I started playing around 2008, right after the Medic update. Convinced my middle school friends to buy the game just before the Heavy update. I remember us discussing Meet the Sandvich on our way to the bus stop. Then, in 2009, me and some people in my pub community started a comp team. ETF2L Div6 ftw. Playing fastlane, well, freight, turbine... Got dropped by the train at least a few times. Those were the days.

Selling more physical merchandise is also a possibility (and it doesn't require depending on Valve). Look at what the Smash community did to fund their Boston lan: https://smash.gg/tournament/shine-2016-1/shop/shine-shop#shop-products.

As awesome as the compendium idea sounds, developing and polishing it to even come close to Valve's standards will be really difficult. You'll need artists. You'll need backend people. You'll need to rely on other third-party tf2 services (logs.tf, fantasy tf2, etc) of varying quality. The bar is very low if you built a website and are offering it for free. It goes way higher if you want to charge money for it. It goes even higher if you expect people to pay for it once or twice every year. If you fuck up, you lose the trust of mainstream tf2 people and your next year's event goes unfunded. Compendiums are good for increasing prizepools but I don't think it makes sense to rely on them.

It would be much more reliable to have a pay-to-play comp league where tf2 is a first class citizen. Tying LAN funding to playing the game is pretty much the best case scenario. If the number of players grows, you have more money to spend on events. If the number of players shrinks, it no longer makes sense to keep organizing events. In any case, the money follows the playerbase and you can organize events reliably until the game dies.

FACEIT looks optimistic so far but I'd really like to see at least some real money component in UGC or ETF2L (or maybe a new paid league? I've heard some people talking about that.). Once you have money, you can redirect that into prizes, events and all kinds of flashy stuff that makes the scene grow.

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It was the vice president: https://twitter.com/jamesbardolph/status/769942675810385920?lang=en

I strongly recommend this too. For GPU passthrough you need to have a compatible gpu, cpu and motherboard, fiddle with bios settings, compile the linux kernel with special options and spit over your left shoulder three times. Dual booting is way easier.

There's https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/. It's definitely not lightweight but smart autocomplete and refactoring does help. Otherwise just use your favorite code editor. Both sublime text and atom have decent python plugins.

You can use Qt as your GUI toolkit, it has python bindings: https://wiki.python.org/moin/PyQt/Tutorials.

Alias: Nonagon
Steam URL: https://steamcommunity.com/id/nonagono/
ESEA URL: https://play.esea.net/users/796065
TFTV Looking thread (if applicable):
Classes (in order): scout > demo
Current level: mid/high open
Scrim schedule: whenever
Can I pay fees?: yup
Comments: I'm a euro currently living in the states. I'm pretty competitive so I'd prefer a team that is always looking to improve.

I'd love to help with working on backend code. This sounds promising.