I think some people are confusing systems thinking with personal motivation here. People are generally motivated with what is best for them, and consider less the impact it has on a system as a whole.

Here are some things I think are true:

An influx of beginner teams is important to the survival of competitive 6s. Aka an open environment.

A well broadcasted and exciting high level competitive division is important to popularize the game and attract new teams. Aka an invite division

Esea has provided both, historically.

Cevo now provides a satisfactory open division, and may provide the second type.

New and lower level teams appear to be favoring CEVO. Instead of telling them their motivations are wrong and ridiculous, we should try to understand why this is happening. Quindall suggests it is both cost and friendliness.

A LAN costs lots of money.

The bigger the player base, the more money available.

Esea has a bigger player base because the lan costs are shared with CS.

Money and LAN seems to incentivize high level play. Open teams seem to bring more money. What incentives open teams? An enjoyable game experience. That is literally the fuel at the core of this scene; lots of people love this game.

As long as people love the game, they will play. As long as enough love it, they will form teams and leagues.

If the game dies, it will be because the community moves on. No money, no league, nothing will be able to sustain it for more than a season or two if people don't care. Because the money is supported by the interest in the game.

In conclusion: the game will either die or it won't. Yes, certain ecosystems support its growth, but if it's going to die, you cannot stop it.

I, for one, don't think it will die.

I think Esea should weather this season in whatever way possible. If cevo is sustainable they don't stand a chance. But if, as many fear, cevo will die, they stand to make out well in s17.

And I think everyone should play where they think they'll have the best time. It will work itself out. The discussion is helpful! The personal attacks, less so

Absolutely. I'm not suggesting open should have a bigger prize pot than invite.
I'm saying... if they're taking a loss, why such a big prize pot at all?

They could easily weather an off season by paying less out.
I understand that this has been talked to death - and I think that LAN is certainly vital to the competitiveness of the league. But the prize pots? That's the icing, not the cake.

Olympic athletes win money, but that's never why people aspire for the gold.

Was this the season that the prize pot was doubled because of the Bitcoin incident?
I would expect ESEA to take a loss across the board that season in order to save face.

Also; don't forget that they have ancillary revenue streams through ads, product partnering, etc.

However, it does seem like they make less profit than I expected, as with these numbers. It seems strange that their biggest expense (prize pot) is misaligned with their biggest income (open).

I'm confused how this could be the case.
Prize pots are guaranteed by LAST season's revenue, correct?

If that's the case, you're looking at 50 teams currently signed up over 4 divisions. At $35 per person, that's a conservative estimate of $10,500 gross revenue for this season.

Now this might mean a smaller prize pot for s17, but there's no way tf2's overhead comes close to 10,5 for a season. For Tf2, ESEA employs Killing and Tri part time, and a portion of the client developer, and presumably a webmaster.

If I'm right, it kinda seems like a threat. "we will drop tf2"

I played with Capnfapn for a season and think rather highly of him.

Fun kid, never rages, great attitude, wants to improve and a good team player.

Will charge you excessive $$s for his music but then return it via paypal.

I highly recommend picking him up. He's go great DM and is only improving.

This is 100% true.
Right around the time there was this big push to make TF2 more accessible I kinda came up with a scheme to improve the camerawork of tf2 by incorporating both better camerawork, and new visualizations (ala sportscenter). This was going to include Stat Overlays for players, Intro videos, better camera placement (maintaining 180 degree continuity etc), freeze frames, replays, and also new overlays that could highlight the places of all the players.

I'm a film student at Uni and I thought that I could do a demo of this and sortof introduce the concepts to other casters and see if it helped.

I played on a team in ESEA last season as med with Scott as my pocket, and one day we were dicking around in mumble and I told him about this project, which I was kinda hoping to really polish and present to the community as a surprise, and I asked if he could help with the source side of it becauese I knew little about that. We went into an empty server (might have been Scotts?) and just tried different things. We turned sv_pure off and I dicked around a bit with unloading various textures and shit, but again, I'm inexperienced. I think I mentioned that wallhacking might be a good idea, and I asked if he'd test it out. He said sure, and a while later we jumped back in and dicked around - he tried sending me screenshots of me through walls and he COULDNT EVER GET IT TO WORK. like seriously. He never managed to make the wallhack function. He was pretty bad with it, to be honest, and I was a little disappointed. We did it for about 1 hour during one day and never addressed it again.

My alternative to wallhacks was to use an overhead view and motion-track all the different players and then auto-keyframe the parts when they went behind walls (if that means anything to anyone). This would have been tedious.

I cannot prove to anyone that Scott doesn't hack because obviously only he would know. I can't even know for sure, although I am inclined to trust him. I do know that
A) I played with him all season and I never got the sense that he had a preternatural sense of anything. We were low open for godssakes. I maincalled and Scott never gave me information he shouldn't have been able to know. He was not consistently topfragging and I really don't think he was hacking.
B) I did indeed have a casting idea and approach him to help me find a way to bring new visualizations to the scene. He sucked with the hack, and nothing became of it

I've since quit TF2 because I'm taking 19 credits and a million projects, and I have also abandoned my project.

To summarize: Scott isn't lying, that really did happen. i don't know about all the rest.

PS!
If anyone into casting wants to talk to me about how to pull off the new additions to casting that I was talking about, I would love to. A lot of them would be hard to do live, but for post-production there's SO MUCH you could do to make the battles (which are fast paced and involve many people) coherent. By focusing on A) individual achievement - through things like instant-replay, player introductions, and stats (at a certain midpoint vs. overall) and B) team strategy - through consistent camerawork, graphical overlays of team strategy, and more visible (luminescent? is that possible?) textures on players.
However, if you think I'm full of shit and talking a lot more than I can make happen... you're probably right. but it never hurts to dream.

Scooter's got great DM and did great as my pocket last season.
His game sense is top notch. His comms are pretty sexy.
Very dedicated, always down to practice, definitely worth a pickup. I really enjoyed playing with him.

However... worst schedule-sense NA.