drshdwpuppetSo what do we need to do? I propose a re-invigoration of the mentorship program. Older, experienced teams from mid-top of open to mid IM tier should adopt a new/ugc only team every season and help them get used to the flow of life in ESEA. Help them navigate practicing, teach them some strats, provide some generic mentoring and help them be lifetime members of the community.
Bit late with this, but oh well.
As someone who has played UGC for a few seasons, here's the reasons that I think limit people making the jump to open:
Actual Content:
Lack of solid content about sixes means that anyone in UGC who does go through the effort of a map review pretty much just watches the marxist video and calls it a day. It would be nice if there was a wider variety of content so that UGC teams end up not wasting 2 seasons with the "throw strats at the wall and see what sticks" idea. The few people who actively do demo reviews help a bit, but that is more specialized than needed. For the generic comparison to other esports, think of all the "How to do ___ Smoke/Flash/Whatever" CSGO vids, if some high level TF players would go for making videos like "Gran Yard Push Garage to Left" that were just like 3-5 min videos going over some basic push strats and/or their counters, I feel it would be very effective at making teams feel more confident in their skill and make the jump to open.
The ESEA players who play UGC:
If you want to motivate people to join Open, convince your peers who play ESEA and UGC to stop acting like they're instantly above all the dirty peasant UGC players. UGC only has 8 matches/season, so playing against a sandbag team who spams binds and insults you for the whole match pretty much torpedoes 1/8th of your season and on top of it you get to waste an hour making attempts at breaking their Heavy/Pyro/Engy 2nd defense. If you're sandbagging, at least put in enough effort to make a good game out of it. My team got knocked out of playoffs by harbleu and m4risa's UGC team, but at least in that game it felt like there were times where if we played better we could have pulled a round or two out. Meanwhile in a game against full time offclassers you just want it to end as soon as possible because it actively sucks the fun out of everything.
Pay to Lose Feeling:
Based off the last point, due to the fact a lot of lower level UGC players only experience with open players is getting rolled by them, it helps contribute to the "don't go to open you're just paying to fail" attitude that #51 brought up.
Basically, the combination of getting rolled/trolled by ESEA players in UGC coupled with the lack of distinct resources for getting better makes a lot of people in UGC just feel that staying put at their current skill level is the best strategy for continuing to have fun with 6s.