Okay, I guess I misread oops.

http://i.imgur.com/w93T6Sr.png

http://i.imgur.com/6p9vFak.png

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

http://i.imgur.com/gDeE6rk.png

http://i.imgur.com/RtyleE4.png

Hmm. I suppose I could see that. Yet, if the idea is consolidation (as mentioned in the other thread) it seems to me this would be a good thing.

Only the non-serious and weak teams would decide to play in a free division, as there would be 0 motiviation to do well in that division other than bragging rights (UGC model). If the weak teams from open went to free, current paid divisions were consolidated, and UGC players had a reason to join the league (loss free entry), I smell a much healtheir league as a whole.

In this scenario, the bottom of IM could meld with the top of open (teams that stayed), and the top of IM could meld with invite. That gives you 3 divisions, two of them with prize pools where the talent is much closer than the doomsday scenario posed with invite and IM being broken down into open...and the new divisons will be more competitive.

In fact...why isn't "open" free to begin with. Don't they keep telling us the money goes right back to the players? Take the prize pool away. Literally open it up for any team to try, allow the weak teams to sandbag all they want there (they get nothing out of it), and use a fee-less/prizeless open division to advertize the product. For NA tf2, ESEA is the top product on the market, but to get it will cost you. As proved by UGC there is clearly a market for a free divison. It makes smart business sense for ESEA to use its "luxury" status in the market to attract these players with a free division. The league as a whole recieves fresh blood, who while arent paying yet, will certainly yeild a portion of players who want to try their hand at greater competition and a prize. Hence more customers.

What am I missing? This seems too obvious to not have been thought of already, so what am I not seeing here?

This seems to me a way to avoid having doomsday deadlines at the start of every season. The model as it stands now only sees people wagering whether or not they want to stop paying for the product, there is no welcome mat enticing people to start paying.

Edit: I know this probably belongs in the other thread, but somehow the topic was brought up here.

ESEA doesn't strike me as a progressive company, or one that cares much about innovation/good ideas. They have a monopoly on our game, they know it, they're a business. They remind me of Valve somewhat in that regard. As an organization, this is to say nothing of Tri/Killing/whoever has been involved at an individual level, but as an organization they don't have a reason to care about keeping TF2 alive.

I think the suggestion of Open being free is an OUTSTANDING suggestion, the best I've heard. I think everything would self-correct, I think divisions would sort themselves out like you say, more signups, more interest, and it could act like more of a top-level TF2 "breeding ground" than a league like UGC where the top level offers next to no reward/incentive.

I guess the trick is getting ESEA brass to buy into it.

CEVO would've probably been more receptive to a free league a la CS

biggest problem with ESEA is premium, unless they open up something similar for CS, they aren't making premium free.

So ban them during the ban phase.

assuming a pick/ban system, the same problem arises because you can only either ban every weapon but stock for fear it lends to advantage or you can only ban the top x% of unlocks and then you just end up with a slightly whiter list than modern 6s with a few more unliked unlocks allowed, because all the ones that changed the meta get banned 24/7

I agree with you. But if ESEA is in the business of milking cows, and they're starting to run out of cows on the farm, it makes monetary sense to open up the gates, let the cows in, and allow them to see how awesome your farm is. You don't even have to feed them. Enough of them will decide what you have to offer is right for them. Then ESEA can milk away.

You don't need to be forward thinking to see this. Not doing this seems more like laziness or a genuine indifference to the future of this game in the league (dumb for reasons in above cow nonesense). TF2 isnt CS and doesnt have a growing and surplus supply of comp interested players. This isn't news to anyone, but if your in the business of making money off those at all interested...you have to bring them to the farm first. This policy should just be the default for a game with less numbers particularly when there exists a free option elsewhere.

I hate to spread the "esea just doesn't care" warcry, but what is the excuse? I'm certain there must be a complicated financial explanation I just don't understand that differs from "must haul as much $$$ off the Titanic while we can." Or to keep the other metaphor "lets milk these drowning cows while we can, our other farm is doing fine."

ESEA is certainly not opposed to the idea of free offerings, considering they just acquired Frag Shack (a CS server community) and started transitioning all of their non-PUG/match servers to be free-to-play under that brand.

Now, I would never expect them to make the core of their service (matchmaking and league) free, but then again I would never have expected them to develop a free service like they have recently. If nothing else, perhaps they'd be willing to put up similar servers like DM for TF2. But I think even convincing them of that would require us to invest a bit more into ESEA, given how dire the situation looks currently.

It's not all ban, you can ban enough to remove the totally horrific unlocks, then limit picks to enforce a stable in-game meta which deals with the other problem of the open whitelist, which is having no idea what your opponents will run producing chaos because there's no ability to plan.

So you're right, 6s remains essentially unchanged while a much more officially acceptable version of the format comes into being.

Edit: There has to be an understanding here that the end game with regards to any of these new formats is supposed to be official recognition. My starting point is that current 6s is the best format we've got, and there is no chance of official recognition while blocking a lot of what makes Valve money which is weapons. Nothing better than pick/ban crafted to maintain the existing meta reasonably closely occurs to me.

That really is the linchpin. But it seems stubborn considering they haven't tweaked premium to accomodate TF2 since they decided to host TF2 at all. Their stance might be "we won't give away our product." But their product for this game isn't the premium service, it is the assurance of competition and the LAN that Tf2 players are buying.

u have noticed how ESEA is like

incredibly lazy and not at all good at anything right

ur best bet is to get UGC to funnel Plat and gold UGC teams into open as a sponsorship program where they get 3 matches a week or something

that'd actually be good and fun and finally make UGC useful, but UGC is just as incompetent and lazy as ESEA so like whatev

UGC has hired three new admins specifically for their 6v6 division. Expect big changes over the coming months.

Will any of us recognize any of the names of these admins? I'm not trying to be mean but rather realistic. What will be different?

Smobo, Terry Crews, and I are the new admins. I don't use tf.tv much, but I think we are pretty recognizable in the UGC community. Anyway, the difference is that previously UGC allocated basically one admin to 6s, and now there are at least four dedicated to improving it. We're not just going to be sitting around doing nothing like the previous poster implied.

what if there major competitive tf2 organlisations (tftv,afl,extele...)joined together to form one super 6s group so the world can play together in a lan, this is a dumb idea but just saying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Schism
http://cevo.com/
http://xkcd.com/927/

i hope u forsee the problem

1

i think part of this can be attributed to american tf2 and the amount of time players have per match. if there was less time per map, there would be more of a reason to play faster if not more aggressively. Europe has been doing that in comparison to NA but maybe it could be worth it to have even less than 30 minutes on a map.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk9LC-Cf8g4#t=1230

The issue with that is that ESEA doesn't need the cows [us] because they have so many chickens [cs:go]. they're living off of eggs right now, and if we die off, ESEA would just then throw all of their resources at CS:GO.

if you're down a round, then yeah you have to. up a round? park the bus. you can eat up to 1/3 of the ENTIRE MATCH by sitting on one point and refusing to push. that would just amplify with an even shorter match time.

if there's big money on the line: no matter what the ruleset is once a team gains an advantage (a round, won mid, etc) they're going to play as safely as they can. if they're up a round expect them to sit on mid forever. if they've won mid expect them to play insanely far back and send in 1 suicide who can either off class or just go suicide again until it works.

alright, final offer. best of seven, one round on each of seven maps.

Do you have any plans to change the whitelist to be 100% inline with ESEA? The quickfix is broken.

when they say the money goes back to the players, don't they mean paying for things like LAN, prize pools, etc.?

I really like the idea of a comp scene that supports locally based teams. I'm not sure if it's really viable but if it works, there's nothing special about A:R that makes it any more viable than any other gametype.