised until eventually becoming official maps, this is actually a pretty big deal.

All the potential maps are pretty good and I think the map creators would all be overjoyed to see them included and all the feedback that's generated from more organized team play. Seeing as I am personally involved with cp_cardinal's development I can promise that, should the map be voted in, all gameplay and feedback from league matches will be reviewed and considered for future versions of the map.