Hi,

During early seasons of ESEA, they weren't offering the 4th place money for people, but flights were also significantly less expensive back then than they are now. If you were first or second place during the regular season, you might solidify a LAN position 6-8 weeks prior to the LAN. ESEA was pretty good about scheduling the LAN a good 4-5 weeks after the final playoffs match, so even teams seeded third or fourth generally knew at least a month ahead of time.
If your team had a sponsor, generally they would cover most or all of the flights once you solidified your LAN qualifier position. Unfortunately, most teams didn't have sponsors. If you had no sponsor, you were going to be in the negatives unless you took first place, and even then you'd barely be money ahead, if at all. Like alfa said, it was all about the experience and the prize pool was just a way to lessen the overall cost of your trip. If one of your teammates happened to be local to Dallas, they would probably pocket a bit of money from the prize pool.

Some teams had cocaine-addicted sponsors who generally went by the name blackfoger who booked hotel rooms for 12 people at a La Kwinta (if you know, you know) motel in Dallas for an entire LAN weekend using a stolen credit card, then stopped answering their phone, swearing up and down that they were stuck in airport security, then accidentally answering their phone once, and upon realizing who had called them, used a blatantly fake voice and accent to say, "oh sorry James isn't here, this is his roommate."

Players from both "blight gaming sponsored teams" were locked out of their hotel rooms on the second day, with hotel staff refusing to let anyone back in to get their things until another credit card was presented.

That was ESEA season 6, with a prize pool of something like $4200. First place received $2000 and last place was $400 I think. Two people to a room, roughly $90 per room per night brought hotel costs to $100ish per person for the weekend, plus flights which were generally $150-200 per person. Even the first place team would only end up putting around $50 in each player's pocket, and you'd likely spend at least that on food and drinks over the weekend.

Pretty thorough write-up.

Hello,

The numbers are in. After analyzing respondent metadata and discarding clear cases of individuals submitting multiple surveys, here's what we're left with.

Froyotech's results were a massive blowout with jay taking over 70% of the votes and a total of 234.

Witness Gaming's results were more mixed, but one player was still heavily favored by voters, and that player was artist with 40.18% of all votes and a total of 133.

G6's results are the most interesting.  Out of 334 unique voters, 3 players on G6 were within 10 votes of each other.  Even more interesting is that there is a two-way tie.  botmode received 27.54% of the votes and a total of 92, barely trailing logan and soapy who each received 30.24% of the votes and 101.

Full breakdowns can be seen here:
https://imgur.com/a/uue92zS

jay, artist, logan, and soapy, please add me on steam (https://steamcommunity.com/id/kmsmaka/) and we can discuss logistics. I'll have to make up a list of what's available, which I'll try to do this weekend, but it may be Monday before I can get to it. Once the list is made, jay will get first pick, followed by logan and soapy and then artist. If logan and soapy both want the same item, we'll have to do a coin flip or something to determine who breaks the tie. If any of you decide to forfeit your item, you can pass it to another person of your choosing and just let me know who that is and I'll work with them to get it to them.

If anyone adds me and impersonates one of these people, just know this:
I may not know who you are. I may not know exactly what you want. If you are looking for money, I can tell you I won't give you any, but I do have a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very medium-length career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you delete me and stop the grift, that will be the end of it. I will not look for you--I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will vet you, I will catch you, and I will send you a jar of karate. And yes, it will be pee. And I will eat so many poppyseed bagels the day before I send it that you won't even be able to use it to pass a test the next time your parole officer visits.

The responses have really slowed down, so I'll let this run until midnight tonight, eastern time. Out of 327 responses, here's how it's shaping up:

Froyo
jay has the overwhelming majority, with 228 votes, or 70.37% of all votes.  habib is trailing him, with 54 votes, or 16.67% of all votes.

G6
This one is actually still quite a close race.  soapy leads with 103 votes, 31.79% of all votes.  Just behind him, botmode and logan are tied with 92 votes each, 28.40% of all votes.

Witness
artist leads with 130 votes, 40.5% of all votes.  The next closest is laz with 65 votes, 20.25% of all votes. alfa has 35 votes, which makes me wonder which 34 people he's paid to vote for him.

I'll update this again either tonight or tomorrow with final tallies.

I don't think there's any way through this site to see it as a survey taker, or at least I haven't discovered one. Here are the stats so far.

Total number of responses: 291

Answer Choices          Responses (% of total)          Responses (numeric total)
b4nny			4.84%				14
jay			70.24%				203
habib			16.61%				48
marmaloo		5.19%				15
meyy			1.38%				4
mirrorman		1.73%				5

botmode			26.64%				77
caps			3.81%				11
logan			29.07%				84
rekuso			3.46%				10
skeez			5.19%				15
soapy			31.83%				92

alfa			10.80%				31
artist			39.72%				114
ash			6.97%				20
branslam		6.97%				20
laz			20.91%				60
lolguy			14.63%				42

The strawpolls were definitely broken. I have replaced them with a SurveyMonkey link.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/6V3VH3J

CaptainZidgel, your facetiousness is noted, but if someone wants to crunch some numbers and give me statistics, I'll be happy to use them for this... I just don't have anywhere near the time to put into something like that.

It is definitely weird that all three of them have 100% of the votes going to one option. Does anyone know of a similar service that isn't strawpoll?

Since nobody was able to defeat Froyo at the LAN last weekend, I've decided to offer some prizes to the MVPs of the top 3 teams. I don't have the time or the footage to peruse and analyze statistically, so here comes the popularity contest. I'm inclined to say habib is the overall MVP for Froyotech, but there's probably some bias there. I need the community's help in deciding who was the MVP for each team.

edit: replaced strawpoll with surveymonkey because strawpoll was definitely broken. If you voted with the strawpoll links, please vote again with this one:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/6V3VH3J

Hah, sort of. I don't have anything against Froyotech, but every competitive scene gets a bit dull when one team starts to win everything.

Right before the COVID stuff hit, TheFragile was ramped up to host a LAN. I was going to donate a bunch of stuff to be raffled off as door prizes, but then the world changed and everything got canceled. I didn't even realize this event was happening until a couple of days ago and I thought I'd find some way to contribute to it.

The idea that additional prizes might spike alfa's nerves and make him spaz out is an added bonus.

It's cool that you guys are finally having another TF2 LAN . I haven't followed TF2 for a very long time, but it seems that every time I've glanced at anything in the past 5 or 6 years, I see Froyotech winning pretty much everything.

I hope the competition will be great at this event. I don't want to see Froyotech stomp everyone. In hopes that this will be great, I will wager the following:

If your team beats Froyotech and takes first place overall, I will send all six participating members of your team some kind of cool computer gear from my spare parts cabinet. I'll make a list of the available equipment and I'll give the members of your team a few days to choose who gets what. If several of you want the same item, names in a hat will select who gets it.

Crap from my cabinet™ includes things like x570 motherboards, quality RAM sticks, Ryzen CPUs, at least one 3080, a couple of 1440p 144+hz monitors, and I honestly don't even know what else yet, but rest assured it's going to be something nice and I'll work with you as much as possible to make sure you each get something you can put to use.

This will only go to one team, so if multiple teams beat Froyotech, you still have to win the whole tournament.

If you are on Froyotech and you win, please revel in the glory of knowing you have prevented 6 of your rivals from getting some cool stuff and please accept my wallet's token of gratitude. If you are on Froyotech and another team defeats you, I honor your sacrifice.

So please, no pressure, but bring everything you've got to the table and, for the sake of everyone who has ever been a part of and enjoyed this competitive scene, beat Froyotech and help me clean my cabinet!

hey e, glad you're still doing well!

hello ingin,
No time for games for me these days, though I would love to sit down and play something occasionally. I *think* still leave steam open most of the time, but only on mobile. I glance at this site every 6 months or so for a few minutes to see if there's anything noteworthy to read, but I don't think I've even logged in for 3-4 years before today.

I have two things to say on this.

firstly, to sigafoo
dear mr. foo,

please, for the love of god and all that is or is not holy in any religion or any non-religion,
let me proofread your article next time
the grammar gave me many aneurysms

SECONDLY, to everyone else
if you don't like his rules, stop taking his money

that is all
good day

It's so obvious!

Clearly the guy on the left has two right nipples and zero left nipples, while the guy on the right has a hickey near his belly button. Duh!!

:-P

To those of you who have paid for things: everything has been shipped as of today at noon. You should all have PMs with tracking information and ETAs.