I'm gonna stop after this otherwise I will keep going, but there isn't really a stalemate. If froyo don't want to go we'll just find someone else. It doesn't effect us all too much, and whilst it would be nice to have the best teams from each region attend, sometimes this just isn't the case.

I don't wish to waste time on a team who will only attend if a specific set of demands are met when there are teams that are far more keen, but need support to come over. Ascent was a great example of this. The event always takes priority, the teams attending are a bonus. Obviously the sign-ups are extremely important for longevity but the invite teams are not as crucial as other aspects of the event. So long as we can put on an event for the community to watch & compete both at the venue & at home and my staff are happy throughout, that's all I care about.

This will never happen. b4nny has made it more than clear that going forward he will only be supporting Invite LANs which narrows the current LANs he will attend next year to only RGL which wouldn't, to my knowledge, allow european competition as that is a playoffs for the RGL season. This idea of THE LAN is not a good idea when the community doesn't even know if and when there will be a next one.

TL;DR: ETF are committed to making another international LAN, but COVID has made that a bit difficult.

Hi all, just thought that this thread would be a good opportunity to make some clarifications regarding at least some of EssentialsTF's plans for approaching LANs in the future. Unfortunately most of what we laid out for the year has been suspended because of the ongoing pandemic. We'll make official announcements when we can.

As many of you will know, the main thing ETF is known for is iSeries which we have always pushed to be an international event. At i65 we had the opportunity to bring Ascent.NA over to compete, although other teams were contacted who either declined or didn't respond. For future events we were more than interested to bring not only teams but also talent over from regions not only in NA/EU but from our friends in Australia and even Asia. In addition, we're interested in having a more global impact outside of purely European competition, both online and otherwise.

So in response to the original question, we are at least committed to having another international LAN and I know our friends in other orgs like TFTV and Phoenix Red are also. Obviously it would be nice if the community itself helped out to support that, but nevertheless we will at least try.

Now to address some points:

• Developer support at this stage in the game is unreasonable, its best if we focus on improving for our own internal benefit; not to appease someone who isn't interested.
  
• I think that people are looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, and that will get us nowhere
  
• As much as we would like to give more notice for iSeries, it is simply impossible since planning for the Summer series only happens after the Spring event which happens at the same time as CPG, to give you an idea.
  
• Numbers going down is expected as a game's lifetime progresses, especially one that does not maintain relevance within a modern gaming market. There is consistent decrease in viewership even in Casual streamers and content creators, its just more prevalent in competitive due to the already smaller audience.
  
• Every popular caster who ever moved on from the game had to start from some degree of inexperience and irrelevance. Support your Casters (& Producers)

EDIT: Formatting

Having worked with DCS during my time in ETF2L and on external projects like the recent Lockdown Throwdown, I have a tremendous amount of respect for him and his ambitions for the scene. Thank you for all your hard work for what is a largely thankless job!

Insomnia will now be for UK players only. We don't want foreigners to take all of our invite slots, they should go to hard-working British Players!!!

Whilst I am not an basketball enthusiast, I knew the impact that he had on the game and his death is truly shocking. RIP.

thanks. amended.
E: It seemed that I had that initial spelling added to my dictionary because I am an actual brainlet.

TL;DR

• I agree with a lot of what Tagg says, and personally I'm trying to distance myself from the scene for similar reasons.
  
• The competitive scene is toxic. More than a substantial amount of people are incredibly discrimanatory or spread awful things about groups or individuals within the scene.
  
• Volunteers are (perhaps unintentionally) taken for granted and the game has the tendency to have people burnout quickly and just picking new people up as replacements
  
• In general, it's hard to justify putting effort into the scene, when you get nothing in return and people are rarely grateful outside of events.

I empathize a lot with this video, lots of what Tagg said in the video I can relate to (outside of the whole invite thing lol). Over time I've been trying to create distance between myself and the game/scene but it's almost like an addiction. I stopped enjoying the core game about a year and a half ago and planned to quit multiple times since then. Much like he mentioned in the video, I don't want this game to rule my life especially since more and more of my free time is being taken up by work. The only thing tying myself to this game at this point are friends and the fact it's quite easy to get experience in production etc.

The scene is toxic, end of. Whilst a decent amount of people are lovely, there are a concerning amount who are outwardly discriminatory or just assholes. In some groups that I am in I've heard some downright disgusting things said about groups of people and even individuals in the scene. I try to not take any personal offence to anything, but sometimes what people say brings back really unwelcome memories and makes me uncomfortable. It really puts me off meeting new people or joining new groups because I expect that they would be the same. The community 'tried' to address such toxicity, but just ended up with a private discord server where people try to agree that being toxic is bad and briefly discussing drama when it happens. No one really cares enough to actually do something. I'll admit I'm no saint myself; I've acted irresponsibly in the past and I am not proud of it. We all need to put a little bit of effort into making sure that people feel welcome.

This sort of brings up the point regarding productions. The unfortunate truth of the scene is that without volunteers, the competitive scene is screwed. The scene takes advantage of such volunteers, bleeding them dry until someone replaces them so we get to have a show. Many people who get into production or stuff like that do it out of love or appreciation of the community, but quickly become disillusioned; especially when people trash productions because it wasn't what they thought the production should be doing. It's really easy to shit on people when you aren't the guys behind the scenes. Every few years or so, the production setup has to start from scratch because the 'old guard' gets burned out or have to get actual jobs and if we don't actually start taking action it's going to happen again.

This is more just a personal vent than anything else, but a lot of the reasons why Tagg left the scene I also share with my own relationship with this game. Getting to see everyone at LAN have a great time and seeing your name in the credits of a production truly is one of the best feelings I've had, but every time an event comes around it becomes harder to justify investing so much time and effort into it. With the amount of time, financing, and detriment to my physical & mental health that such events have caused; it's frustrating when people act like complete pricks to one another, from both a personal and organisational level.

I feel like #5 is right regarding why TF2 doesn't really have as many players actively engaged with playing the objective/winning. OW/Fortnite are games in which winning is the core source of enjoyment as a player, it sucks when you lose outright, winning feels great, and matches that are closely fought but still lose give a similar amount of enjoyment as winning (the Near Miss effect).

In TF2, there is less focus on winning and more on enjoying the moment (through taunts, funny interactions, and sIcK PLayS). For Quake, there is a strong emphasis on your individual skill and the second-by-second moments throughout a match. In both of these games, winning is a plus but not the emphasis.

I would hesitate to say that this game 'failed'. It was a key inspiration for many shooters, particularly ones that are class-based, cemented itself within gaming culture, and revolutionised the F2P system (for good or for bad). Whilst the game has certainly fallen off in the past few years, as to be expected, the game by all accounts is/was a tremendous success for Valve. Even the competitive scene is something to behold; a community-led esports scene sustaining itself for a decade without the support of the developers is very hard to come by, and something I don't think we'll ever see again.

I think that there is more to say and discuss here, but I'll save you the torture of another fucking nerd essay from me.

Unfortunately, none of us saved the VODs directly from the stream. We contacted Twitch the day after the vods were deleted once we realised our mistake to see if there was something that could be done, but they were unrecoverable. We are looking for anyone who may have any matches saved locally since they would be useful for conducting our own internal reviews of the streams for future events.

I wholeheartedly apologise on behalf of everyone at Essentials for this oversight and will make changes to ensure that this doesn't happen again at future events.

Except financial incentives aren't necessarily needed for one organisation to have leverage. Everytime iSeries comes around again, both organisers internal to the event and ourselves have to justify TF2 to be at the event or else its just ignored. Other orgs, in theory, can ask to be the contractor for TF2 at iSeries and the organisers just want a good show so long as there are people who can work it.

The more events that you work, the longer your 'resume' as a organisation becomes, potentially resulting in bigger or more chances to grow. At the end of the day, Essentials and Phoenix Red are businesses and as such self-interested. Exclusive broadcasting rights over all events is a serious amount of power to hold and I cannot see any org willing to be consolidated into another for the 'benefit of the community' with no real incentive in doing so.

I don't think that quality would stagnate under a exclusive production or even that multiple orgs would necessarily warrant innovation as you say, especially since most production stuff is open source and freely available. But the risk of losing what events we currently run and/or people preferring one event over another forces us to actively improve our approach year-by-year.

So gemm has the origins as to why the european production separated towards different orgs, mainly due to people having friction and differing ideals leading to circlejerks of "our way is the best way". Early on, I was very committed to bringing the orgs closer together to potentially globalise down the line, looking back however I don't think that this would be a good idea.

Multiple orgs encourage competition, Essentials pretty much got iSeries since there weren't other orgs that could pick up after TFTV and remained as the defacto EU LAN until CPG came around. Regarding personnel, I am completely comfortable bringing people who work in or with other orgs on board to Essentials to do other events and vice versa I would be happy to work with other orgs on events like CPG. But trying to unite all orgs under one banner at this point isn't going to happen, previous attempts have shown this. From a personal standpoint, each org working on their own event(s) allows them to focus on their own priorities, if for instance we would like to bring back the Monthlies and prioritise online tournament coverage or looking at other LAN events we could cover on the calendar we can explore those options without trying to please a sizable group of people, all with different views on what TF2's competitive and production should look like. Anyone that knows me should be vaguely aware that I don't care for HL or Prolander, so under my supervision such tournaments could potentially see very little coverage from Essentials, but KritzKast is more than comfortable with doing so and is much more oriented towards what they aspire for the game.

I think that there are still teething problems from the initial splintering as orgs are to this day trying to find their niche but it is my own personal opinion that the way we have it now works; drastic reforms this late into the scene's existence would do more harm than good.

This should be a wake up call for all of us. No one should feel like they have power over someone else due to their perceived worth in the Community. People were scared to talk because of his value in production, but we can always get new people willing to learn. Keeping people like this in the scene out of necessity is a disgusting premise but its a lot easier for us to just block out the noise rather than approach the problem head on.

We need to make it known that we do not tolerate this behaviour in any capacity; from off putting comments, to groping and sexual assault. Victims should not suffer in silence.

Ok. Since you have made it known that you don't want a back and forth, ill give you the luxury of a concise rebuttal.

• The organisers for i63 and 65, Belong.GG, are a prominent sponsor with connections to large international companies, as the tournament was under their brand it is not our responsibility to secure sponsorships for iSeries. i65 peak viewers and i63's cannot be compared confidently due to a significant change in how front page works. The viewership was not strikingly different outside of the peak.
  
• RGL's statistics do demonstrate a faster game, yes, but did you forget that the format as of the infographic was only 4-6 weeks old in comparison to a 11 year old format? Does a faster game mean a better one? ETF2L has experimented a LOT over the years and was a key pioneer in changing the whitelist/map pool over the years.
  
• I am not the community, never claimed to be. I just speak based on my own perspective and ongoing research. You can have multiple communities within a single game, and many that are aware of competitive simply aren't interested, speaking from experience when talking to casual players whilst running the ETF2L Newbie Mixes.
  
• We haven't given up, but rather we are being realistic about the circumstances. The game is 12 years old, supported only through shoutouts and new cosmetics/content, and this has been the case for a while. The game simply cannot compete in the current esport market, the data backs this up.
  
• If you find someone who has the time and passion to establish these so called 'basic practices', provided such things exist; I will eat a picture of b4nny's face.

lol 69

The prize pool decrease was a result of the change in the event itself, not the game as Insomnia transferred to a signup-dependant method. As for peak viewership, this was largely dependant on a variety of factors concerning how Twitch presents their Front Page. IIRC they have changed the way the numbers are registered and we only got front page on Twitch UK, but someone may feel free to debunk this. In terms of signups and engagement internationally, we had a similar amount of teams competing and more audience attendees than i63. If you were to determine our success through statistics, then we've pretty much matched last year albeit a decrease in average viewership however that has been consistent throughout on-season play as well.

There is no guarantee that dramatic changes to the format would encourage more people to play, only purely anecdotal evidence and theorycrafting (something that b4nny doesn't like, actually). TFNew and projects like it are crucial to not only engage newer players, but also older players into committing to the scene more. Unfortunately, every project in TF2 is volunteer based and extremely volatile without any sort of funding or monetary investment. It isn't a wasted effort.

Ah yes, because b4nny's previous excursions and projects have been sooo successful. You can't be a pro player and also run a league/tournament system, its too much to handle. Since he makes a living off streaming and picking up winnings, why would he ditch that to try to work on a project of that scale? Funnily enough, you need the community (or the organisation owners at least) support if you are going to make significant changes. He is a divisive figure and that in turn may only divide the community further. Running an esport isnt fucking easy, and he should know this.

And noone who plays the game in any competitive setting is expecting or pushing for true viability within the current gaming market. While it would be nice to have money thrown our way, the fact of the matter is that it isn't ever going to happen, so the community has elected to shape the game in a way that would be enjoyable for the majority of current players. MarmadukeGRYLLS said it best earlier on.

People hate on RGL not for trying to "grow" the scene, they hate on them for seemingly reactionary or downright confusing litigation or rules and their poor public presence and attitude towards the competitive TF2 scene. And yes, the community doesn't want 'common practices' because it isn't a fully viable esport and the measures needed to do so are laborious, time consuming, difficult, and controversial. You are not going to find more people that I can count on one hand who have the skills, time, effort, and experience necessary to pull of what people like b4nny want that are also willing to do it for free. Its far more complicated than you think it is.