Could the captains of the teams that did signup join the Discord and message me so I can add you to the private channels. Due to the limited signups for Invite, we will need to adjust the structure and I would like to discuss that with the captains before I make any changes. Specifically I need the captains of:

• HRTeam (Magma)
  
• Cat Posse (kura_beast)

We believe that we have promoted this frequently through multiple newsposts, threads and social media. All of which we encouraged people to keep an eye on those channels for updates. We reached out to RGL staff for support where reasonable, but at the end of the day this is a cup seperate from their organisation. It's clear though that our usual channels of communication are quieter in NA than we expected, and will do better to promote our events for NA audiences.

That being said, the main tournament next weekend is still going ahead which will be open to all teams who wish to compete. Additionally there is a Newcomer tournament for teams who do not have experience with competitive mode. All tournaments have been designed to be adjustable for signups, whether that's 16 teams total or 72 and beyond. We are committed to delivering the event as promised, and that has not changed.

Signups for the NA Invite Qualifiers have been extended! You have just over a day to get signed up, and since only 4 teams have signed up so far we're really looking for people to get a move on. Based upon signups for Invite we may adjust the structure for the event. Registered teams will be contacted by email and a post will be placed here to announce any and all changes to the event.

Just wanted to quickly bump this thread to remind teams that wish to play invite that they have less than a week to sign up to the qualifiers. All teams that want to play invite in the main tournament must signup. The structure of the qualifiers may change based upon signups, although this will be communicated to teams.

As always, direct any questions here on in the EssentialsTF discord.

There is no entry fee, the prizepool has been provided by DreamHack. As for email addresses, we require them for two main reasons. In the case that something goes wrong with discord etc. we need a way to get in contact with individuals. Secondly if you win prize money those emails are needed to send over to DreamHack. If you are not comfortable having your email listed, we may look into making them private or only requiring team leaders emails.

Match Times (EST)

Main Tournament:
8th May
Invite Round Robin:
Group 1 Round 1 - 14:30
Group 2 Round 1 - 15:15
Group 1 Round 2 - 16:00
Group 2 Round 2 - 17:30
Group 1 Round 3 - 18:15
Group 2 Round 3 - 19:00

Open Swiss:
Round 1 - 13:00
Round 2 - 14:15
Round 3 - 15:30
Break - 16:30 -> 17:00
Round 4 - 17:00
Round 5 - 18:15
Round 6 - 19:30

Playoffs (Single Elimination):
Round of 16 - 21:00

9th May - Playoffs (Single Elimination):
Quarter Finals - 13:30
Semi Finals - 16:00
3rd Place Match - 18:30
Grand Finals - 21:00

Newcomer Clash
8th May - Open Swiss:
Round 1 (Gullywash) - 13:00
Round 2 (Metalworks) - 14:30
Round 3 (Snakewater) - 16:00
Round 4 (Sunshine) - 17:30
Round 5 (Process) - 19:00

9th May - Playoffs (Single Elimination):
Semi Finals - 16:00
Grand Final - 18:30

This is the event thread for the upcoming North American Community Clash sponsored by DreamHack and organised by EssentialsTF. Details about the event will be posted here when available. Questions about the event should be placed here as well and should be answered promptly. I would encourage any teams interested to check out the tournament pages as that contains all the relevant details about the event, but also keep an eye on our twitter page for updates: https://twitter.com/TF2Essentials

All matches are played using the RGL Scrim Config and Whitelists.
EssentialsTF Discord: https://essentials.tf/discord

Main Tournament:

• Signups end 6th May at 18:00 EST
  
• 8-9th May
  
• Day 1 - Open Swiss (6 Bo1 Rounds) & Invite Round Robin (2 Groups w/ 3 Bo1) followed by Playoffs Ro16
  
• Day 2 - Playoffs (Single Elimination)
  
• $2,400 Prize Pool, splits are the following
  
  1. $1,200
     
  2. $600
     
  3. $360
     
  4. $240
• 72 Team Cap (subject to change)
  
• https://www.toornament.com/tournaments/4539172956295323648

Newcomer Clash:

• Signups end 6th May at 18:00 EST
  
• 8-9th May
  
• No player on the team must have played in the playoffs of the Newcomer division in RGL or any equivalent league and/or have exceeded 15 official matches.
  
• Day 1 - Open Swiss (5 Bo1 Rounds)
  
• Day 2 - 4 Team Single Elimination Bracket
  
• Prize Pool confirmed, but details TBC
  
• 16 Team Cap
  
• https://www.toornament.com/tournaments/4539260879002624000

There is a soft region lock, no teams can have more than 3 players from a region that isn't North America. South American teams will be subject to admin discretion. We are open to suggestions about the format and times of matches. Please don't hesitate to let us know on Discord or within this thread.

1. PUGs are a great opportunity to practice personal aspects of your play (DM, general positioning, other classes) but scrims will always be the better option if you want to improve 'across the board'. Nothing beats practicing 6s than playing 6s properly.

2. A good mentor is one that helps you grow, not someone who is a walking encyclopedia of knowledge. Any invite/prem player could give you tips, but a mentor that works on your own playstyle and you as a person is infinitely more valuable. Certainly, a mentor with extensive knowledge on the game is important. However, if you are struggling with the non-game elements (communicating properly, working with your team, avoiding tilt) that is going to be a major roadblock to your success as you progress.

3. A player is only as good as their team, and vice versa. If there is an issue within your team (e.g. your flank dies very early in teamfights or your med drops a lot) that's a conversation your team needs to have. Thinking in terms of "X is holding us back" or "I'm holding them back" is the wrong way to approach that problem.

4. A lot of well performing teams are ones that have stuck together for a long time, or at least have a good portion of the team who have. This is because you become friends with one another, communicate more naturally and develop in-game dynamics with one another. If each individual splits and tries to find teams, more often than not you'll be joining a team of complete strangers or being new in an existing team. In either case you have to get to know one another before you can learn to play with each other, which takes more than one season.

5. Whichever mode of practice you pick (DM, MGE, Offline, Jump), whats important is what you get out of it. Theres a term in psychology known as Deliberate Practice. In simple terms, it refers to a structured approach to practice that focuses on identifying areas of improvement and developing sessions to develop that specific area. In terms of TF2, you could, for example, find that your Scout vs Soldier is pretty poor. To improve this, you spend the next couple of weeks before scrims doing some Scout/Solly MGE to warm up and figure out where you can get better. There is no BEST way to improve DM or Movement, but determining your weak points and focusing on that will make improving feel more natural.

6. Just through spectating, Invite Players appear to make correct choices more often. In actuality its hours upon hours of practice and years of experience. Main Players seem to make more mistakes, which is to be expected.

7. Pretty much what carter said.

8. Improving comms, much like anything, takes practice. But generally speaking good comms do one key thing, they let people know about something they do not currently know but should. The odd spam rocket is not worth calling, but that spam rocket hitting 4 people probably is, for example. Determining what you as an individual should say and how your team as a whole communicates is just something you need to figure out with your team, it all depends on how they work.

9. Natural talent is definitely a thing, but the cases in which things just 'click' for an individual is incredibly rare. Practice and mentality is a much bigger contributor than raw talent.

10. Soldier goes zoom, airshots make brain feel good.

We were interested in potentially doing something like that for i67, but then COVID happened. I would love to see asian teams coming over to play, but as we've seen with NA teams attending iseries the logistics of that can be tricky.

So I've decided to give the report the article is based upon a quick read through. I have a couple of points that I think are important to note.

1. This report/research was conducted with support from BeGambleAware, an independant charity advised by the Gambling Commission set up by the UK Government. That is not that unusual with reports such as these, and charities like BGA tend to be non-invasive when supporting research, but its always good to bear such information in mind when conclusions are drawn.
   
2. The '40% of children have opened a lootbox' statistic is taken from a 2020 study where its explained that its a little more complicated, especially when you frame it in the context of problem gambling. From the study itself: while establishing a statistically significant link between loot box engagement and problem gambling, our data do not allow conclusions as to whether loot box engagement promotes problematic gambling or if problematic gambling leads to gambling-like loot box behavior in gaming.. (It's behind a paywall you'll just have to trust me on this one).
   
3. Most of the studies used in the review of the data are not longitudinal (aka examining over a longer period of time) and utilises surveys which have their own host of issues, especially if they are your only source of data collection.
   
4. Their own individual data collection started during the COVID-19 pandemic and their sample for their survey was collected on the 19/11/2020, at a significant peak of the UK pandemic. This presents a potential skew in data that can only be verified by a reproduced study (someone else doing the exact same study to see if they get the same results).

This isn't to say that this is based on inaccurate conclusions or shoddy research. There is a link between problem gambling and video games, any player who plays games with loot boxes in them will tell you there is an issue. Valve especially has a problem in regards to reselling items and artificially forcing them into a seperate digital currency, resulting in scandals like CSGOLotto and what have you. There definitely needs to be some form of child protection from such things, and you can make the argument that developers (or more accurately publishers) can't be trusted to deal with microtransactions themselves. But at the same time, parents should be monitoring their children, especially when it comes to games that feature microtransactions.

TL;DR - Study makes good points about lootboxes being bad (who knew?), but the article have missed some key points in their reporting, as always.

5CP best allows the style of play that we've decided upon for competitive play. There is a heavy emphasis on deathmatch and mobility, where one player can turn the tide of a fight yet cannot do so without the support of their team. 5CP simply gives 6s teams more freedom in terms of mobility and what teamfights to take etc. By all accounts, we can run other gamemodes in 6s (Payload and Attack/Defend tends to be the ones brought up most), but it becomes a question of whether or not we should. Does having more gamemodes create the sort of competitive game that we want? Are what makes comp tf2 good promoted in these modes?

That isn't to say that 5CP is flawless. Unlimited rounds with a round timer reset per cap means that stalemating is an option that doesn't have any significant downsides whereas stopwatch necessitates constant action. In order to create the 6s meta we wanted, we've had to cut out certain classes from being generally usable to prevent 5CP from being absolute torture to play which can be seen in HL or even Casual matches on these maps. Fixed match limit creates potentially 4-5 minutes of garbage time which is unfun for players and spectators alike. But we put up with these flaws because we've determined that the alternatives are worse.

And again, 6s has its issues. However the community decided that 6s promotes the best of what TF2 has to offer and the meta we run is just one consequence of that. Sideshow made such a point in that video, in that the meta isn't what is 'best' but the one that is the most fun or conducive to our preferred playstyle. The one flaw I think should be addressed is encouraging a bit more flexibility in classes/weapons outside of just last holds, but the challenge is how to do that without breaking what we already have. Without external incentives, there's little reason to shake things up for the hell of it.

Yay! More opportunities to voice my opinions that noone asked for. To be honest, the first couple of minutes of this video actually brings up a couple of decent points. FACEIT's AC is particularly annoying and invasive and if their EULA is anything to go by it seems to be a good way for them to sell data (but at this point which website ISN'T selling your data?). Secondly, the marketing around the platform did seem to try to say that this was some sort of 'replacement' of casual, which from the beginning I thought was a little...off, I guess?

I think their main critique was that they were not transparent about sponsoring (or incentivising) content creators to speak good things about their platform. The rest of the video involves them saying that FACEIT is a very corporate entity focusing on profit, not really caring of TF2 as a game. To that end, I agree that we should remember that such companies seek to gain from the game and its community. But then again, FACEIT want the system to have high player counts for more money so they themselves are incentivised to keep us around, so its a double-edged sword.

Again, like my previous post discusses, having a company like this on board is important for a community like ours and that offering alternative casual modes is great in the absence of constant development from Valve. Competitively, the platform is a good chance to make it easier to get more people into 6s/HL which is always a good thing. I think that FACEIT has a way to go in being a platform for both competitive and casual audiences, but from what I've seen it's a decent start.

TL;DR: Did you guys know that FACEIT...is a FOR PROFIT COMPANY!?!?!?!

I know that I'm a little late on this, but that video is one of the worst takes I've seen on the FACEIT Platform. Man goes in wanting to play casual TF2, is surprised when a competitive platform isn't full of hoovys, trolldiers and people who kill bind when they get funny kills. He spends 10+ minutes basically saying that the system sucks and is going to die then says "I want it to succeed". Basically equating it to Meet Your Match and blames the competitive community (???) for both.

Thing is, the system isn't perfect. Matches are still unbalanced, partying up is almost a guaranteed win, map pool is a little limited etc. But FACEIT provides another option to play TF2 thats a mix between 'wacky' casual and 3rd party competitive. With the addition of a 6s queue we actually have a nice transition for players from being new at the game to starting their first season of comp.

Fresh Install -> Casual -> Community Servers -> FACEIT 12s -> FACEIT 6s -> In-house PUGs/TF2 Center -> 6s/HL

A seamless transition from casual to competitive is something we've needed for a while, as its currently really hard to get into actual competitive. So this pubber YTber whining that "ITS NOT CASUAL" is so ridiculous it would be funny if it weren't so infuriating. FACEIT needs improvements, as all things do, but having an actual organisation like them behind the competitive community only benefits us.

So long as FACEIT is receptive to feedback for their 12s and 6s queue, if and when it happens, I think that the competitive community should try to support it when possible (notsponsoredbtw). I don't want this to go the same way that Pro League did, where both sides were unwilling to compromise or put in the effort, and it seems that they are quite keen to continue working with TF2 so long as it benefits them.

TL;DR: YTber is dumb, FACEIT needs improvements but is good for us.

Ultimately this is nothing more than quite an impressive technical piece for the developer. The amount of work to keep the original style but in a modern engine is massive and I think it does a really good job at that. But I would not put a lot of weight in this being of consequence at a gameplay level outside of what a more modern tf2-like game may look and play like. Support it, provide (constructive) feedback, and the rest. But don't expect that this will amount to anything.

Hey everyone, really excited to announce another series with DreamHack! This time we're hosting both an NA and EU tournament, with both being over two weekends each with more details to come on the structures & qualifiers for invite. If you have any questions feel free to post them here. Another thread will be posted in the future when more information arrives. In the meantime, keep an eye on our social media (@TF2Essentials on Twitter) and our Discord.

Random people who don't know how AC works think they know more than AC Admins, more at 11.