Today on this weeks episode of "Players acting like 5 year olds"...

nice'd

You know I really think that's the best talk I've seen from Gabe. The first half of it is just about the early years of Valve and why they run the company the way they do, as opposed to just reiterating what we've heard a thousand times about what they're doing in the industry right now.

At their heart, an MGO is there to sell marketing space. If they can't provide a sponsor with a convincing return on their investment or successfully reach out to potential sponsor then that is why they have failed.

The only MGO who really seems to "get it" right now is EG. As someone who used to follow SC2 really closely, I know all about all of their players, I know about their house, I love them for their announcement videos, and they've managed to create probably about a dozen different memes about themselves within SC2, quite a few them including main sponsors.

The TF2 scene is enormous and there is huge potential to expose the casual audience in an engaging way.

http://www.dota2wiki.com/images/e/eb/Nev_ability_mastery_01.mp3

Cool that other people here are asking for EU, I was actually just speaking to Klanana about that today. :P

I'll hopefully be setting up a surf and jump server soon on EU.

You can say thanks to this sexy motherfucker on reddit. http://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/13h0ad/hey_guys_ive_spent_the_last_few_days_writing_an/c73x4lx

:P

Our numbers have dipped a bit recently, but we were pulling 2k+ every second cast over the summer at VTV, and that was casting 3 times a week.

3500 is pretty damn impressive, but there's more to it than that. Our big thing is viewer retention, i.e. how long someone will actually sit and watch the stream. When we were looking at the stats after they went offline yesterday, it was about 33 minutes average. So think about it like this, that's the AVERAGE viewer watching an entire map then a bit of the thoughts/funny BSing afterwards.

Compared to say SC2, that's utterly astronomical.

Bear in mind that the front page changes randomly every 5 minutes. We've had front page and so have the other streams. Ultimately TF2 > CS. :D

At the end of the day I'll see if we can get lange to screen cap the viewership graphs. It's been 1.6-2.4k most of the day.

We'll be getting the vods up on vtv youtube pretty sharpish after the event.

You can always go off on a rant about Pennyfarming. We've completely marginalised him here in Europe, so he's probably gagging for some attention here.

Not that a disagree, but we (VanillaTV) manually host our own relays for any ETF2L match we cover. We've got a few guys who have plenty of server hardware, so we're just lucky to have the resources to do that. ETF2L games are played on a team's own server, so we need to go through all the hassle of contacting them for details, and then regularly (like 2 out of 3 games) having teams decide they want to play on a different server at the last minute.

Considering how buggy TF2 servers are these days, I don't think there's a lot ESEA can do about it. (If you think the recent steam validation bug is bad, you should see what's been going on with failed/corrupt updates for the last 3 years on the server side).

It's a sad day when people think the only way for esports to be sustainable is for the developer to pour in tons of money. Valve very recently with Dota 2 and Riot with LoL are the only companies that have ever had success doing this. Where do you think the money was coming from for the last 15 years of esports going all the way back to SC1 in Korea?

At a guess, probably your stream key was wrong. Sounds like the most likely thing to cause that. :P

huh, that's interesting. I will have to investigate this. I'll update the guide and this thread with what I find.