? i've said before esea has had its issues, im only trying to remind people that cevo does too, and a lot of them are IDENTICAL to esea's (bad client, shitty admin support, etc).

and fox yeah i agree, big difference between esea and cevo though is that you have to go to lan to win the big boy money, whereas you get to do that from home for cevo...

also no one has addressed or even acknowledged what happens when nahanni stops giving money to the prize pot coupled with cevo trying to throw an entire lan and suddenly league fees are tripled/quadrupled/whatever.

seems most people here are airing out esea's issues and ive been addressing them all, but then dodge my questions about cevo's future..let's be reasonable here folks.

You know what they say, if you can't beat 'em, -frag 'em! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

-7 frags in 23 seconds jesus christ you guys are good

TF2 is vastly changed from the time when cevo was popular. We transitioned from a time when there were actually sponsored and community involvement was pretty low to now where we have community run modifications like soapdm and MGE, sizzlingstats are very prevalent and the community funds literally every LAN event that happens now. Times have changed and I think it can be done this time.

that is my point with scheduling though, you imply that people should obviously have the time to play both because its not a big time commitment, yet getting 6 players to play 2 matches a week can be pretty hard a lot of times.

my reaction would be the same as if ESEA was drasticly increasing prices, which by the way, ESEA league fees have increased $20 dollars in the past 2 seasons for Invite league fees. But why are you going in with the assumption that CEVO will increase our league fees anyways? We literally had to ask cevo to charge us money. also, CEVO client is not linked into TF2 in any way that i know of, so chances are that ESEA will be affected way more than cevo ever will be.

Ahahaha, ahahaha what!? You haven't even responded to my main post that's got your butt all in a twizzle.

so a $20 increase over the course of a year is a drastic increase? what happens when we as a community (you know it will happen) want a lan for the top tier teams to play? or when there's 3-4 leagues and each one wants at least a respectable prize pot (considering they're paying league fees after all) and nahanni isnt there to contribute most of it? that money doesn't just appear out of thin air.

you seem to forget that while we have league fee increases we also have to fund a lan.

and ok, no cevo anti cheat for tf2. so that means you're going to rely on vac, not have a lan, and you're offering cash prizes. do i have to spell it out for you?

I don't really want to get too involved in these threads (getting ready for FITES, working almost every day up till then, etc.), but I wanna point at a few things briefly.

CEVO's problems were mainly with Admins and battling community apathy. CEVO TF2 died out in large part because the community ditched it for ESEA. When it was trying to be restarted, the admin in charge screwed things up because people were looking for a short HL tournament, it was announced as such, then he turned it into a Ladder and everyone lost interest. There is no way to prove that CEVO will be better than ESEA so asking for such proof is kind of ridiculous.

I believe we can do better (whether it's CEVO or someone else) than ESEA, but that's just my opinion.

ESEA's problems however, are at it's very top. There's been issues with admins, which happens in every league, but one of ESEA's co-owners not only was involved in criminal activity but he also was a complete dick handling the PR afterwards. LPKane's customer "service" is atrocious and has added to the feelings of discontent.

Nope, but the bitcoin scandal is a prettty big deal. Besides the impact it's had on established players not wanting to continue with ESEA, the scandal has completely trashed ESEA's reputation among the general TF2 community. Threads promoting ESEA LAN on reddit were met with disdain because of the scandal. Where are the threads on reddit promoting this season's registration? I just looked and don't see anything posted by ESEA or anyone else for that matter.

ESEA threatening to close shop doesn't really help em much in my mind either. I understand business is business but if you are losing customers, you don't respond to that by threats, you respond to it by fiXing the problem and staying positive. If I recall correctly, last time they threatened to close up shop if there wasn't ____ number of teams in open, they eXacerbated the problem by eXpanding IM and not counting the teams they moved up. It struck me as dishonest...

TF2 is the only game ESEA has actually succesfully used to bring non cs-players in. Their LOL and Starcraft efforts fizzled fast. If they want to continue to have a presence outside of CounterStrike then TF2 is still their best option.

Customers left because ESEA were being dickish. Continuing to be dickish and threatening to pull the plug (even if it is the smart business decision for them), will not solve how they are viewed by most of the TF2 community.

If they don't get the numbers they need for this neXt season, I hope they make adjustments and continue for at least one more season to try and prove to the community that they are moving forward with honesty and dignity. If they do so, then perhaps the following season there will be many more people willing to sign up for their league.

when was the last time a hacker was caught in esea tf2? maybe its a bit archaic but i would bet we catch more cheaters with demo reviews than either client combined would ever catch. To play TF2 for a year costs $60 more than a year ago, per player, obviously significant price increases. Do you think CEVO would increase their fees more than esea has? honestly? the respectable prize pot comes out of league fees from the previous season of CEVO which were not there this season, thus requiring nahannis donation.

HERE YOU GO MAGUS: as far as mistreatment of customers, i've been on and off with cevo for 7 years. have you ever tried to get an admin to help you out with a client issue (or any issue) in cevo? do this and then report back. but judging from your posts in this thread alone i'd probably run out of patience quickly if i was dealing with someone behaving as childlike as you.

i don't know why you're so obsessed with updating stats. would it be nice to have more detailed stats? sure. would it do anything to change the way the game is played, make people better at the game, or help the games growth overall? nope. ESEA still shows TEAM X: 5 TEAM Y: 3 and that's the only important stat.

st. patrick did something stupid in calling out the owner of a COMPANY. this is not communist russia, we do not all own a piece of the pie. esea is that man's pie, and he tried to take a piece. over the top ban? sure. EASILY avoidable? yep.

i haven't told a single person to refund their fees to cevo and go play esea. i've simply said play both if you have time, but if you don't to play esea over cevo. perhaps if you stopped stomping and shouting with your hands over your ears you would have realized this.

you do realize that cevo listening to us and cevo following through (now and in the future) are two entirely different things, yes? they have had the opportunity to be our league of choice in the past and dropped the ball. why should we give them the benefit of the doubt now?

CEVO's Paladin client is an anti-cheat, it's just not as invasive as ESEA's and is a bit simpler to use.

Marmaduke, the only thing I haven't answered is "what if CEVO spikes entry fees for a LAN?". And that's a complicated question to answer.

First and foremost, CEVO hasn't made any promises of hosting a LAN. If they do, I'm sure they'll have figured out how to go about it because their primary business (which is why they didn't have entry fees until people wanted a prize pool) is coordinating events, unless I'm grossly mistaken.

As for where the money will come from: every penny of entry money this season is going into next season's prize pot. If anyone didn't know that already, then you shouldn't be participating in these discussions yet; inform yourself. Because of that, we've already been funding the next season, so at a the very least we'll have some amount of money that doesn't come from Nahanni. Beyond that, where do you expect the money to come from? Even if CEVO doubled their entry fee, it would still be less than a season of ESEA.

And when the time comes that CEVO wants to host a LAN, there are plenty of avenues they can take: crowd funding is just one of them. Sponsorship is another, and they could even piggyback off of an existing event or host a more open one that can help compensate for the costs (just like ESEA TF2 LAN is piggybacking off of CS).

Okay, calming down and being rational, if you replaced CEVO with ESEA in that last topic could you honestly see why I think you're being a bit hypocritical?

As far as telling people to leave CEVO and refund, I didn't mean you said that I meant Killing.

once again, i am going to say esea is fucked up. i totally agree. but my point is everyone is turning a blind eye to cevo's past and present issues. and they tried to reboot cevo tf2 with a highlander tournament? that has NOTHING to do with us as 6's players, so they weren't even attempting to win us back with that.

LoL fizzled out because look at riot's starleague or w/e its called you have salaried players and all that shit, that never stood a chance. sc2 same thing with other leagues, even though that games dying out as well now. both of those games have no similarities whatsoever with tf2.

the whole "rep on reddit" thing is a joke too. you don't get rid of a bad reputation by telling people your reputation isnt bad anymore, you actually DO things and let word of mouth spread. you honestly think a thread on reddit made by an esea admin talking about the upcoming season wouldnt get trashed to shit and just reopen old wounds?

i'm not trying to tell people esea is perfect i'm trying to tell them cevo isn't.

because we've been provided with a league to play in, a lan, stats, an actual anti-cheat (lol paladin), and although mediocre still existent admin support. until you have seasons of experience with cevo under your belt you're not really in a place to comment it and all that encompasses it.

But I do have seasons of CEVO under my belt. And TWL. And ESEA. And alienware arena. Don't just assume I don't know what I'm talking about. I remember the shitty client that CEVO had, but I never personally had a problem with their admins.

However, that's all a moot point because CEVO has changed ownership now.

Again, though, you're ignoring my point. If you replaced CEVO with ESEA in that snip you posted would it not be the same argument the other way around? Trusting ESEA now and trusting ESEA in the future is two vastly different things.

can i get a tl;dr?

yes, and my point was esea has GIVEN US far more (mainly 13? seasons of lans) for us to WANT to trust them more than cevo. cevo lost our business, esea won out in the beginning and has been our home since. now suddenly we owe cevo our trust because esea fucked up during those 13 seasons while cevo was doing nothing to win us back.

synchro: idk why you're still arguing with me, the entire point of this thread is cevo has done just as much shady/weird shit as esea, it's just less noticeable because no one played in cevo.

the fact that theres absolutely 0 plans in the works for hosting a lan should they become the new #1 in tf2 worries me greatly.

That's a pretty good point, so why is our community so open to it?

Edit:

Because you keep saying nobody is answering you while you're answering everyone else, but that's not really fair.

You keep saying that CEVO shouldn't just earn blind trust, and that just because they say they'll do something doesn't mean they will. Yet they have been keeping good on their word, and that's exactly why we're having these discussions in the first place. They're delivering on their promises.

http://i.imgur.com/F0vZc6h.png

This is all I can think of right now.

seems like he's admitting esea fucked up and was just naming a few things they've done to try and remedy the situation, while also accepting that for some people it's gone too far.

This was addressed in the Season 4 announcement video.

Nahanni donated $1000 to the Season 4 prize pot. CEVO matched this, donating an additional $1000. We've also raised $485 through our community crowdfunding initiative, bringing the total Season 4 prize pot to $2,485.

100% of the entry fee from Season 4 (minus paypal transaction costs) goes towards the prize pot for Season 5. CEVO does not take a penny. We currently have 199 paid up players. Assuming transaction fees of 5% (a very conservative estimate), this puts the Season 5 prize pot at $2835.75. This is without any donations or crowdfunding. This number is constantly growing as more and more players get paid up.

Our plan from the start has been to build a sustainable and responsible league. By the players, for the players. We will do everything in our power to ensure that we can keep this promise.

We are investigating the possibility of partnering with an existing community LAN(s) or reputable LAN center(s) to keep costs down while still providing a competitive environment that the players would enjoy.

I think what milehighmilitia was trying to say is that the CEVO Paladin client does not hook directly into the game. It uses different methods of detection. This makes it less susceptible to breakage, and it should remain largely unaffected by game updates.

I like you marmaduke, but you have been stating multiple falsehoods as fact. You are welcome to message me on steam if you want any clarification on the issues you have with CEVO, we're already on each other's friendslists.

I feel like one of the biggest differences for me is the admin team. While both sides have people that seem to care about tf2 (killing/tri and Lange/Nahanni), I've seen so much more work put into this community in the past by the admins of CEVO, which leads me to believe they will work much harder to make their league the best possible for our community. If they approach being admins of CEVO with the same attitudes that created the Community vs. Pros events, and Tip of the Hats, I have faith that they will do what is right, and do it well.

People are going to pay for what they want personally for themselves. It has nothing to do with the betterment of game or the community. If people chose to pay for cevo instead of esea it is completely understandable and getting mad about it really doesn't do anything but show how selfish you are. There are reasonable arguments for and against playing in esea so if the community as a majority does not support esea... There's not much you can do about it but bitch about lans ect...

love how ESEA turned from crooks who installed malware on people's computers to get remote access to their desktops, personal files, webcams and mine bitcoins while getting paid by the very same victims to ESEA the saviors of TF2.

they're chaotic neutral obv

fucking shitty alignment always ruining every game

Let's just all play UGC

play both to keep tf2 alive, splitting the community will only make the competitive side of this game more of a joke n_n 6cuties will play both leagues and be darned happy to do so!

i like you too lange, you're a broham for sure. i'm all for cevo trying to come back and be a thing, i'd love for them to prove me wrong and shit on esea and host a lan and be the best league ive ever participated in.

i'm just worried that people are putting all their eggs into the cevo basket before its hatched. while there's talks and plans of making a sustainable league that values the voices of its players, that's every league that's been made. i want to see some consistent results and then i'd be sold on switching to cevo.

like i said before, in my opinion for now cevo should be viewed as an up and comer with potential, but that potential has to shrine through over the next 6months/year until i'd be ready to bail on the league we already have, that already has different divisions for skill levels, already has lan, is relatively cheap even WITH lan, etc. etc.

cevo has made moves like this before on other games i've played, let's see if it actually pans out/they stick with it this time.

basically, do both if you can, but imo if you can only do one support esea until cevo proves equal/superior to the former.

oh, and in regards to paladin, i'm not sold on any cevo client because of how terrible the last one was, ESPECIALLY if there's big money on the line like a cevo-p finals.

Magus you had a few good points to make earlier in this cevo/esea discussion (in other threads) but now you just sound like a spaz, maybe take a break from posting.

Marmaduke, you need to look past your own experience of cevo. Nobody cares what happened 10 years ago in some cs tournament. Nobody cares what your experience with cevo is... it doesn't matter. You can talk about how bad it is all day and it doesn't matter. Telling people to play in esea instead of cevo until YOU think it's good enough isn't going to change anything and you are being completely ignorant as to why they made the switch in the first place. If anything esea has more to prove than cevo does to a player who is undecided on whatever league they wish to play in. I think killing has been doing the right things to help regain trust, but once you lose somebodies trust you have to understand you may never get it again. Cevo does not have to prove to be better than esea for someone to chose to play in it.