Thanks John, i really appreciate the praise. I agree this shit is fucked up.

looking at his recent forum activity, he has only posted that exact phrase once and while some of his other posts have been along the same line it seems like being outspoken about an opinion that is different than yours...

what about the rest of the items?

maybe when you come down off your high horse low level players will heed your advice and respect your opinion.

while cevo hasnt proven themselves by having a successful season of tf2 under their belt, all esea has been able to prove throughout 15 seasons of operation is that they are more consistent about offering sub par services which are never fixed and that they will betray all of their customers trust without batting an eye. cevo doesnt need to prove themselves, as we already know what we get with esea.

when was the last time a hacker was caught in esea tf2? maybe its a bit archaic but i would bet we catch more cheaters with demo reviews than either client combined would ever catch. To play TF2 for a year costs $60 more than a year ago, per player, obviously significant price increases. Do you think CEVO would increase their fees more than esea has? honestly? the respectable prize pot comes out of league fees from the previous season of CEVO which were not there this season, thus requiring nahannis donation.

TF2 is vastly changed from the time when cevo was popular. We transitioned from a time when there were actually sponsored and community involvement was pretty low to now where we have community run modifications like soapdm and MGE, sizzlingstats are very prevalent and the community funds literally every LAN event that happens now. Times have changed and I think it can be done this time.

that is my point with scheduling though, you imply that people should obviously have the time to play both because its not a big time commitment, yet getting 6 players to play 2 matches a week can be pretty hard a lot of times.

my reaction would be the same as if ESEA was drasticly increasing prices, which by the way, ESEA league fees have increased $20 dollars in the past 2 seasons for Invite league fees. But why are you going in with the assumption that CEVO will increase our league fees anyways? We literally had to ask cevo to charge us money. also, CEVO client is not linked into TF2 in any way that i know of, so chances are that ESEA will be affected way more than cevo ever will be.

marmaduke you cant even handle properly scheduling matches in ESEA and getting your 6 players online, are you being serious right now?

Ive never been satisfied with ESEA as a product and have thought that leaving ESEA was in the best interest of TF2 competitive for a pretty long time, even barring the "bitcoin scandal". I actually played tf2 in cevo and esea at the same time at one point, and the only upshot ESEA ever had on CEVO is that they had a monopoly on the competition, if you wanted to play at higher levels you went to esea. Following up on that, every other advantage that ESEA had (stats, stv demos, etc) has now been integrated into CEVO, and much of the competition is playing in CEVO as well now. Furthermore, ESEA has developed 0 new features relevant to TF2 competitive in recent years leaving them stale and in a position quite easily matched by cevo, leaving them vulnerable to this move in the first place. We havent had healing stats for how many seasons? They obviously dont invest any time into even simple things that this community wants, so why assume that they ever will change and be the league we all wished they would be? Its not going to happen. With CEVO we have a chance to make something for the community, by the community, a league that we can mold to something better, without the bureaucracy and lpkane of ESEA to stand in our way.

You all need to calm down. The scare tactics about tf2 dying doesnt work on open players and only goes to stroke the ego of the players that think that they are above playing seriously in a league such as CEVO.

dont count skalar as an esea open team, we are doing cevo!

I miss the days when there were 3 or 4 popular huds that were consistently updated. Life was simple. m0res, PV, flames. These days everyone has their own hud and it's just downright confusing. I use the old standby of broeselhud (PVhud mod) however broesel is terrible about updating and MvM is still broken, as well as the "Streaks" on the scoreboard.

turtling in the video that slin made was done on default classes as much as it was done on offclasses and the removal of heavy/engineer does nothing to address the "problem". If people dont want to push nothing is going to force them to, end of story. the problem, at least in the match that brought this discussion about, was not that every push was a fail push due to defensive offclasses, but rather that there were no pushes at all, as neither team wanted to accept the risk associated with pushing the next point. implementing a shot clock might increase the number of pushes (and thus fail pushes) from the team who has the advantage, but it also will reduce the number of pushes from the "defending" team since if they park the bus they can simply force a midfight, which does nothing to address the issue at hand.

also removing offclasses just so pushing can be easier is not a valid point to be making. giving the attacking team a sure thing victory by removing the defense's best chances at success is just silly.

i just wanted to make the distinction that slin is upset about parking the bus and not stalemates. in the video he shows a couple 7-8 minute "stalemates" where no player in the server takes any risks and no attempts are made from either team to push a point. this is bus parking and not stalemating. essentially he would like to eliminate "stalemating as a strategy" and not stalemating in general.

parking the bus and stalemates are 100% different. i also disagree with your assessment that a defending team has no control over stalemate situations. in the situation that you are referencing, both your scouts sit back on the fence and your roamer sits on heavy in forward spawn for an appreciable amount of time. while the opposing team is no doubt parking the bus, your team is actually doing the same, and taking no calculated risks to progress the game in your favor. the other team is doing the same and you end up with what you showed in the video.

implementing a "shot clock", as you describe it, encourages the team with the upper hand to push (as you say) however it discourages the defending team to push and to simply park the bus to force a new midfight. Unlike in basketball, the defending tf2 team can essentially force the shot clock to expire by not taking possession of the ball (not pushing / parking the bus) at which point a new midfight will occur. this gives the defending team no incentive to push off of last points in particular as it gives them a better chance at attaining middle directly, rather than having to capture the 2nd point on their way to middle.

i think people just need to realize that "offense" and "defense" in tf2 are not distinct. each team's goal is to simultaneously take the next point and to defend the points that they have control of. just because it is accepted strategy to park the bus when the enemy team has middle doesnt make it any less your fault when a stalemate lasts 7-8 minutes.

better players take the game more seriously and have been playing it for a longer time. these better players are probably in higher divisions, and have better stats than players who do not take the game as seriously. Since they take the game more seriously they also probably have less problems spending money on things such as 120Hz monitors and better PC hardware. For these reasons there will likely be positive correlation between 120Hz monitors and better performance and higher divisions but it does nothing to prove that the performance difference is from use of a 120Hz monitor.