klosterman is a douchebag but an immensely entertaining writer

I'd also need a solid editor or multiple solid editors. I could amass/sort the clips and commentate myself, but I definitely don't have the necessary editing skills to pull something like this off. I have no idea if, like an article writer like djc, any compensation from tf.tv would go into something like this, but I'd be happy to give as much of that as requested (even all of it) to the editor. After all, they'd be doing all of the really difficult work. Every week I could take a look at all the previous week's footage, commentate it, and send a recording to the editor, and they could post-produce it and post it on either an official tf.tv youtube channel, or onto here.

So, that's my proposal. Thoughts? Ideas? I'd love to hear what you guys think.

Hey lads, it's that guy ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I've had this idea for a while, but I figure I'd officially propose it here.

Almost every big game that warrants it regularly features some sort of best frag or best plays video, much more frequently than we do. We've had the commft top 10, but obviously it's run into some difficulties as:

1.) it's become less frequent, and is released too far after the fact.

2.) the quality of frags has slipped, both in terms of the frags themselves out of context and the level of the players in them.

I want to make it clear that I have the utmost respect for eXtine and eXtv and don't really think they're at fault for either of these problems. The former problem is more because of the giant workload those two have, that makes each project more difficult to accomplish (especially when other projects with stricter deadlines must take precedence, e.g. live casts and eXtravision). The latter is obviously a fault of the community, and the lack of incentive to submit footage.

Recently, I've seen two top 10 series, plus two other videos, that have inspired me to find a solution to this problem.

The first is the French top 10, a monthly series that highlights the best plays from French (and Belgian lololol) players, commentated by Luzzu and Pognon (two well-known, roughly div 1 level EU players).

Here's the most recent example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb16XwNh1Rw

Now, I'm not suggesting this is the perfect model to emulate. The video still came out at the end of July despite being about April and May. However, by narrowing the frags to the close-knit French community, the quality of submissions was actually higher, because of the increased pressure for every player to submit their frags.

The second is the top 10 plays of ESEA-I for 1.6 and CSS that eseanews puts out every week, corresponding to a particular map in the season.

A recent example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5PuUjNbNbo&feature=context-gfa

Other than the obvious fact that this isn't TF2, I think this series is the best possible example of what I'm goin' for. It's professionally edited, it comes out frequently and on a regular schedule, and all the frags are great and are from high-level players. Hell, I don't even like CS, and these vids are great!

Besides those two series, the videos that inspired me the most were Beater's stv watching nerd compilations, which said "fuck it, I'll do it myself!", and Prem by CUBE, which showed just how easy it was to get frags from the top level of competition if you focused exclusively on that goal.

But, I'm rambling. To go back to my original point, I'd like to create an top 10 plays of the week for ESEA-I, and host it on teamfortress.tv. I was thinking that, by the time other content (such as demo reviews, instructional videos, cast vods, the podcast w/ sal and cbear) becomes available on tf.tv, more tabs will need to exist alongside "articles", "streams" and such. If one of them were "videos", these could be under that, with either embedded youtube videos or tf.tv-exclusive vids holding the content. I might start by making a pilot via looking through stvs from esea, but ideally I could have one player from each invite team be the "representative" of their team, and gather pov demos and ticks each week. On behalf of the individual player, you'd only have to watch 2 of your own demos a week, something most people would probably do anyways. I think that, rather than getting less content because of the narrowing of scope, this initiative will produce an impetus on players to send in their stuff, because the burden is more greatly on them.

(cont'd below)

TF2: The Musical

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyYl0ks5EKU&feature=plcp

I predict that I topfrag for my team and all the match comms are filled with people saying OMG BR0NZE CARRIES SO GOOD HOLY SHIT

david foster wallace went to my school

get_fucked

no Atheist?

please never bring back warmfront

no ashville and no warmfront

what #2 said

people on music forums spend the same amt of time as tf2 nerds do on tf2 just finding new music, amassing their library, and cultivating their taste. MOST people here don't do that, I've found

h2k 5-0 normalcool

I've wanted to cast for a while but djc told me I had literally the worst voice of any player he's ever heard :>

I feel like you slightly misunderstood me. I recognize that, for the amount of labor and resources extv has, it's already vastly overworked. However, as long as extv signed off on an idea and promoted it from time to time, someone else could organize it, and any viewer of extv who hasn't yet expanded to really follow comp tf2 (and there are a lot of those guys) will check out the other content. cross-promotion is what's needed, not an increased burden of work on extv.

10.) a big, multi-platform tournament, for both 6s and hl. Otakuscott has the right idea- the problem is, his banlist has antagonized ugc, and the notoriously finicky admins don't like it. I say, try to cross promote between tf.tv, ugc, extv, vanillatv, etf2l, and maybe even esea. maybe a donation drive, or unusual hat/item raffles, to get decent prizes.

9.) this just came to me, but absorb as many other important channels as projects as possible. newbie mixes are a good start, that would be relatively simple. #tf2mix, #tf2.pug, #tf2.pug.na, #tf2scrim, tf2demos, and atf2.org would be another solid step forward. and, here's the whopper: tf2lobby. for all the unregulated behemoth tf2lobby has become, it still has a grand total of three (3) creators. in fact, one of them is a well-known member of the competitive community, and all of them can be reached. it really wouldn't be hard to advertise tf.tv on the main page of the site, or sponsor all the valve servers as tf.tv servers. even if like 10% of the lobby population stopped playing lobbies because of this advertising, you'd still have literally thousands of people to work with