Lange will be getting compensated for the 12 hours of camera work he does this weekend, whether it be done by ESEA or myself.

This will be my last post on the topic since I laid out my opinion about as clearly as I could, but as far as I am aware and from what the ESEA guys said to us in our discussions tonight, it was always on the table for EXTV to cast the ESEA LAN off-site on the Orange stream. They were apparently willing to provide compensation similar to the compensation that EXTV got for casting last season's LAN as an online only thing, but that option was presumably declined by EXTV.

Sal was able to promote himself just fine while being in the EXTV organization. We could all do so as well, if we wished. But nobody cares about that! I talked to cbear, Lange, and seanbud all separately. The amount of times that someone went "well, how does this benefit me?" was zero.

I do not think that any of us expect some kind of favor to come from ESEA out of this. We did not get into Mumble and go "if we slip ESEA a tenner, maybe they get rid of the roster hijack rules." The direct reward that comes from this is that our game is seen by people who would not otherwise see it, and maybe it helps legitimize it. Look at the IPL Shootmania tournament: 400 people watched that, and a ton of them were us, but think about how many were not from the TF2 community and saw the IPL guys taking the game seriously and heard Alex Mendez say that he was going to go check out the community and Teamfortress.tv and see what we were all about. That helps us, and I think that we get more of that when we expand ourselves outward instead of curling up and holding tight to what we already have.

Here is what it boils down to: on the ESEA Orange stream, we will get more viewers and those viewers will be the players that we need to show this game to if we want it to grow. That opportunity simply does not exist if we do it on the EXTV stream. We would have front page status thanks to Synwyn, we would get a decent amount of viewers, but the general pool of viewers we got would be EXTV's subscribers and the people who already pay attention to and follow competitive TF2.

There are problems with ESEA's set-up and the TF2 community's desires and that is a big problem, but the fact remains that ESEA is the only thing that the North American scene has that exposes it to the rest of the e-sports world. It makes no sense to me (and presumably, makes no sense to cbear/Enigma/Lange/Seanbud, since they were willing to come along) to isolate ourselves and just do things for the community if we have any intention of growing it. Look at what happened to European TF2 -- here is a post that adequately and succinctly sums up what happens when a gaming community intending to be an e-sport tries to do so on community effort alone:
http://www.vanillatf2.org/2012/11/where-are-we/#comment-50752

ESEA provides us the opportunity to have coverage on a multi-gaming news site, because it is one. It provides the opportunity for us to have casting by people who are not explicitly the TF2 casting groups, or at least their plan is to incorporate TF2 into ESEA TV. ESEA provides the only regular prize money competitions, and it provides a regular LAN that has prize money, which accompanies the community run LANs we have.

The opportunity to cast on ESEA Orange was always there, it was just dismissed due to reasons that are not entirely clear to me and were not really made any clearer by my brief discussion with Extine. If the entire reason is "we need to push back against ESEA," then that goes entirely against the idea of growing the game.

I did not watch the video and have no particular intention to, so my points here may not address anything that was directly said in it. I just wanted to give you guys some indication of why we did what we did.

i watched a virgin stream himself hiring a prostitute, performing oral sex on her, and then asking "did you come?"

it was about as awkward as watching some kid's mom cut his hair on twitch.tv.

byte screams at pub medics who drop uber

he had a problem that had gone undetected, i believe it was with his heart, and he passed away suddenly

rest in peace alex

the original versions of this came out like 4 months ago and nobody's been VAC banned for the use of it yet. you might get banned but maybe you want the fame of being the first!

stvs aren't vac secure. you wouldn't get banned for running a wallhack while connected to an stv.

the tf2 revolution has arrived

powah was applying for a visa to come to america and talking to his sponsor to see if they would pay his way to LAN and trying to make all possible accommodations he could to fit LAN into his schedule. not sure how that equates to "they knew he wasn't going to LAN!!!!" moose joined the roster september 9th, when they found out powah wasn't going to be able to attend LAN.

ty

actually a lot of the time i do it in the same mumble over whisper