kaidus"We have also been able to reduce costs by contributing individually where we can.."
What does this mean exactly? As far as I can tell the only expenses that aren't listed in the breakdown is the £40 it will cost kos and mike collectively to get to the LAN, and Mikes accommodation which is entirely separate. The tickets were given to you for free which is left out of this information (so potential donators are led to believe you actually bought something on your own), are you honestly asking people to believe that despite "caring only about LAN" for the past 6 months that the six of you can only come up with enough money for two British people to travel to a British LAN, and even go as far as asking for £60 for another British person to get to the event.. Considering one of your players just dropped £250 or so on a monitor that he doesn't need (at all) earlier this week, this is just bullshit.
You don't know our financial situation at all, Mike & kos could afford to pay out of pocket so they did, the rest of us asked for help because we have to. We did get the BYOC tickets for free and it wasn't mentioned because we didn't see a reason to, this is the first time any of us do this sort of thing and the fundraiser was rushed out in about 2-3 hours saturday evening. And yes, this is our fault for leaving it so late but there's nothing we can do about that now. I might be the only person that can't see the way kos wrote this makes it sound like we're trying to deceive the community, if that's the case obviously it wasn't our intention since there's no point doing something like that in the TF2 community, because everyone is already extremely generous, doesn't matter which circumstances.
I dropped £200 on a monitor last friday because my old one had broken and it's gonna take 3 weeks to be repaired, I don't want to practice for i58 on a 60hz monitor so I bought a new one with my money from my savings that I wasn't gonna use before I move out in a couple of years. When I get my old monitor back I will sell it and break even, so that's just completely irrelevant.
kaidus"and shoving more people into a hotel room than is advised."
5 people in two rooms. Considering there is already next-to free "rough" accommodation at the event, asking for one hotel room seems entirely sufficient. Fair enough if you want to get two, but don't make it sound like you are significantly cutting corners here. This is one guy sleeping on the floor, maybe you rotate so it's a different person on the floor for one night each. It's completely disingenuous to even suggest that this is a noteworthy sacrifice, it's just carefully worded to maintain the farce that you've done anything or made any sort of contributions as a team.
We could sleep on the floor in the venue but so could every other team that's ever asked for money to go to LAN. When you're going as a top team ideally you'd want to get more than 5-6 hours sleep across a whole weekend of tournament play. Since the end goal for every top team attending is to finish 1st. Having somewhere to stay privately with your team is gonna help you win in the long run and that's the reason why teams go to these events. Again, I might be the only one who can't see the way this is written makes it sound like we're cutting corners, maybe it's because im foreign.
kaidusYou even ask for money for a PC for alle when he plays on a laptop at home, yet still try to maintain the impression you are keeping this as low-budget as possible? There are also numerous viable options for free PCs that certain members of your team definitely know about, but instead go straight to asking for money. I guarantee if you don't hit the fundraising goal, you will still have six players at LAN with entirely adequate computers and monitors.
Yes we ask for money so alle can play the most important LAN in TF2 on a PC that gets more than 60-70 fps and has no input lag because we want to win, and so having a PC that can run the game properly is a big deal to us. To begin with we thought we had monitors and PCs available for everyone, but it turns production are using this equipment.
kaidusIt seems to me that you need roughly half of the money you're asking for, and the fact you've been talking about going to this event for so long makes it ridiculous that only kos and mike can cover/contribute to their own costs. I'm aware you had a "sponsor" until a few months ago and this will probably be the excuse of choice, but it's really not a good one when you consider what that sponsor was and how long ago that became obvious even to you guys. Also to be clear I'm not suggesting people shouldn't donate, I hope they still do because the event is better with you there but just be honest about the circumstances and most people will still donate to see a good event. No need to trick the rest.
We could go to the LAN and not have anywhere to stay and play on shit PCs and save money yes, but it is also very unlikely we'd perform well and that's the reason we're going to LAN in the first place, to win. Forming the team for i58 was definitely our goal, but I think the biggest LAN in the game is most teams goal whenever they form, not all of them stick together long enough or end up wanting to go when it comes to it though. We didn't confirm everyones attendance till a week or so after DHS.
Our sponsor fucked us, they told us they'd still reimburse us for Dreamhack even if we left them before i58. Which would've helped us massively since we paid out of pocket for DHS.