competitive gravelpit my beloved

Crazy that 90% of Valve's lineage derives from Half-Life but it becomes more blatantly obvious over time Dota 2 has attained near total cultural victory in Valve's developmental and artistic direction.

Why don't I pay my taxes? Because I'm playing TF2. Why do you think I'd pay my taxes, seriously? Because that's what everyone's doing that's popular? Cool, I play TF2. I'm not too concerned with what's popular, alright man?

we need a new league that will recharge the tf2 gaming scene

hey man what's up what's going on in indonesian tf2 these days

never got around to making a bear pic archive so just gonna dump em here while im at it

https://i.imgur.com/XuzIy6W.png

https://i.imgur.com/RhwLjEY.png

https://i.imgur.com/Rg38VN7.png

https://i.imgur.com/7wea25P.png

https://i.imgur.com/1NFmh7X.png

https://i.imgur.com/IKksC1K.png

Doing my monthly read-through of TFTV, and this is bittersweet to read. I really do miss the "older" days of TFTV, and it was a lot of fun while I was a part of it. It really shows how just a stream of articles really did make the scene feel more alive, especially when we got the ocassional article for OZF, AF, or an SA/BR league (anyone remember Chapelaria?). Granted, I think there was a lot more to "write about" in the older days, but part of coverage is always trying to find the throughline in the scene.

Unrelated, but remember TFTV casts and when they had the blurbs on the match thread? Good times.

If you're interested in writing, whether a little or a lot, I will say that the barrier to entry for writing is a lot lower than you think, especially if you're already knowledgeable about the scene. Of course, I technically have several years of "experience" writing in esports, but I think the ropes of the trade are easy to grasp as long as you keep an open, creative mind with writing. I don't know who's "in charge" of the newsroom at this point, or if there's even people willing to mentor or edit, but I think you should reach out if you're interested even a little bit.

Anyways, while we're talking about the TFTV newsroom, here's the bear pic.

https://owcdn.net/img/661746737abb6.png

https://i.imgur.com/yReULDK.png

name changed from Mazeltop to mazerati

There are few people that I know that put as much passion and dedication into competitive TF2 as ire did, and I have nothing but fond memories of joking with ire in the TFTV writing room back in the day. She deserved so much better.

I've seen these arguments before when MYM dropped, and it's always felt like sentiment sans substance. But, there is some merit to it, not that Casual is different, but that it's just a worse Quickplay. This is just my opinion, but Quickplay was never the "community-oriented" server experience that people reminisce about.

There are good QoL additions that make Casual good, but there are still fundamental issues that make Casual worse than Quickplay.

1. There's too much friction in between matches. The assets for the game start and end look great, but are a waste of time.
2. The system is not designed well for the player density of TF2. Frequently I've seen Casual matches that simply just cannot stay full because the matchmaking can't keep up with disconnects.
3. Players seem to leave a lot at the end of matches. Purely anecdotal, but it feels like I have to requeue at the end of maps often, which is weird even when the same map is voted at the end of the match.
4. Why can you only vote for three maps? The built-in map vote supports up to 5 maps, so why is there this arbitrary reduction?

Of course, the main issue isn't that these issues exist, but that they've persisted because Valve fundamentally reworked the games official server-finding flow and never refined it.

added

chill is already taken

added

added