I had no idea BPM lost all their carries, no Pulse, no Kapoww, no Boink, Mouse still sniping, Cygnus still a poor man's TMP.

I heard Chain Reaction were good, I guess it will be between Ginyu force, mTs and cR.

Why would I be ashamed? Because people I barely talk to or work with will judge me and think of me as strange? I tell me Work Colleagues if they ask, I don't bring it up or talk about it unless it comes up in conversation - "what you doing in Telford this weekend?"

Think that competitive TF2 is a passion of mine, being in this community is a big part of my life and drives me through it. I actually pity people who don't have this sort of passion for anything, they could work 9-5 and go home to watch a shitty reality TV show, or spend all their time on Twitter + Facebook, or the highlight of their week is getting drunk and fighting in the Town Centre. If you're not proud of what you do, don't do it because if you can't tell people you work with or friends then you're conforming to an idea that what you do isn't acceptable by their social standards.

I don't go around gloating to people I play competitive TF2, I don't gloat about it like some proud father but I love this game, this community and competing in TF2. I happily added it in my CV, so long as you word it favourably - "I volunteer admin for ETF2L".

This will be really interesting to watch.

North America will be dominated by Ginyu/mTs/BPM.

I won't write shit on UGC forums cos I am banned.

No-one will write coverage worth reading except for boring people like Hein.

I don't know what any of this thread is about, nor do I know Indust personally, or anyone from AG or any sort of background information regarding the issue, however I NOW SUDDENLY REALLY HATE INDUST, HE IS DEFINITELY THE WORST PERSON EVER.

Ginyu had a large ping advantage, it's hard to really count that, same way USA have a massive ping disadvantage in this game so to call it a EU v NA thing is absurd, if USA win it will prove what we already know, that NA HL is way ahead of EU, but by how much depends on how well France play.

GeaR, Jukebox and Blaze.

I refuse to support the French, although I remember Exon at LAN undressing me with his eyes...

Okay, VIVA LA FRANCE.

Pleasure to talk briefly to you, thanks for all your amazing work Lange. <3

My problem with this whole NA v EU thing is the general consensus people put on their continents best teams. Last year the ability of Europeans to play TF2 was questioned by complete shitters with zero understanding of the game because their best team was better than Europe's best team. For some reason this seemed to translate to people that because Mix^ and LG were so good that Intermediate was so much superior to division one, or that this level of TF2 was superior to that...etc etc.

All i49 proves is the best team in the world is Epsilon, it doesn't mean that Low Prem teams would shit on Low Invite teams, or that ETF2L Division Six is superior to UGC Iron or whatever. I think people need to be a little less egotistical about this whole continent v continent thing, yes it is great hype and I too love to banter with my American friends about it but you can't dismiss an entire continent of great players just because their best team was beaten by our best two teams in three close maps.

Medic - Knoxx
Roamer - GeaR (I know we all love Jukebox but GeaR was amazing all LAN)
Pocket - Yuki
Demoman - Numlocked
Scouts - Bash & Sheep

So hard to pick individual players really, lot of people performed really well from those top 4 teams.

Just watch them all, What I am doing with my 2 days off work this week.

Most tense matches - HRG v Epsilon Upper Bracket final.
Most intense match - iM v TCM

Get the biggest LAN you can somewhere in NA, persuade the top teams to attend, persuade a large portion of the community to attend.

In particular getting communities to attend is important, at i-series the big ones from EU like TC, Nervous Energy, Clanda, Kritzkast, UKCS all attend, these being mostly UK based communities but an impressive amount of non-UK people still come.

But also what is recognisable is the amount of players from the Prem/Div 1 level that come, from ETF2L S15:

Team Epsilon, Broder/TCM/Infused attended with their full lineups, SOLAR attended with all except Medic, had their old Medic there. Majority of RLM's S15 lineup attended with different teams, 2 guys from LMS came (the non-Russians). Then in Division One, Half of Reverto came, half of my team, Furbo Pandas came, Did I stutter had most their team come, Least one guy came from every team, in the end you've got like 40-50 current top players from Europe in attendance, mixed in with some ex-greats of past times gone by, it's more than enough talent to create several good teams and a lot of these people travel from around Europe as well.

To relate this to North America, if you held a LAN somewhere fairly central with good transport links, I can't really comment but around the East Coast and got most of the community from that area to attend, then try to get least half of all your top players there and still get your top teams like HRG, Mix^, AG...etc then you'll have a heck of a big community LAN with great players in attendance. I think the sheer size of the US would affect it a lot, UK one of the most Western parts of Europe so we don't get too many Eastern EU people come, if the NA community were to do the same then parts of the US would be neglected, but it's really about getting as many people there as possible.

In general Australians were so strong, they were kind of unlucky to go out but in the end TCM deserved it for the comeback, but iM are easily one of the best TF2 teams in the world, I take back everything I said about them pre-LAN, they're all incredible players who play selflessly for eachother.

Plz come back for i52.

I would love to see Wireplay grow as a HL league, their admins are some of the most helpful and polite admins I have ever interacted with.