if this is actually gonna happen please dont keep it to na only

3 Years Ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230205234221/https://tfcleague.com/2022/02/11/lets-try-this-thing-again-a-message-from-sidular-wall-of-text/

1.5 Years Ago

https://i.imgur.com/3O41cvD.png

It's been 3 years (but for those in the know, much longer) yet you've only and still continued to talk up ambitious goals without anything to show for it. I'd love to be proven wrong though. But please stop misleading a community by making these posts without actually having started anything up, because you look like Nikola Motors right now.

You started TFCL back in 2016 and what do you have to show for it? A Liquipedia page with only one tournament of note with only a $120 prize pool and whose last edit from 2023 was:

I'm tired of watching you talk up a league and seeing a community react to it with a glimmer of hope that you are this dashing knight in armor that will rejuvenate a scene. In fact I'm surprised people are reacting to this thread with optimism having been around during the time of your involvement in the scene. Other tournament organizers and people who work tirelessly behind the scenes to run cups, leagues, and LANs know very well about you and won't speak up, but I'll speak for the majority of them.

is this hypothetical league going to mirror rgl cheating/"player misconduct" bans?

Yeah this is sort of what I thought was going on. The insistence that "Sidular is a company" is misleading in this case. That site lists two contributors, you and one other fellow. You can call it what you want on paper but this is not some separate entity like you seemed to imply, this is your project that is legally separate from you but for all intents and purposes is a 2 man operation with you at the helm. For tax purposes it may be distinct, but this is just your money.

My concerns about somebody's private capital being what sustains the NA scene are valid I think. RGL has problems, but I actually think it makes a lot of sense for the main league to be fully self sustaining financially. I'm not sure if RGL turns a profit at the moment, but it is currently being run with the goal that prize pools, lans and all of these other services are covered by league fees. That means lower prize pools, but it also means that we aren't reliant on the whims of some rich kid.

RGL's unilateral control over TF2 in NA kinda sucks but at least there isn't one guy at the top who can just threaten to pull out if things aren't run exactly how they want. That might be a bit of an unfair characterization, but its one I feel like I have to make when I hear the way you characterize RGL.

At the end of the day running a league is really hard work and people are going to be unhappy with you. You seem to have a bone to pick with RGL and that's reasonable, but if you're going to try to fix the issue I think you need to make an effort to actually identify what the issues you have are. You shit on RGL pretty hard in that news post but don't seem willing to get into details. Like this whole thing is framed in a way that implies that its a lack of features and services? I don't buy that.

Why exactly do you feel that we need another CEVO? There are plenty of valid reasons, but if you don't outline them I am going to assume you wish you could say slurs in matches.

So, after sleeping on it and reading the other posts in this thread, I wanted to ask a few more questions.

1. I don't know how other people feel, but I would rather have 3-4 giant international LANs every year than an entirely new league. If it's truly a part of your mission not to be a direct competitor to RGL, then it makes more sense to do something different. I'm imagining a LAN circuit with weeks-long online qualifiers, etc.; something like this wouldn't interfere with what RGL is doing. Why not do this?
   
   That being said, I don't actually mind if your goal is to overlap/replace RGL, but I'm wondering about this since you keep saying you don't want this new league to be a direct competitor. Given this project's history of going bust, it seems like it would be a lot easier to "test the waters" running a few standalone tournaments, maybe a LAN, before deciding to go all-in on an entire league system. Setting up a league is ambitious -- and in RGL's case requires consistent unpaid work -- so why not host a few tournaments first to build trust in the community, prove that the money exists & that this is real before trying to create an entirely new league system. Hosting a tournament is hard, but creating a new league is, like, at least ten times as hard. Why not do the easy stuff first?
   
   
2. Another question I had, really a request, is whether it's possible for you to be completely transparent on how far along the project is. I don't want to just trust that it will be shipped this year; I think it would really help with people's skepticism if you gave people open access to seeing how much work has actually been done. I want to be able to look at screenshots, videos, or log in to a beta version to see that work is actually being done. I don't want to get in a situation a la Kickstarter where communication goes dark for weeks.
   
   
3. The #1 question I have is about the money. If you had said "I'm wealthy and love TF2 so I'm going to fund it basically out of charity," that would make sense, but this stuff about a business funding everything is confusing. I want to hear directly from the people with the money (you?) the reason why they are throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars away on TF2. And why $40k per season? We'd be grateful with much less, especially if it reduces the chance of the project burning out.

I also wanted to mention that if this ends up working out, I will be a huge supporter, everyone will be grateful and buzzing, and it'll be the best thing to happen to TF2 since I started playing 6 years ago. I'm super excited that this even has a chance to happen. My suggestion right now would be to build trust with the community given your track record of shelved projects.

4 international LANs every year would be extremely expensive, meaning pretty much all of the prize pool money would have to be diverted to funding the lans. On top of this, it is extremely hard for a normal working person to find time in their schedule to travel across the world 4 times each year.

Also, not to sound like a dick but I dont think we would be grateful for much less. Right now the prize pool is pretty much the only thing differentiating this from RGL, and considering how many times this league has been hyped up just to disappear, I find it hard to believe people are going to even bother with it unless there is a chance to win serious money.

I think a league with a 40k prizepool is a good thing, actually. I understand the apprehension because TFCL has been pretty unsuccessful, but having investment from a business is really a huge deal for the scene and I would encourage everyone to actually give the league a try.

I have had conversations with Sidular about this before and he seems pretty determined this time. He has all sorts of ideas he wants to implement. I think it is fair for people to feel skeptical/doubtful. I think the concern of relying on one person for funding is fair. Sigafoo was the primary funding for RGL for a long time. RGL has never really been able operate at a profit. It always broke even or operated at a loss.

But, I do have hopes that Sidular can pull it off. It is time for there to be an alternative to RGL for players who may no longer want to play in RGL. I know quite a few people who quit playing competitively due to RGL's staff and structure of how its managed. A huge chunk of why I stopped playing was due to RGL as well.

Best of luck to Sidular and team.

Im more skeptical because this isn't your personal money.

I feel like I’ve seen like 5 different times over the past like 6 or so years when you’ve made huge promises and failed to deliver on them. A huge prizepool would be good for the game but I’m extremely skeptical on whether this will happen. I’d love to be proven wrong however.

Also is there any reason why you had to make an RGL competitor? Sure RGL has its own fair share of issues but splitting our already small community between 2 leagues doesn’t seem like it’s a good idea, and I’m also skeptical whether someone who has not really interacted with the community can do a better job running a TF2 league. Like others have said it would be extremely cool to see these efforts go towards having more international lans happen imo (the last big international (as in, na/eu/au representation) lan before fireside was in 2017, if I’m not mistaken). I really don’t know if an RGL competitor is what TF2 needs.

hows the mmorpg goin

Okay I decided to make a real post about this; I SEVERELY doubt that Sidular can actually support this with income from his “business backing”.

Your company has four projects listed. TFCL doesn’t exist and you’ve done nothing with eFiction, to your own admission. That leaves two, PSX Extreme and DoRoyal.

PSX Extreme is plastered with ads and it gets no engagement on any of its posts. The articles might be written by real people but it’s functionally the same as any other AI generated news site that just creates articles to show up in searches and get clicks for ad money. I struggle to believe this is bringing in any significant income, especially because there’s a Patreon page on the website that specifically states “traditional ads won’t pay the bills anymore, so we decided to create a Patreon!” You have a list of patrons on the same page and there are literally 0 names on it.

DoRoyal probably has made some money, but I doubt it could support something like TFCL. It is a web hosting service that on the surface has references to it from other sites, solid reviews, and some semblance of a consumer base. However, these references from other sites are all sponsored, as you can see in the disclaimer at the start of this video: https://youtu.be/WsZ8N-vIA9A?si=n5e5I6dO3BG9AdOW

I can’t prove this, but most of the positive reviews on TrustPilot for DoRoyal just stink of being paid for. The negative reviews, however, are DEFINITELY written by actual people. You respond to every one of them with different excuses but it really just seems like it’s a subpar service or even just a straight up scam. Reddit threads about DoRoyal have many users saying it’s just a scam, but you post in every one of them to try and defend it. I just simply don’t care about your defense, though; either $50 lifetime hosting is a scam, or it’s a horrendous business decision. Neither one makes me want to trust you with a league.That deal was supposed to be a limited time promotion, but i still see it advertised years later after the first posts about it, so I’m assuming it’s just a scam.

I'm surprised that you've been standing on the sidelines planning all of this for the game and didn't bother to think to do anything while we were having the biggest LAN the game has ever seen with self-funded teams travelling from AU and EU to NA. It would have been a great show of good faith to try and partner with fireside or at least contribute to the prize pool or funding the international teams or something.

In general I think that you should take this money and not try to create a homogenized competitor to the infrastructure we already have in place and instead try to partner with or invest in the organizations we already have established. Maybe scale down to just hosting cups and a LAN or 2 instead of splintering the pug and league system we already have going on.

8 years ago you announced TFCL for the first time. Seven years ago you made the announcement that you would be providing free LAN travel for top teams to UberJam. Six years ago you announced the revival of TFCL, the cancellation of UberJam, and some weekend cups. Five years ago you had two articles written about another revival of TFCL. You didn't make any posts about a revival you tried to do 3 years ago and all we have is a now deleted article and that thread to show for it. TFCL has a liquipedia page that is two sentences with one tournament/season that was ran. Now we have this.

Why show up every 2-3 years just to promise something big that never comes to fruition? Why the refusal to support what is already established in the scene? You know what would've been massively helpful to have instead of an ever-growing prize pool that never gets paid out? A sponsorship for the largest LAN TF2 has since Rewind, or hell any LAN going on across the US like RGL, Europe like poLANd.tf, or Australia like LAN Down Under. This act of popping up every so often to show off a new project that will never become realized has got to be tiring for anyone who looks for any glimmer of hope of growth in the scene.

Furthermore I want to mention. There are other organizers that we should be supporting/participating in that have already done more than what Sidular has done in less than a year, quite frankly.

Some that I'd like to note are:

- Horse Run Monthly (GamerLatam): 7 cups hosted across 7 months with +$3,000 in prize money already paid out
- QEL (Quick Esports League): 2 cups (Cup #1 & #2) hosted with over $1,100 paid in prize money (mix of keys/USD) across divisions of varying skill levels
- MGE.TF: $5k 1v1 World Championship + an ongoing EU MGE League with over $2k in prize money across two divisions. Hell they even have a pretty decent looking website too with a rulebook at that. All for MGE.
- TF2 Coaching Central: Hosts of the TF2 Coaching Central Newbie Cup. They've been able to get a fiesty $100 prize pool for their most recent cup on top of in-game participant medals DESPITE no income/revenue streamlining into their efforts. On that very same vein, Asiafortress is also hosting a "Gibus Cup," which essentially is the same thing as the Newbie Cup, but for the APAC region.

Sure they will probably run into the same issues with longstanding participation that also plagued the Essentials Monthly Cups. But key differences that I see from TFCL are:

1) They don't make a grand show of an announcement. When they have an event finalized, there is no grand show of these events. They make an announcement, give you a date, and you play in it and get paid promptly
2) Receptive to criticism in the sense that they actually implement changes for the better
e.g.

• QEL mirroring severe RGL bans
  
• GamerLatam working with other organizers like TF2 Coaching Central, RGL, Fireside to better plan out their cups
  
• TF2 Coaching Central working with RGL to host cups in the off-season to time their events with signups for RGL
  
• MGE.TF's inaugural season being Europe only, which is great for Europe since I think the region lacks prize pool seasons other than ETF2L for the most part (Could be wrong). From talking with Neptune personally I can see why they wanted EU.

3) Transparency. I mean hell I see a channel in the QEL Discord server that has screenshots of them paying out their participants.
4) Integration into the current competitive ecosystem. TF2 Coaching Central's Newbie Cup streamlines a player's path to Invite (so per say) by giving them a chance to test the waters of competitive TF2. They like competitive 6s? With the experience they've had from the cup, they can further test their skills out in RGL. I mean, that's the whole goal of the cup anyways: to get people playing 6s and eventually play in RGL.

Do I see any of this from TFCL? Aside from a wall of text, no. I ask that we support those that are actually taking initiative and putting the money and time where their mouths are without all this showboating. Sure, the marketing for these events could be better... but they're trying and that's what matters. There's even people on the r/truetf2 subreddit trying to help market and publicize these events. Those are the people we should be returning the efforts towards.

https://media.tenor.com/romq9dCYWPcAAAAM/disappointed-fridge.gif

In Sidular's defence, following his post about his Father, his Mother also passed away not long after that post. I think we need to give some leeway here.

Don't get me wrong, I think there are some really ambitious ideas that might need to be reassessed, but Sidular is obviously passionate and I think with some adjustments, there is definitely a space for him to run something.

Deleted, I'll hold that L.

That blog post was written by a different person, if you look in the comments you'll see someone mention "artphilia" who responds to the comment. Looking further into it they speak German and wrote a blog post on their personal website https://artphilia.de/das-leben-und-ich/ that mentions the anniversary of their mother passing away in November. On the blog are also more posts about having knee surgery etc.
If you look at the page https://web.archive.org/web/20200512010849/https://efiction.org/2019/02/19/short-news/ it makes no mention of Sidular, who "adopted" the site efiction later on: https://efiction.org/2020/06/07/up-for-adoption/#comment-24310 (even this article now says it was posted by Sidular).
I imagine during the transition smth wasn't adjusted properly so all the efiction articles appear as being posted by Sidular.