What divisions are you wanting to combine? (I'm assuming the main + adv = div 1)

Unless you opting in for the extreme and just go with "Open / IM / Invite" Model. (This assumes moving AM + IM --> Open)

I feel the only unintended consequence is if going with the former (div 1), teams/players are more reluctant because (a) they don't want the "beating" from invite sandbaggers and/or (b) they don't want to pony up the cash. This in more regards to IM move-ups or returning low-mid main teams -- not to say they don't have the vigor to do so.

For the latter, its just becomes a battle royal -- "Adapt or die" moment/environment. But I DONT think we are there yet so...

I'm definitely assuming its the former lol. Personally, I never got to play DIV 1 in S13 -- can't recall if was productive or ineffective division.

https://i.imgur.com/Vokrx4q.png

To be fair, we've returned to roughly pre-COVID team numbers. A gradual decline in teams and players was always somewhat expected as things settled back down.

I think there are a few broader areas that leagues and the competitive community should be looking at:

• How competitive TF2 is perceived: How does it look from the outside, both to the wider TF2 community and the general gaming community?
  
• The value proposition: What are the benefits of playing competitive TF2 compared to investing time in other games?
  
• Formats and map quality: Are the maps, format & meta still fun to play? Are we becoming stale or failing to evolve?
  
• The pathway into competitive TF2: It's a mess. Every league has its own newbie guide and introduction to competitive TF2, PUG discords/services are fragmented across different communities and platforms. There's no clear, consistent entry point for new players.
  
• The in-game competitive experience: The official competitive matchmaking mode gives players a pretty misleading impression of what competitive TF2 actually looks like.
  
• Promotion and visibility: We're lacking in general promotion, advertising and outreach to bring new players into the scene.
  
• Production and sponsorship: Broadcast production quality, securing sponsors and making the competitive scene more commercially sustainable.

I think there's a tendency to focus on retaining the players we already have, when we should also be looking at why new players aren't coming in, what barriers they're facing, and what would make competitive TF2 appealing to someone who has never played it before. We are an old game, but it would not be difficult to play catch up.

if it dies, it dies

does jesus love tf2, wonder?

I believe div-1 was created Season 13 because there was 3 or 4 advanced teams so the admins just forced the combination of the div. Unfortunately for the main players, The Mafia was born from this season and dominated the season even with some restrictions.

This pre-season there was 6 invite teams (1 team was dying) and 6 advanced teams. The admins wanted to combine advanced into invite, the advanced players didn't like that and all the adv teams threatened to disband if this were to occur. You can see the drama behind that on b4nny's twitter. Unfortunately the best option here is to combine and make a Div-1 next season, we now have the problem of how many "Advanced" teams are going to play and if the restrictions will be fair.

P.S. if we make it Div-1 again please make it pick/ban i hate weekly maps especially when it matters for a top 4-8 playoffs.

And yet all of his tweets are just him bitching and complaining while providing zero solutions. This post discussion is unironically more productive than anything he has tweeted in the past 2 weeks.

At least @mitch provides legitimate discussion topics and potential avenues for the scene to consider.

Retaining players is extremely important though. There were almost an equivalent amount of AM teams as there were IM-Invite teams this season. Another good question is why aren't more open players making it into higher divisions?
I think it is partly due to the huge difference in commitment between open and IM-Invite... Open players are going from a free league with one match per week into pay to play and two matches per week. Having to double down on time where you are expected to be somewhere and now paying to be there is crazy. You effectively have to make TF2 the only game you are playing if you want to be successful and also have a reasonable/healthy amount of screen-time.

Is there a way to fix this or is the two match per week system vital for higher divisions?

He loves everyone

With the "old" config (not progressive ruleset) teams could just play a single 2-map offi on one night and get the same amount of gameplay in one night of gaming as RGL currently has in 2. This is what EU does currently, and the infinite overtime is kept only for playoffs.

Seeing that we're essentially where we started from pre-COVID, I think it's true that player retention and player attraction are both going to be pretty critical if we want to keep competitive TF2 from kicking the bucket. That being said, we can't rely on another COVID level spike from giving us that peak back, but we also don't have a framework that actually lets us do anything on scale in the way "competitors" of TF2's would be doing, which is industry-level money and a centralized place to do everything. And really, there's no way for us to do that anymore, barring some truly exceptional gravitas that somehow gets everybody in this huge umbrella under one roof.
The money that's in the scene currently is pretty limited, and getting rid of limitations like paying down to play in a higher div works but also counteracts any money that RGL or whoever's charging would need in order to advertise to players that left or for new players to try their hand at learning the formats, which is its own vague and archaic issue that everybody under the sun has tried to solve and can't really get an answer for because of the whole lacking a centralized place problem
Without getting too in the weeds I think one of our boats off was actually getting a competitive launcher and our own game + developers when that had energy going behind it, and it would have solved a lot of issues that mitch describes and that I do agree with fully. That also takes money, and developers, both of which are in short hand because there are few developers and not much money to support them with.This is still a possible route though, and mastercomms has been doing really good work with optimization, but we would need to get on that train before it's too late, which it could already be

The learning curve to even play AM from scratch is so tough that we're effectively filtering out anyone that won't spend 15-20 hours a week learning the game. The newbie cups are probably our best way of getting new players into the game, and they even make that time requirement explicit. It's no surprise that we lose people to burnout, or just employment. How many players have we lost because they're not willing or able to spend that much time? It's a huge bummer.

I also think that match quality is pretty bad at the low level. We get 8 matches a season, and usually 3 of them are competitive. Everything else is just a wash. It's not a great experience!

We could make a lot of gains on player retention by focusing on the segment of the playerbase that wants 6s to be a part of their lives, but has a limit on how much they can dedicate to it.

This is the exact reason that UGC 6s was good for the scene back in the day. You could do pretty well in pretty much any division without being very good at the game. There were SO many great players that got their first taste of comp TF2 through pub server community UGC teams - I doubt most of them would have stuck with it if they'd gone 0-16 in open their first season instead.

I don't know if this is helpful, but I'm a relatively new player and I've had a great deal of interest in competitive, but have yet to jump in. Here are a couple of my thoughts, sorry for the ramble:

(1) I'm really nervous to get into scrims or pugs, even the newbie ones, when I have almost no contact with the format. I play a good deal of 5CP in casual, but even without any real experience in 6s, I know that 5CP in casual is not a substitute for 5CP in 6s. On occasion, you can find a game that feels fairly balanced and is 7v7 or 8v8 or something in casual and it has been some of the most fun I've had in TF2 so far. If there was a no-restrictions (or restricted, either or) 6s matchmaking system that was (1) used frequently and (2) not horrifically broken, I think it would help me and other new players build confidence to get involved further.

(2) Someone mentioned it already, but the system for getting involved feels confusing and a bit daunting. I think this one is probably trickier to solve, especially since there is no in-game competitive gamemode [Competitive Mode Matchmaking, y'know?] that people use. But in my experience, I've had trouble figuring where I can play pugs of 6s as a noob without being greatly outside of my skill level.

(3) Skill reccs./culture of improvement. "Culture of improvement" is sort of a stand in phrase, because it doesn't really capture what I'm trying to get at. Maybe it's seriousness. I really want to play 6s, and I want to improve to some degree at the game. But I'm an older guy who has to take time for family and work, so what improvement looks like for someone similarly situated is going to be lower than someone with more time to dedicate. Again, I don't have much experience, I just play/watch/read about TF2 quite a bit, but it doesn't feel like there's much of a space for people in my position. I don't know, I'm having a hard time getting across my sentiment here. I guess I just want to play games of 6s where people take it seriously enough to not deliberately throw, but still be relaxed enough to laugh when things hit the fan and stay positive in a loss.
It would also be really helpful to have a regularly updated guide (either written or audiovisual) on what skills you should have before getting involved in competitive. I did a couple scrims during the last (i think) newbie cup and I didn't feel completely out of my depth, but I did feel like I was noticeably outskilled in these matches. I'm guessing this is just a difficulty with a smaller playerbase in a game that has such a crazy skill ceiling, but I've run into plenty of people on casual who have expressed interest in competitive/the 6s format who've cited similar worries as their reason for staying in casual/community servers.

(4) "Edutainment" YT videos on 6s. This is only loosely related to my experiences as a TF2 noob who's interested in 6s, but what gets me interested in a game's competitive scene is either playing the game or seeing someone on YT who can break down what is cool about the game's competitive format in a digestible way. I think there's a lot of room for "breakdowns" of interesting matches that gives newcomers a greater understanding of the format and it's nuances. The closest analogue I can think of is the YT channel "Ocie". They do breakdowns of Overwatch matches in various skill divisions, explaining how advantages, disadvantages, etc. affect individual matches. I don't really like the general feel of Overwatch as a game, but I've gained a lot of respect for the competitive scene in that game because Ocie's videos have given me some understanding of what is happening in game and why.

Sorry if this is a bit scattered, just trying to get some of these thoughts out

sounds like it's time for Unc League where at least half players your have to be 30+ or married

This is the third time all my friends have retired/decided to not play since I've started playing, unfortunately to keep playing I'd need to get on and play with a completely new friend group, but the people who are new play 40-60 hours demo reviews map talks mge included.. The last 3 seasons I've been fortunate enough to find people willing to play 2-3 days at most a week but that was not a reality this season.

Also from my experience in pugs the people who play a fuck ton are really mean to people who are down to try but don't really want to commit to the full grind. Back in the day there were lots of teams of people who didn't necessarily care to be top invite but still wanted to try and were content playing high adv low invite, but it feels somehow looked down upon.

is the hope that top adv teams would go into invite and low adv teams would go into div-1? or is it just combine all of adv and main because low main to high adv would be really fucked considering how one-sided a lot of low adv vs high adv matchups already are

HL is already kind of experiencing this after getting rid of IM, where main ranges from "this team got like 4th in am last season and wanted to move up" to "this team should probably be in advanced but is not"

(poorly formatted thoughts on this) Attracting new players is a silly priority. I think the majority of people who have ever played 6s in their entire life would probably be down to play 6s again if there was an extremely low commitment way to play it. I have been talking to my zoomer and gen alpha coworkers who game a ton and most of them do not even have PCs (everyone owning a PC spiked with millenials and older gen z because of fucking minecraft) so trying to attract new players is a less effective method in my opinion than trying to make 6s accessible to the large number of people who already know what it is and enjoy it but cant commit to more than a few hours of gaming a week. I am in a discord server with like 70+ people i used to play tf2 with and forming a 6s team was actually impossible because nobody was able to commit to more than 1 game per week and none of the teams we played against were willing to reschedule which made it impossible for us to play regular season matches. COVID definitely gave this community an unrealistic expectation of what a regular work/life/gaming balance looks like lol. another tertiarily related topic is that the global economy is in a much rougher position than it was 10 years ago and most of my online friends who live in different countries and most of the people I know living in the US all need to work either insane hours or multiple jobs now when this was not very common a decade ago, so while pivoting 6s to be a less time intensive commitment sounds bad for the handful of extremely dedicated players, it would be by far the best approach to see a large increase in teams every season and the higher divs would still be extremely competitive. Also yeah a lot of unc players dont even know where to play pugs or mixes or whatever and having it all linked to a discord with a page of rules and a million channels is rather annoying for people who just clicked the role button on TF2center back in the day and were able to play within 10 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRYmVb33VU0

So you're saying we pull a 6s: classic edition and have a boomer league with shotgun soldiers no scout medic speed boost and badlands??

LFT