After about 5 and a half years of being a staff member, I'm calling it. It's been a long and interesting ride, but for a bunch of reasons, I've resigned from TFTV. I'm still sticking around the community, however, so I'm not completely gone! I'm just not going to be active anymore.
The reasons I've resigned isn't due to TFTV itself. They're still a great bunch of people fighting a worthy fight doing cool work, and I'm glad I could contribute to that lineage. Sadly, my interests have shifted mostly towards music production and audio, spending more time on advancing my career, as well as exploring all kinds of side projects, including videos, multimedia projects and making games. I've started to have a pretty irregular schedule in general, too, so I felt it was unfair to be kind of this quasi-authority in TFTV when I couldn't even give a (in my view) minimum amount of time to managing it. To answer the obvious question, I'm not moving to Overwatch as far as I know (at most, casually).
So, what does that mean for this very site? Hmm, not much. I'm already not very active on moderating but others have stepped up. I think the current mod team will be fine and will do their due diligence to keep it a fun meme-loving place that we all know it to be.
For the production team, I'm not exactly sure what the future direction is, but I'm confident they will find a good solution. TFTV is too interesting to call it quits. All I hope for my own influence is that I've set a good precedence.
If you're interested, here's my short history with the game.
The Orange Box. Everyone loves it, for good reason. I remember playing TF2 early on (~2008? 2009?), being attached to the elegance of its game design and aesthetic. There really is nothing quite like it even today. One fateful day, Valve news posts about the ETF2L Highlander Challenge, and that started everything. I gathered a bunch of friends, got stomped, but was left wanting more. I eventually found /r/reddittf2league (a newbie 6v6 league, now dead, RIP) and that opened a gateway for me to be a writer here on TFTV (I think I only did one article; some random chat between harbleu and enigma). That eventually lead me to becoming an admin and on site production member. Growing the TFTV team as well as the overall competitive community has been a huge labor of love; that's truly the only reason anyone can stick around. I've tried to facilitate many projects in collaboration with so many others. Some failing, some succeeding. But most importantly, there was a lot to learn, either way.
So, thanks. I have so many people to shoutout, I don't even know if I want to start because a lot of people have been significant in this section and part of my life; I know I'd miss someone, and I feel pretty terrible about that possibility. And you know what, I'll still be attending as many LANs as I can, and helping out if possible. Those have always been the pinnacle of why I was an admin in the first place. If you see me at these or if you wanna chat and shoot shit on here, feel free to say hi.