This is being worked on.

As I've said or implied, I do have the blueprints to making a league that I designed a few months ago and have been tweaking ever since. You can most certainly make a league that is superior to ESEA in every way except for the LAN and the anti-cheat client, but it's going to take more than one person to make.

If a new league doesn't pop up, there are still the alternative leagues like UGC and CEVO. We already know they won't be making any significant changes in order to accommodate the player influx - they're just going to add in new divisions and call it a day.

Thus, there's not really additional risk in trying to make a new league, no more than in a normal effort.

The think I dislike about all of the alternative leagues as they stand right now is the fact that they rely on teams providing their own server. This is one thing ESEA does right - they provide a standard experience. You know that no matter who you play or when, you're always going to be able to see stats, you're always going to have SourceTV coverage available, and you're always going to have a demo download after the match.

I think that the most important reason for trying to build a league from the ground up is in order to try to create the best league possible. We know what complaints we had with ESEA and we know what disadvantages other leagues have.

We have the dreams, we have the ideas, we have the knowledge, we have the skills. Obviously this cannot be completed by one person working alone or with some spare change lying around or in the span of a few weeks (believe me, I've tried), but it's not like we don't have the resources to get it done.

I can't say that we'll necessarily succeed right off the bat, but it's better to try to innovate rather than settle.

Before we start trying to narrow down our choices, I think it's important to realize that we have the rest of the ESEA regular season and playoffs to figure things out.

Personally, I think that we should allow leagues to submit their own bids and explain why they would be best suited to host the ESEA refugees. After all, if a league wants to be the future of competitive TF2, they should show that they have the dedication and ability to do so well.

For one, you're just abandoning the prize pots that you paid league fees for.

Second of all, there is absolutely no way that any solution could present itself in a matter of days so that the league schedule would be unaffected. At minimum, it would take at least a few weeks if not months to get something decent put together.

The best thing to do is just to finish the season. Once playoffs are done we can definitely have all the time we want to debate and argue over a new league, but not right in the middle of a season.

Well, in order to have the league provide servers, you've either got to a) have the league maintain a large pool of servers for match nights or b) be able to provision servers for match time.

Most leagues practice a) in a limited fashion, expecting most teams to get their own server since they'll use it to scrim. ESEA does it fully. The problem with a), however, is that it's expensive to maintain servers that only end up getting used for a few hours a day.

There isn't a league that does b) yet, because it's a bit more complicated than just running and doling out servers, but if done right it'd be more stable and less expensive than running a pool of servers. This is the option that I've been looking into for a while, and while I do have a pretty good understanding of how to get it done, I just haven't been able to pull through and build it yet. The cool thing with this, however, is that if you can get this up and running, it's relatively trivial to bring back most of the features that ESEA did right (notably absent: the ever-coveted LAN and an anti-cheat client).

That's what they get for settling for $350,000 - the right to deny they ever did anything wrong.

(emphasis mine)

If the community would get over having a LAN and an anti-cheat client temporarily, I could probably create a league that replicates almost everything else ESEA gets right, add more features that would actually be useful, and almost certainly charge less for the privilege. Of course, I probably wouldn't rake in nearly as much as ESEA does (considering they just agreed to a $350k settlement), but hey.

No, that was part of the complaint. It wasn't part of the settlement, or at least I couldn't find it on my quick skim.

And he's even hiring for the web development now. There was a job listing on the ESEA forums.

Nope, it was the initial request. It's not part of the final settlement.

If you have a YouTube channel, you should be able to migrate that to a separate page from your Google+ profile, and pages have the same abilities as normal profiles.

I'll look into making a bot, since it doesn't seem to difficult given what I already have.

Interestingly enough, iT is signed up for CEVO as of this morning.

The math only says 16.9 days though... still impressive.