Do you have a soldier config from a while back?

http://www.ugcleague.com/players_page.cfm?player_id=76561197994199456

john_milter'd

edit: yes I'm aware yeeegz is better than me and on a good team that's not the point of ugc linking??

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-harold-ramis-dead-20140224,0,2259309.story

He died from an illness he had at just 69. Incredibly sad, he was one of the greats.

You're getting -frag'd because you're acting like a tool, not because there's some bandwagoning conspiracy. And if there were, 400 players is a rather large bandwagon, you should probably hop on.

As for your question, the answer is (edit) roughly yes. Quindali posted the total explanation below.

It's not like we're actively trying to sabotage invite. I would be happy to help support an invite LAN again, I just don't want it tied to ESEA.

Don't get me wrong, I think LANs are great, that's why I co-hosted a half dozen of them. And for it to be an incentive play? Absolutely, I think it's a good way to push players.

The problem I have is the concept of invite teams and players trying to hold the game hostage, and blaming lower level players for not catering to their whims. I think it's just downright disrespectful to expect the majority of the player base to bend to your will.

I think this is the best thing you've said so far, just because of how utterly insane it sounds to me.

I'm pretty sure you have things backwards once again; it seemed like all the upper division players cared about were themselves, and that lower level players should be eager to support what better players want. The biggest sticking points higher level people used to convince people to play in ESEA over CEVO were the money and the LAN, neither of which directly affects lower division players.

And of course lower level players are going to consider themselves first; the majority of the player base is playing TF2 for their own enjoyment, not yours. That being said, you're delusional to think that nobody cares about the state of high level TF2. Nahanni put in $1,000 of her own money, and people have donated directly to this season's prize pool as well. Not to mention that CEVO wasn't even going to be a paid league until people said they wouldn't care if there wasn't money on the line. And it's like I said earlier, the lower level players are the ones who funded the LAN to begin with.

Just because the wants and needs of lower level players don't line up perfectly with mason's invite dream scene doesn't mean they don't care, it just means they have different priorities.

Okay, I stand corrected; this is now the dumbest post I've seen in this entire thread. I have never in my life wanted somebody to lose the ability to communicate more than I do right now.

That's on you, the top teams, not CEVO. They have everything the division needs to be competitive except for a LAN at the end, and if LAN/money are the only things that matter to you then I think you might want to check out some other games.

I would 100% agree with you if CEVO didn't have a Main division where this wouldn't be the case. ESEA had 19 teams across Invite and Main last season. Given that teams who do well in Main are supposed to be moved up to Invite, it's pretty reasonable to think that, if the top 16 teams from those two division had all moved to CEVO-M, the competition would have been pretty great (again, since schedules are made as the season goes on, we'd probably see some internal divisions going on anyway).

I literally just explained what they did, are you even reading my posts? It doesn't seem like it. In fact, you failed to point out one specific thing I mentioned that I made up, and if you think I just invented everything in my post you are sorely mistaken.

Before everyone was interested in CEVO, there was a small group of players who were trying to get others on board. Before anyone would, they wanted CEVO to have more features to more closely match those of ESEA. I'm going to spell it out for you very clearly in a nice, neat list so you don't miss anything, okay?

CEVO didn't have a single of the following features until TF2 community members ask for them.

• A prize pool. This season, like the others, was going to be free-to-play. People wanted a paid league with prizes on the line, so CEVO implemented and offered that. On top of that, Nahanni had enough faith in the league that she put up a bunch of money, which CEVO matched without collecting any entry fees. On top of this, all of the money we put into the season goes towards next season's prize pot (sans Paypal costs).
  
• Post-game stats. CEVO didn't have much of a post-game match page aside from some predictions and round results. They worked with the SizzlingStats guys to add the stats system to their page.
  
• STV Download. Just like the above; when people were happy with the stats, they also wanted an STV download to go along with it.
  
• CEVO provided servers. CEVO matches were initially going to be played on the home team's servers following their server hosting rules, but people wanted officially sanctioned servers from the league. They had them up and running in time for the first matches to take place.

Now, if you're still confused about any of those or don't believe me, I'm not really sure I can help you at this point. I might be mistaken about some small details, but as far as I know, every single one of those things was requested by the community and added by CEVO as a result.

You've got to be kidding me; this is probably the dumbest post I've read in this entire thread.

You're seriously going to blame the massive amount of people who joined CEVO for invite matches not being played instead of the invite teams who chose not to sign up for both leagues? At the very least, they could have signed up for CEVO just in case ESEA didn't happen, the same exact way people have been begging players to join ESEA because they get a refund in case the season doesn't happen.

Not to mention the fact that the "bandwagoners" are the ones who are responsible for the LAN happening in the first place.

I'm sorry but it's getting really hard to respond to comments like this in a neutral tone.

I had intended to make my previous big post my last one in this thread, because at this point I'm rapidly losing interest in this "discussion". The more times I have to repeat something, the more I feel like it's a lost cause and I should just let everyone else bicker over ESEA's grave.

Anyway, let's take it from the top: I'm sure that making anyone who disagrees with you out to be a CEVO fanboy makes you feel a lot better about your arguments, but I assure you that I'm really not that attached to CEVO as a league. I'll admit that the collective negatives of ESEA have driven me away from them, and CEVO is really the only viable option for me. If you think I'm retarded for not wanting to give ESEA money because I don't like them as a business then whatever; that's, like, your opinion, man. I'm also a supporter of CEVO because of the community volunteers they have helping them out.

As for what CEVO has done that ESEA hasn't? That's not exactly a fair question. I will say that CEVO's action compared to ESEA's inaction should be an attractive point for anybody to look at. At the start of this whole mess, CEVO didn't have post-game stats, didn't have STV downloads, didn't even have servers available to reserve and play on. In the span of a few short months, they implemented all of that, and all because the community asked for it. Sure, having the healing stats is a pretty small deal - but you can use that same reasoning to ask, why hasn't ESEA added it in the year+ people have been asking?

Objectively, CEVO offers nearly the same benefits that ESEA does for a smaller monetary cost. You can't say ESEA has better competition because 1) there's plenty of competition in CEVO, and schedules are dynamically assigned based on league performance (so you play people around your skill level, just like in ESEA) and 2) there are way more teams in CEVO right now than ESEA, so it's a really invalid point.

The other two things ESEA provides are a LAN, and their client-server integration.

Yes, the LAN is nice. But saying that there's no way to have entertaining, exciting and intense competition without a LAN is, and pardon my language, a load of dumb-ass fucking bullshit. If you're seriously going to tell me that only 4 teams and their on-LAN matches are worth having a league for, then you're on your way to convincing me that playing in any league is a waste of my time as well. I have no intention of making LAN at this point because I'm not currently good enough and don't have the time to put in to getting there. I play TF2 because I like my teammates and enjoy the level competition I get. If that makes me a bad player in your eyes, you really start to sound like you're damning me to hell for not holding the same beliefs you do. If you can pull the "wal-mart, nike" and "disciple" bullshit then I can absolutely pull some religion b.s.

Now that my ranting is over, the last edge that ESEA has is how easy the actual server management is. You jump in, type ".ready" and the match is on; sure, the servers may have had weird geographic distributions and poor often performance, but it was admittedly stupid simple to get in. The interface wasn't the best, but at least nobody had rcon. Still, this one advantage unfortunately isn't enough for me to want to participate in ESEA.

This is probably going to be my last full-on nerd essay on the subject, because I'm running out of meaningful things to say, and I really don't feel like there's an actual discussion going on here. All I know for sure is that I've already played a preseason match in CEVO and so far, I haven't developed any symptoms or experienced negative side effects.

I pulled these from the top of my head, but I've been using this type of thing since I started TF2.

Mouse1 will pull out your primary and fire it, Mouse2 will do the same with your secondary, and Mouse3 will swing your melee weapon.

// Primary
alias +primary "slot1;+attack"
alias -primary "-attack"
alias primary "bind MOUSE1 +primary"
primary

// Secondary
alias +secondary "slot2;+attack"
alias -secondary "-attack"
alias secondary "bind MOUSE2 +secondary"
secondary

// Melee
alias +melee "slot3;+attack"
alias -melee "-attack"
alias melee "bind MOUSE3 +melee"
melee

Reset script to undo that (for classes you might not want it, eg. anything that uses Mouse2 already):

bind "MOUSE1" "+attack"
bind "MOUSE2" "+attack2"
bing "MOUSE3" "+attack3"

He was talking about it being "bad business"; my point was that CEVO isn't missing out on money, we, as a community, are.

I'm not really sure how you can say that, I've probably seen just as many people commend CEVO for their efforts as I have people bashing ESEA for _______. I'm not going to dig around and find them because I've actually been paying attention enough to see them; if you're not, maybe you shouldn't be so quick to assume.

As far as where people are lining up to post about their opinions? They don't have to; as they say, talk is cheap, and action is what really matters. If you really think over four hundred people switched over to ESEA just because someone told you to, then I'd love to hear your reasoning about our current situation: there has been probably five to ten times as much posting in favor is ESEA (several threads, freemium offers, you name it) and opinions on why CEVO is bad, so by your logic, nobody should be in CEVO.

Finally, just because Killing has addressed the concerns doesn't mean they've gone away. I'm not really sure what you're trying to prove by saying nobody's responded to what Killing has said; what are we supposed to say? Should we be thanking ESEA for doing us a favor and fixing their problems?

CEVO reps have said time and again that the leagues they run aren't part of their business model; they do some kind of event coordination/consulting to make their money. Even if they did make money from TF2, much like ESEA, it would probably be negligible for them to have another 20 teams signed up. In addition, their goal for this (as far as I know) was to have around 30 team in Open, which they've nearly doubled. CEVO, so far, seems to be more interested in players enjoying their service and letting that speak for itself.

This right here is what I'm talking about, going in circles; we're way past the malware talk bud, try to keep up.

CEVO doesn't make a dime from the entry fees, it all goes to next season's prize pool.

(Watch out, it's another early morning, groggily written text wall by synchro.)

It's interesting to me how the same handful of people, with a few exceptions of newcomers, have been bumping this thread with mostly recycled text. It's interesting because there are 68 teams paid and ready to go in CEVO, while ESEA has less than that even signed up.

I think it's pretty easy to explain, and it's not just because a lot of people are saying "oh ESEA is bad don't play in it" to a bunch of new players and they're all signing up for CEVO: there are a lot of veterans playing.

A few months back, when there were rumblings about CEVO wanting to grab more TF2 players, we had a pretty similar division but in different roles: half of the people talking about it were saying CEVO could never compete with ESEA, and the other half wanted to support CEVO and help them improve their offering. Put into that perspective, I think it's pretty easy to see why CEVO has gobbled up so much of the playerbase; while ESEA was sitting on its monopoly, CEVO was taking action and actively listening. Suddenly, when registration opens up and people see that CEVO was actually listening the entire time, ESEA supporters start to panic, and we get a bunch of threads like this one.

A lot of the talk in this thread has been calling people out for crying about bitcoins, or for boycotting scummy business practices, or a bunch of other negative things about ESEA. You're all basically saying "yeah, ESEA did these sucky things, but they're really not a big deal so why are you going to CEVO?" which is a pretty inaccurate assessment; people didn't join CEVO just because they didn't like ESEA, they did it because CEVO has actively done more with its feedback in the last few months than ESEA has probably done in more than a year.

When people bring up the fact that ESEA has bigger prize pools and a LAN and whatever else, they're forgetting about a pretty basic fact: almost all of that is supported by the lower levels of competition in the community. Most people don't play this game for money, and a lot of them just want to be in the top X of players regardless of a LAN. If you wanted to convince people to play in ESEA, you wouldn't do it by saying there's more money or a LAN to host or that "we've worked so hard to get here don't throw it away", because none of that really matters to the average player. What matters is having fun and, typically, getting better, which can happen with or without all that stuff.

I think at this point, people are just running in circles. I also think that it's mostly ESEA players popping up in this thread, given the ratio of +frags to pro-ESEA posts (and more important, against-CEVO posts) to the actual amount of players in ESEA, so I'm probably just wasting my time.

I guess my point to this yet-another-rant is two-fold: first, people who keep posting here are a bit late, since it's all been said before; and second, that most of you are missing the real reasons people aren't playing in ESEA. I've tried to remain pretty objective in my posts, but it's hard since I honestly have no intention of ever giving ESEA more of my time or money; that being said, I have nothing against them being kept alive by other players. I just think people should stop trying to convince players to join ESEA by whining about what CEVO doesn't have, and instead prove ESEA's value that's relevant to the players you're trying to convince.