So I know you americans and a lot of newer guys won't know this story.

i39. April 2010. Dignitas is at the peak of their virtually contested reign as the best team in Europe. It's the group stages on Friday morning and the brackets go up.

CantFitMyN vs Dignitas.

Now for those of you who've never heard of CantFitMyN, let me link their team page. This team played 4 consecutive seasons of ETF2L with the same 6 players and never won a single round. Great people, regular i-series attendees and really nice, but playing the game was not their strong point.

Dignitas played each round with more and more off classers, with them finally winning the 5th round at 20 mins in with 2 people afk getting food and 2 engineers.

Everyone had a good laugh.

Ladies and gentlemen.

i49's biggest storyline. I will be playing TF2.

I've spent all summer procrastinating like fuck over doing something that'll earn money when I'm back at uni next year.

Last couple of days I've finally got down to it. Going to be doing a small computer repair business. Spent a full day and got like 60% of the work done on a system for managing jobs and so on, with a nice little iphone/android app that lets people see updates on what's going on with their computer. Also decided I'd try and make something that didn't look total arse for a change and I do think I've succeeded.

Not sat down and programmed something more than a hundred lines in months, so felt good.

I know this is a borderline necro, and I'm barely even involved anymore, but that's bullshit.

A few months ago back when no one else in VTV would give me the time of day and a lot of people in TFTV were getting a little circlejerky about the whole thing, myself and Arie sat down and worked a ton of things, particularly regarding this.

TFTV uses Arie's FakkelBrigade relays because during this conversation, I casually mentioned that I was looking into sorting out things with our relays. Arie was adamant that we were more than welcome to use his even though I initially had reservations about it. A TF2 server usually only has 1 relay slot, so the deal we worked out was that any game being casted by both organisations would have an FB relay connected to it, TFTV would use that relay for their streamers/casters, and then a VTV relay would be chained on to that.

Again, the team comms. We got a dedicated, neutral "team comms" mumble server set up on Arie's server that a few people from both orgs were given admin privileges on. The idea is we have teams join that server, and then several sound delay bots. TFTV cast off that server purely for convenience and can link channels to enable team comms, and VTV have someone (usually Arie) relay the sound from that mumble to their mumble for the cast. It's on Arie's server for no particular reason, anyone with a dedicated server can create one of any slot size with negligible effort.

I don't really want to get into an argument like this when I'm not hugely invested in either side anymore, but what I'd say is the most important thing is producing the best product for the viewers to enjoy, and the numbers indicate quite clearly who's doing a better job of that at the moment.

I wouldn't worry about casters for i49. I'm going to save myself the annoyance of reading the rest of this thread, but I would like to at least hope that VTV are going to put up the best people available throughout the weekend regardless of their chosen organization.

It's just people being excited. If you actually think about "let's go yankees", its actually a totally meaningless statement, but tons of people say it and just rolls of the tonuge really easily when you're excited because it's only like 4 syllables. It's like the irl equivelant of CTRL + C CTRL + V.

"Let's go yankees!"
Go where? What are we doing there? How are we going to get there?

Isn't that just hilarious though? Like obviously "raise your pauses" isn't that funny, but the fact you can get so many people to do it?

I just don't see what people think Twitch chat should be? It's like going to a Football match and complaining that people are screaming and shouting instead of having incredible in-depth discussions about the latest metagame and shoe building materials.

Take a drink every time someone cool and edgy comes along and complains about the quality of Twitch chat.

I think you'll find that most of what you could possibly do has already been done. If you don't mind the fact that you'd be reimplementing something that already exists, try making an API wrapper for VSPs. The raw valve VSP api is absolutely horrible, so if you can architecture something that doesn't add a lot of overhead, it has a ton of potential use.

Metamod already does an excellent job of this, so it's a good reference.

To be fair, I do tend to agree with most of what Turbo said. The big thing for me was that it was a little lacking in narrative. Showing Byte ramble on for a solid minute about how TF2 will never be big in the conclusion of a documentary intended to grow tf2 was pretty keyboard smashingly facepalm.

Just finished watching it. That's exactly what it needed to be. I loved it, and the bit at the end with Sal was perfect.

I'm the sort of person who'll watch a triple-A blockbuster like avatar and go "the colour grading is a little harsh here" or "oh the music fade to silence wasn't quite clean enough", but honestly, that wasn't what this was about, it was about telling a story. And I really think Luke, Airon, Sal, Extine and co have done an amazing job of that.

KK hyped the ever living fuck out of it, like a "big anouncement" and gave the wider tf2 community the impression it was a really big deal for the whole of tf2. Then it was just a hat and people were a bit pissed.

I lost all my stats when my server accidentally'd itself and the hard drive died.

But bassically, viewership wasn't growing all that much, but the quantity of casts and streams was increasing rapidly. For regular streaming viewership, it's about 5x what it was at this point last year.

i49 will be the big tell. We peaked at 6000 during the finals, see what happens this time.

However I'm a little confused. To my understanding the extv trip was primarily funded by the community in the form of donations. Isn't it a little bit unfair to ask for money again?

You put your money where it will get the most return. League of Legends is an ROI printing machine right now, and so is SC2 if you have a player somewhere in the top ~20 worldwide. Dota 2 is failing a little in this regard, but it's still pretty solid.

If you could somehow quantify ROI accurately and put it on a graph, TF2 wouldn't even be visible by comparison. That is why they aren't putting in enough money. If they're not giving the team enough, then it's up to the team to ask them to either pay up or get fucked to put it bluntly.

If you're the best in the world at something and you're flying across continents regularly to promote yourself and the game, when someone comes along and offers you $200 you should be telling them to try again.

Looks like the 1920x1080's are about the same price.

Hey man, I worked in a computer repair shop for about 2 years, so I should be able to help you out here. :)

So bassically your laptop lid consists the LCD panel itself which has 2 metal bars either side screwed on to it, and these are connected to the main hinge. What's happened here is simply that the LCD panel has been cracked internally. It's a fairly common thing, and aside from possible damage to your hard disk due to the drop, the rest of the laptop is 100% fine which we know simple because it still turns on and boots up. Make sure to ask them to check the hard drive while they're at it. Any good shop should do this anyway as a matter of process (if for no other reason they might have the opportunity to charge you for a new hard disk too), but it doesn't hurt to ask.

The only problem I can see is that as you say, its a 1600x900 display and those are usually pretty expensive compared to the regular 1366x768 displays you see on most laptops these days, but I just had a quick look on ebay and it seems the particular model that laptop uses isn't too bad. They're about $70 inc postage for me to the UK (from the US), so I'd expect your parts cost to be something in the region of $80-100. I know labour cost we'd usually charge about £40-50, but that's a little on the pricey side, so convert that to dolla and you're probably expecting a bit less than that.

As for particular shops, I obviously can't recommend anything better than what Bubba here helpfully linked, but that should give you a ballpark on cost. :)