So, your strategy is to first cut costs in a market where service is valued at a premium. Then, you allow potential competitors time to outmaneuver you and claim market share you gave up on. Then, if they succeed, you start moving into a now more crowded market with harsher competition.

This is amazing to me

Real talk though pretty much all of Valve's decisions are based on a principle of "creating value". They don't aim to create cost efficiency across the board, they first aim to create the highest possible value from any situation, which generally works out being more cost efficient anyway. They hire the best possible staff and pay a premium for them, because one exceptional coder does more work, better work, and is cheaper than 10 average ones. This principle applies across the board. (Netflix does this too.) It makes the most sense to find what makes our weird tiny community so stupidly passionate about 6v6, and find a way to expand that to the masses. That's how you get your precious cost efficiency, by creating massive amounts of value.

Remember, before LoL and Dota went fucking bananas, little mobas that were mods of other games (starcraft, warcraft - note that Blizzard completely missed this train despite being on it from the start) had small, weird passionate communities. Riot and Valve either saw potential or got lucky in tapping into it, and here we are. 6v6 is a pseudomod of a worse game, and tapping into the weird little things that other people find and love is kind of what valve has staked most of its business on. (dota, portal, tf, csgo, l4d). We have consistently loved this weird little game of 6v6 for a long time. There's clearly some potential here. Valve sees this (now) and I guarantee you the conversation is "how can we create value here?" TF2 is and has always been in an awkward spot, but they're a company that likes to take risks and try things. Get excited.

cool idea

dude you wrecked some idiots while running an aggressively bad class comp, just to showcase how much better your players were, while effectively wasting their time

thats sometimes referred to as Bad Manners

dont get on your high horse and talk about trying to break up the dogma when y'all were just being dickheads for a giggle

nobody wanted to give up those cool owl logos for something as trivial as "making sense"

im so fucking excited

ty slin

http://www.twitch.tv/jambikan

streaming div2 aus (so like mid-open maybe) scrims and matches most weeknights

from new zealand

1) tying up loose ends? lydia was a threat who wanted skyler dead. walt didnt know this specifically but must have known she could be a problem.

(from a writing standpoint if she was left alive then people would know she would be an issue, because of the skyler threat, and the writers wanted all plotlines finished up)

2) ricin is incurable

3) you've got me with this one, ricochet i guess? :V

what helped me a lot was this video (via this ozfortress thread).

basically i'd go into games expecting to win or at least play good, which meant i was always expecting that i would hit that pipe/win this middle/deny that roamer etcetcetc in any given circumstance. if i didnt (even knowing that of course even the best make mistakes) then i'd be bummed because man i could've hit that fucking goddamnit their roamer just keeps jumping me what a shitlord this team is aids yadayadayada.

from that initial frustration it can snowball hard and you end up with a shitty night.

the trick is to remove this thought process entirely. from the very start you shouldn't be thinking about the score. you shouldn't be expecting to hit that pipe/win that middle/deny that roamer. this "outcome dependency" (copyright ddk) leads to that frustration/sadness/anger. instead, focus on individual moments in the present - that is what deserves your attention the most.

if you have 12 minutes you should def give the above video a watch, ddk is hella clever