I absolutely support these guys if their goal is to raise more money this way, but if you don't expect Overwatch players to care about your TF2 event, you certainly wouldn't expect TF2 players to care about an Overwatch event.

And while I don't resent ToTH becoming more conscious of mass appeal any more than I resent other big events like AGDQ that attract wide audiences, it is natural to feel the sting of losing yet another "our thing" to Overwatch and to the changing fashions of the industry in general.

Good luck to Lange and everyone, anyways. You guys are doing this for the right reasons.

I don't want to come off as excessively pessimistic, since I do love this event, and it is sick to see all these old faces coming back, but last year there was backlash over the emphasis on PUBG and Overwatch. This year, 8 of your 9 announced guests are Overwatch celebrities, and the 9th is a successful Fortnite streamer. This, and the most popular Team Fortress personality is still persona non grata at an event ostensibly about the community coming together for a good cause.

I guess I'd just like a concrete statement whether you guys are trying to take ToTH in a direction with more general appeal, as opposed to being the community thing it has been.

I'm going to think of this team as Luca Goers ft. b4nny and blaze, so I can be happy when it rolls Invite.

When can NA get something like this?

FACT: every time a euro team has brought an NA pocket to lan they have gotten to the finals and every time they have lost to se7en.
Ignore these facts at your own peril.

no arekk... sh-should be a good one... heh. aim's got this...

go corsa

Oh I wouldn't say ALL of them...
https://imgur.com/a/1Zz9GqZ

The choice is yours, mods. Unban Sage or be cursed to play Logjam lobbies with mute Europeans for all eternity.

botmode to take out the trash.

The perfect place to post my thousand page novel, "Quitting and My Story: Legend of My Time as a Sub-Open Bin Resident"

https://pastebin.com/qvHdNqFZ

Someone already has, but you aren't going to like the answer.

https://tinyurl.com/y9oqzxk2

Of course because FaceIt aims to serve all skill levels, it's doubtful that it will ever be able to cater to high-level players in the same way that a service that exists solely to serve that demographic, but instead you'd hope they could make enough accomodations within the top two divisions that the other advantages PL offers in terms of dev support etc would outweigh Pugchamp's attractive exclusivity.

I'm not an invite player or a software developer, but one compromise might be having 14-player pools in the picking phase, with the unpicked people being fatkidded and put back in the queue. This might make it easier to have a balanced pug, but also make it harder to be repeatedly passed over in the picking process.

While I do understand the problems top players currently have with Pro League, it's sad to hear so many big names giving up on the opportunity it represents.

Changes like the captain priority system and server choice have demonstrated a willingness on the part of the devs to accomodate the complaints people have had, so it seems if the top players are willing to participate, and to meet them half-way, Face It as a platform has alot to offer this community in terms of its dev support, scalable structure, uniting the community, and clear progression through divisions, things that pugchamp can't do by design.

None of those changes would've happened if you hadn't actually engaged with b4nny and the developers. Given that a project like tf2pl requires the whole community's involvement in order to really work, I would've hoped for some more leadership on the part of the Invite players.

The furries are Far from innocent. Have you forgotten so quickly?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTQqBjVr2F4

Several people have made this argument that the claustrophobic environment in OWL is somehow the inevitable byproduct of the money at stake. Sure, corporate money may mean corporate standards, but the cynical and maternal bureaucratic practices that Blizzard's aping are as ineffective in other industries as they are in our world of young white guys. It's analogous in its intent and ideological roots to the sensitivity training policies other companies in other industries put in place. The atmosphere this sort of inquisition creates causes far more harm than good. It's scary to see how normal human interactions, like accidentally bumping into someone backstage, become something real adult men have to be scared of. There's alot of research that's quite clear on how counterproductive things like this are:

http://www.richardswanson.com/textbookresources/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Ch-12-Diversity-Training-Ineffective.pdf

I won't deny how this community has failed people like Tagg, and we've suffered the loss of great people like him because that, but ideological and inhuman corporate policies aren't going to solve problems that require actual goodheartedness on the part of the community itself to fix. Valve has been able to make their own decisions with regards to how they run their esports because they're financially independent, and while I don't follow DOTA or CS, their approach seems to work quite well; both those games are certainly more time-proven than OW or HS. Blizzard may be chasing venture capital dollars, but they'd do well to take note of how other successful esports have run themselves.

While I'm just a layman, I have no reason to doubt that allowing people to regulate their own personal interactions would be healthier and more sustainable even for as manufactured a "community" as OW esports.