DAMMIT LANSKY

How are we supposed to even answer that question? Most of us "invite players" didn't play HL before this so how can we possibly know how its changed?

What's there left to say about shade? He's been with the team forever and he's not going to be a guy to carry the team or the guy who makes them lose. You know what you're getting. Suppose I could have just written that above few sentences in there, and that would have sufficed.

Clkwrk leaving is the most important thing that happened to the team this season and colors the whole discussion about them going into this LAN. They lost a lot of matches midseason with random replacements before settling on Hero, and while they had one great match with him against Mixup it's still unclear exactly what they are going to get and what team they will be, especially considering they are changing their overall team playstyle a little bit to accommodate the lineup change.

They are not breaking up, but this lineup won't be the same as a couple people will most likely be leaving. I suppose it's possible that changes, but probably not since there isn't another European LAN to motivate people the same way it did this season.

It's oPlaiD dammit.

Why do you people even waste time capitalizing the P if you're going to do the rest of it wrong?

Guess what?

Teams dying every season isn't a problem

This has happened in every esports game for decades. It's going to continue to happen.

And it doesn't matter. The game is doing fine. It's still growing. New players are reaching invite every season, and they are making impacts. Players are still moving up through the ranks and if they perform well they get noticed and get opportunities. Every season there's a couple new players who have a positive impact, and they will continue to in invite.

The community isn't small because teams are dying every invite season. Teams are dying every invite season because the community is small, and there isn't enough incentive to build something. That doesn't stop things from growing.

It's inevitable that this stuff is going to happen. Over the course of a season it's more likely that a player on a team will have something in their life happen that stops them from playing again than not, whether that's losing motivation or something else. If a team doesn't work out after one season, then it's also going to suffer people leaving. When a team doesn't have a good record it's usually for a reason - personalities don't work out, the team doesn't have the proper skill level or chemistry. Sure you can spend loads of time practicing it to make it work properly over the course of multiple season, but that isn't a guaranteed method and probably isn't the best way to get results. People will point to LG to refute that claim, but the fact is they were not a contender in invite until they made roster changes and replaced raf with Yz50. They've managed to stay on the top by making similar roster changes ever since.

If the competition level was higher so that there were more IM teams that actually were at the invite level it'd mean more for the teams in invite to stick together and play. There would be teams that can step in and replace the lower invite teams who struggle after a season, meaning those invite spots couldn't be filled by new pug-type rosters. It'd be more worthwhile and easier to build something since it'd mean more to hold an invite spot and there'd be more prestige involved in having one.

It's getting pretty tiresome when people bitch about this every season. There isn't a solution and it's not going to change.

Now, teams dying midseason is a bit of an issue. This season was a bit unexpected. Our team will finish out and play our matches, but with 5 players since we only have 5. I honestly can't blame Rich for quitting though. We don't have anything to play for and he probably hasn't been having fun.

I checked my email this morning and found a very interesting press release from TwitchTV.

TF2's very own invite demoman John "Boulder" Stockwell earned a $10,000 scholarship today as one of five gamers selected for the TwitchTV and Alienware Scholarship for Outstanding Student Gamers.

"You may not have enough logs to tussle with this Gaming Abe Lincoln," reads his description.

Yep. We're all short a few logs when it comes to Boulder.

Congrats!

People stopped playing CEVO because ESEA had a LAN final, match statistics, servers, better prizes. They didn't have a LAN at first but overall ESEA was the more professional experience and thus the more competitive league, so top teams spent less and less effort on CEVO until it eventually wasn't worth the effort trying to play a 3rd or 4th match a week for CEVO when you needed to put in more practice to make LAN in ESEA.

When I played at PAX sniper was definitely the easiest to dominate on since it wasn't hard to headshot most of the classes. Part of that was just everyone else being awful, though, so it's hard to tell how things will play out later.

From an esports perspective - the game could be fun.

At PAX it was pretty fun and the visuals are similar to TF2 in that it's easier to grasp the action than a game like CS, where invisible bullets kill people in one shot after someone peeked a single pixel.

They do have jetpacks but the movement isn't dynamic since there wasn't any way to gain speed and keep it like in Tribes or Quake, and there wasn't any viable form of rocket jumping either. Some of the skills were movement based, though, and if the skills are properly set up and balanced I think that could add a lot. I'm not sure why so many FPS games have ignored features like that aside from the 3rd person ones like Firefall and Monday Night Combat. I guess partially because it's hard to know what a "skill" is doing from a first person view, if you're doing some kind of ground stomp or something.

When I played the multiplayer at PAX it was pretty fun, except that everyone at PAX was absolutely AWFUL and it got really boring going like 30-1 as any class and dominating everyone. Plus I had to play while standing up, which is kind of weird ergonomically.

I'm in the beta but the couple times I tried to play it it was stupid. There were vendors everywhere and I had to waste time doing not fun things like walk around a giant city talking to floating exclamation points.

Then they made me go to this spot where I killed some pod things that spewed little spiders around.

Then a spaceship came down and started spawning these evil looking dudes, but they walked around really laggily and died pretty fast and they never stopped spawning and there was no specific objective to fighting them. It was almost unplayable due to lag the couple times I tried it, and there were not very many other PCs about.

This was a couple months ago and I read somewhere they changed things up a lot, but the way that was going doesn't make me want to bother. It's like bogging down everything fun about the game with extra bullshit.

The WoW-inspired RPG elements COULD work in a game like this but they copied things a little too literally from what I saw. That said, I have not played it enough to really judge.