THEY CAN'T LET US KNOW THEIR STRATS, IT'S COMPETITIVE

harbleu, deliver us from this suffering

pepperidge farm remembers

300-600 people can't know what it takes to WIN

You can't just TELL people that DEMO isn't supposed to WATCH FLANK

Or strategies that include PUSHING ON ADVANTAGE

Next thing you know they'll start only playing on their own servers and allow no specs except team members so they can keep the STV demos for themselves.

FUCKING CLOSE

if you wanna be bad like the mud men, i stream

lol guys, guys, come on. how do you expect teams to brainstorm some groundbreaking strategies on viaduct with you guys listening? it's selfish of you guys to want all these strategies. if the strat is to cap the middle and only point, this needs to be a secret until match time.

better edit that before the invite illuminati break your wrists for your attempt at loosening their vice grip on tf2 theorycraft.

strats must flow

http://i.imgur.com/mudnq.jpg

reptilian takeover is nearly complete

I would like to see a solid argument for not streaming scrims. Literally the only advantage you'd gain is on new maps. You're not gonna come up with some crazy badlands strategy that nobody has ever seen before. Or one that isn't quickly reacted to.
Just want to know what the argument for it is. Because the only one I've heard is "strats" and then I see the matches and think, "Oh, that same shit everybody does, crazy."

Better FPS, possibly less lag, can talk shit without repercussions.

talk shit get hit

http://www.twitch.tv/tri_/new

invite Illuminati at it again

this is the best part

*

Shit talk is shit talk. Who cares if you don't like another player. Better fps? Sometimes I get that, most of the streamers are still getting pretty solid fps when they stream. Less lag? Very valid, but it doesn't affect statistics.

im not invit anymore............................................................. RiP

+ +

I streamed basically everything for the past year or so. At this point I'm perfectly comfortable streaming and it doesn't hurt my in-game performance so I have no problem with it most of the time. That does not mean that my teammates are equally comfortable talking about things in front of a live audience so if people aren't ok with it I generally respect their opinions. With the new team, we were trying to figure shit out and I didn't want people holding back advice and criticisms because I was streaming. I like getting things out there asap so they can be fixed. Team is coming together well now so expect more in the future.

I've also learned that reading chat during scrims is impossible. If I don't turn it off there are a LOT of stupid things said that just take your head out of the game for a bit and literally none of it is ever useful to me. I don't like reading negative shit about me and my team so I just avoid the issue by closing chat when I scrim.

And I agree that learning another team's strats is usually useless. However, this is invite and people practice and play a lot and teams are usually really competitive with one another, and certain things like knowing which routes players take to middles and learning tendencies of certain players and teams IS an advantage that good players can exploit, even if it is a very small one. Giving up even a slight advantage before the DM fights ever start is something some teams don't want to do. Think of the dota community and how many of the top teams ever stream their practice. They only ever stream pubs, the reason it is still popular is because the pub format IS the competitive format. This is not the case in competitive tf2, but that's a whole other issue that could be debated.

tl;dr: It doesn't hurt MUCH, but it probably doesn't help either so some people prefer not to stream scrims.

P.S. I don't appreciate all the hate I read about me not streaming, regardless of what anyone's personal (incorrect) assumptions are about why I haven't been streaming lately. Especially after streaming almost everything for the past year which lead to a few pretty rough seasons. Thanks for watching.

aren't "i don't feel like streaming" or "i don't want to stream" good enough reasons?

You must be a great person IRL if you go around shit talking people without caring. Just because it's online doesn't make it look any better. And plenty of shit talk isn't about the person's character but their skill. Also, your last two responses are weird as fuck.

Acceptable

Of course I'm an awesome person, because I don't hang out with people that respond to shit-talk like it's actually an insult in a competitive setting. If you're playing a game of M:tG and you insult somebody's deck building, they usually don't give a shit. If they win it's more gratifying, and if they lose, it's a criticism they take in.

That's an acceptable argument. It's high enough level play that little advantages can tilt the scales. Some of that is a short coming that they'll pick up during matches I'd assume, but nonetheless valid.

R.I.P stream sniping

Sean, why do you care what some random stream viewer has to say about you or your team? I think Pyour/Seagull/Zbryan/Justin/Fragile are secure enough with themselves to take a handful of jabs from random aliased stream watchers. I would hope that you are as well. You don't need to shield them from low grade trolling that they'll never know about much less care at all about.

If you, or any other streamer dont feel like streaming, fine. I'm not going to put anyone in an armbar to stream scrims -- I just think if our endgame goal is to continue growing TF2, having consistent content being presented by the invite teams is helpful to that end. We want casuals (people that don't click every tf.tv thread, or know much of anything about the players) to get to know the top team players and their personalities. As we continue to cast multiple invite games a week, having our viewers get to know the players as more than just _____ playing _____ class will help engage them with the game/scene.

So, I urge the invite teams to consider streaming a few scrims a week. I honestly believe it will help. I'm looking at you, Tagg. Bitch.

i'd stream but i don't have good internet at college. However, I'm building a nice computer so i'll try to mess with some settings and see if i can get something watchable with 1 upload

I think that aside from helping little newblets out by offering golden nuggets of information ascertained during the course of a scrim, having 300-400 people consistently watching streams grows the community as a whole by putting tf2 up on the twitchtv front page.

I know that abstracts like "helping people" or "raising awareness of competitive tf2" aren't always the types of things that motivate people on tough days where they know they are going to rage at their team. But now that Lange and Seanbud are no longer streaming scrims, there aren't many other teams left.

We can hold on hope that cool people like RaysFire will garner 100+ viewers through consistency and interaction, but even then, he's IM and not invite.

I'd never be able to be someone who could stream myself for a plethora of reasons, so I can't begin to fully comprehend how much pressure there is... but at the same time, it's kind of one of those things where it feels like something is missing.

The community was all abuzz about the steps that have been taken to put tf2 more in the spotlight. Having no invite scrims being streamed feels like a step backwards. Maybe we need someone to just sit in spec for a could of scrims so that way they can interact more/no mumble coms are being throw out there. But finding someone willing to do that seems even less likely than an invite player deciding to stream again. If there was something else filling the gap--say more original content or games cast nightly, maybe that would be an option as well. Maybe such a thing would be a better option.

I just hope some middle ground gets found.

edit:
Maybe instead of focusing on the invite scrim stream "issue", we should be thinking as a community, how to get the 400+ viewers back a night. Recently when I check to see what streams are on, it seems like collectively it's about 100. Getting those viewers back, and putting out good content might be worth more effort than all of us making a few people feel bad because they want to give their team an edge.

For a few weeks things were looking good for TF2 but then some invite players lost sight of the big picture. Brad, Tagg, et al, you've got to wake up and look around.