eXtineWe're always going to have a relationship with Valve. There is no boat that has sailed anywhere. The devs might be locked up in their room ignoring us because of reasons, but they're still around.
If Valve were genuinly interested in making TF2 an esport, how fucking hard is it to communicate? Having to figure out the ancient fucking code to meeting the allmighty VALVE GODS and crack the code on what the fuck they actually want has been attempted for a decade and yet the most we got was some "we'll think about it" that never went anywhere. It is not a reasonable state of affairs for any company to place this burden on their customers just because you placed the community in a maze and we ended up going our own way instead of following the one magical path that could have >>>POTENTIALLY<<< lead to a valve supported game in 2012, reminder that this path is made by the same guys that thought turbine was a map that belongs in competitive play, limiting your config to high settings with the highest dxlevel on a game that about as optimized as a PS4 game thats trying to run on a PSP.
What's a better way? Praying to lord gaben and experimenting for years and years until someone from Valve actually shoves his desk back into the TF2 room, which hasnt had a team ship a major update since 2017 OR after countless attempts to grow the community (TFNew, Newbie Mixes, Guides and Videos), countless formats and over a decade to just accept that it just wasnt meant to be, make the best out of what we have and just try to keep the people that are already here happy instead of trying to force a fairy tale into reality.
If Valve actually wanted to make TF2 a big esport, they totally could. TF2 ticks every box to be a viable esport, but its just a faint dream at this point.