Quake doesn't appeal to a casual or competitive audience anymore.

Casual gamers will play games that are popular and that are easy to get into (content creation for video games is a HUGE factor). But since quake is neither easy with its high skill floor and ceiling or is massively popular so that you can have more balanced matchmaking, you end up with new players being curb stomped and quitting.

If you are a competitive player the question you need to answer is: "Why would I invest my time into quake, when I could invest my time into any other competitive FPS game and get x100". Like why would any 15-16 yr old spend time grinding quake - when they could grind CS, Valorant or Apex Legends?

They would get more opportunities, more LANs and more money. For less effort, as you could collect a paycheck in T3-T2 CS or you could try win a LAN against rapha for the same paycheck. Plus, a player can shift to streaming/coaching/casting/analyst/content creator if it doesn’t work out.

Now there are a few new players and an older audience who will be able to deal with these problems because they end up finding the game very enjoyable. But the franchise is dead in the water at the moment. Honestly, I don't know how they would fix these problems.

shoutout to the chugger

Any non-tactical, non-battle royale FPS esport are basically dead at the moment - QPL isn't going to be returning for next year and quake pros will be jumping ship from quake champions to any arena FPS that has a prize pool (e.g. quake live with project velocity, then back to quake champions for keencon 2). Maybe something will get revealed at next quakecon?

OWL has died and OW2 is looking like a worse game by the day as Blizzard seeks to milk as much money from the playerbase using skins, battlepasses and campaigns.

DOTA, League, Starcraft and AOE2 are still very "esportable" and will likely be for the foreseeable future. Though RTS games are a little worse for wear than the MOBAs just popularity wise.

Games I'd watch out for right now would be THE FINALS, Tribes 3 beta for FPS fans and Stormgate for RTS fans. I reckon that they will have at least a few decent tournaments.

I hard agree with #3, #8 and #9. I would also suggest:

Avoid running into your opponent, unless you know you can kill them in 1-2 shots. Try to "dance" around your opponent.

Don't double jump in straight lines, always try to airstrafe and curve your jumps (if you are in combat). I will say at a high level of scout, double jumping lots with good airstrafing and lagless double jumps is very powerful and hard to deal with (playing gazy on 4 and he is just able to float around the crates with jumps and constantly hit big damage)

Try to move and get to the side of a scout, since side-to-side movements will become back and forth the more you widen your angle. It is kinda like LG duelling in which you want to "cross" your opponent.

Use the winger it is stupidly OP. Abuse it to take good highgrounds.

An outstanding loss for the whole of Scotland.

It would be cool to play with/against Asian and Australian players.

I think that you'd buff scouts a large amount by removing the plugin, enabling scouts to have an easier time playing aggresive and playing passive against soldiers.

Being able to run at a soldier - esp a unbuffed soldier - tank two directs and hit 1 meatshot to trade would be huge. Big buff in enclosed areas, think about taking gullywash water as a scout vs soldier or lunchbox in granary. Even if you don't hug a soldier, you can bait them into shooting themselves for 30-40s instead of 10-20s.

It would also nerf soldiers, jumping on peoples heads and directing them, since if a soldier bombs your medic/demo and directs them, they take like 50-60 + rj damage, which makes the clean-up easier meaning that soldiers will get their second/third rocket off less.

I'd be interesting in seeing what would happen if the plugin was disabled, would scout players try to abuse self damage more leading to more aggresive plays? Would soldiers need to be more careful about bombs; trying to bomb highground and rain rockets down rather than bombing on/into people? Would the plugin even make much of a difference and would the game feel the same?

I find that your attitude and mentality is the most important factor to your success in TF2, as it makes you improve DM, teamplay, communication, etc, alot faster.

A bad player with a good attitude will eventually outclass a good player with a bad attitude with enough time and practice.

This stuff is awesome man, thanks for making this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX1j5hTeO1Q

Warped

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhJ_Bi1wce0

KO

I'm very interested in seeing what EU players would think about introducing league fees into ETF2L - maybe a poll would be good? I agree with Lupus here in that it will insentivise better competition and make EU a stronger region.

League fees need to be used in a way that they benefit a regular player. Some of the money could go to top level talent, But as Gazy has said, it wouldn't be very popular to just give money to high level talent + sandbaggers and keep the league as it is.

I believe that using league fees to create new services (Building tools like https://ozfstats.com, updating API, etc) or to create events (ETF2L Pugs/LANs/Cups etc) would be the way to implement league fees positively. Then you would also be able to boost winnings of high level talent.

There is of course some negatives to implementing league fees (sandbagging first comes to mind), but I think that if league fees are used positively they could improve the scene in EU and create a better comp TF2 experience.

shoutouts to lambo driver