I am not a fan of judging whether or not a match is cast worthy beforehand. You never know when it's gonna be an upset or a close game. I think since we have the capabilities to cover more games this season, we should cover as many as possible, regardless of the potential outcomes.

And as Fog said, we're trying to coordinate so that we can do doubleheaders from other divisions before the Invite games, since they usually start fairly late.

http://www.twitch.tv/seanbud/c/3129994

http://www.nekkidtees.com/wp-content/uploads/fullycharged_large.gif

It's nice to at least have some info around the situation and get the feelings out there. Doesn't it feel good to talk about your feelings?

The only thing I will say is this: Situations like this(forced forfeits/judgement calls) keep happening season after season. In lower divisions, I get it. Matches need to be played by Sunday so schedules can be released. In invite, you know from day 1 your entire schedule for the season, and dates/teams are not changed. So why the forced time limits? I think it is in literally everyone's best interest if we just allow exceptions for invite matches. Invite is the league with a LAN race and marquee match ups that fans/spectators want to see played. You see stand-in's all the time in Dota 2 and other eSports. Client automation and whatnot prevents that, I get it. It's a paid league and you're supposed to have other backups paid up, I get that too. But I think if we're going to play in a league that has final decisions regarding Invite matches with LAN implications to be guided by judgement calls, then PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make the decisions that allow the matches to get played.

"But people will take advantage of it."
Maybe, but I really doubt it. In the end maybe it makes more work for the admins and schedulers, but at least we're not paying $70 to get forfeited out of a LAN race because it's the 4th of July and squid wants to play video games.

I'm all for brainstorming streaming ideas that could maybe help growth speed up, but I can't think of any at the moment. We've already got a huge variety of content and it keeps getting bigger but between the 42 streams that were live I'm sure we have about every aspect of TF2 related content covered. I think the stream viewership is steadily growing, but unless it's a casted match(especially frontpage d casted matches) the viewer pool is basically the same 400-500 people every night.

I think having more leagues would be the biggest benefit to competitive growth. The options are honestly not that great right now. What I would like to see SO much is someone drop $5000 or more and just run a tournament. Not a league, a tournament. Think of the dota 2 tourneys that run over the period of a month or so. Start with group stage, then have a playoff bracket. CEVO sennhesier tournament and the MGE Cup were good things, and I would love to see more of them. We don't need another LEAGUE to compete with ESEA(although that would be nice), we just need more competitive content in general.

Bottom line is casts of competitive matches with big name players draw the most viewers, but there are usually only 1-2 decent high level matches per week, because our ONLY real option right now is ESEA. CEVO is going in the right direction, and has a $600 first place cash prize, but I think some tournaments with sponsorships has the biggest potential to catapult tf2 to the top games on twitch more often.

A shift away from ESEA automation and dominance on the competitive tf2 market would be nice, and I don't think the LAN is preventing other events from being successful. Do you think Mix, iT, and all the other invite teams would ignore an event with even something as small as $5000 of cash prizes for the top 3 seeds? Another LEGIT event that attracts high level teams to sign up will give tftv and other outlets more matches to cast, and more attractive content for viewers, which would just trickle down to everyone.

I rambled but yeah, someone needs to throw money at tf2 gamers. More $ for tf2 = more high level players/teams = more matches to cast = more frontpaging on twitch = more viewership for tf2 streams overall = I made it back to the point of the post.

much respect bradford. lookin forward to the articles and more info on this. invite has been jerked around for a long time by ESEA policies and a couple of questionable decisions by a lot of people involved. bottom line is rescheduling over and over is more painful for some people than others. brad is a busy guy. also from what it looks like a lot of the decisions aren't as guided by policies as we've been led to believe at times, and are rather judgement calls by killing/kalkin. and in the past there have been some really questionable judgement calls that apparently don't set any precedents.

http://www.twitch.tv/seanbud/c/3101185

wish i could go. mebe next year. hf

I think everyone is aware that you're not at fault for the client not being updated. You are however our representative at ESEA and as much as I appreciate the posts saying "Matches are fucked tonight, sorry", Finding out a little earlier on would be really really nice for a LOT of people. Do we know about tonight yet? Monday it was "tomorrow." Yesterday it was "tomorrow." What is it today? I don't understand why there isn't a better timeframe or more frequent updates on this.

BUMP. CEVO was really fun last season. Also it is free and offers prizes. There are only 9 teams at the moment and registration ends in 2 days.

http://i.imgur.com/QV4ONKK.png

He can bend them backwards and touch the top of his arm iirc.

god damn i forgot about your weird fingers then i cringed all over again. p.s. use bumpers next time.

It's good to know that all 5 people this garbage is relevant to are here. Now they can work it out amongst themselves and I won't have to read any more of it.

I'd like some feedback on another idea to start collecting item donations for TotH 2.

Would anyone be at all interested in a a system where if you donated an Unusual or promo item we could do a budcast of your match(or scrim I guess.)

I don't know how popular it would be, I don't want to make it like donate a refined and I'll cast your game because I don't want to do 1000 casts, BUT I realize donating an unusual or something to have a game casted might be asking a lot, however I think if even 1 person donates it might be worth it.

So anyways I will try to iron out the particulars and outline the process in a future post but I wanted some feedback on this idea to streamline it or improve it.

Let me know.

lf sponsor