There's a new little blog post on teamfortress.com about the MvM update Valve announced last year:

This was posted on their website a few days ago, the direct link appears to be broken but the post is visible on their homepage: https://www.ugcleague.com/

Even if they have been pretty much dead the past few years and were irrelevant for EU and NA 6s, I thought it was worth mentioning here as UGC was still a pretty big part of (HL) TF2 comp history and they also hosted some other formats afaik. They are stating they will remake the website so player and team history isn't lost, with the mention that they might host competitions in the future, but not any time soon.

edit: see GeneralNick's post further below about the actual state of things

Just chiming in here as someone who doesn't know much about the previous pricing of NA TF2 LANs nor its venues, but please be aware that a venue having their own PCs and monitors available and only having to spend $80 ($100 for the upcoming LAN I believe) to be able to just turn up and play is a very good deal. There have been many EU LANs where ~$80 would be the ticket entry cost and then you either travel and bring your own PC and monitor, or drop 200€ for PC and monitor rentals on top of it. And teams still turned up.
Don't take these venues for granted and make use of them while they are available; looking at RAM prices etc. rising I think it's only a matter of time until they prove to be unprofitable and close down their business, and the community has to go back to BYOC + rentals or small-scale LANs.

judging from your recent posts you need to lay off the vodka and go back to having tea

cu@

That blog post was written by a different person, if you look in the comments you'll see someone mention "artphilia" who responds to the comment. Looking further into it they speak German and wrote a blog post on their personal website https://artphilia.de/das-leben-und-ich/ that mentions the anniversary of their mother passing away in November. On the blog are also more posts about having knee surgery etc.
If you look at the page https://web.archive.org/web/20200512010849/https://efiction.org/2019/02/19/short-news/ it makes no mention of Sidular, who "adopted" the site efiction later on: https://efiction.org/2020/06/07/up-for-adoption/#comment-24310 (even this article now says it was posted by Sidular).
I imagine during the transition smth wasn't adjusted properly so all the efiction articles appear as being posted by Sidular.

I was Senior AC at the time and I can assure you that this:

is not at all how the case went back then. Your source is either not remembering things correctly or is acting in bad faith, I'm optimistic and assume it's just foggy memory, it's been almost 6 years after all. I had to refresh my own memory by going back and checking the archives.

In general for AC cases, if a majority of the AC staff agrees to ban a player and there are no issues with the quality of their case reviews, that player will get banned. A unanimous vote was not necessary during the time I was an admin. Requiring that would make investigations last forever if staff members are on holiday/busy or if there is a single disagreement etc.

added

He's talking about this. Afaik it only took a screen of your TF2 & whatever a cheating client would show in the game if one was injected, not anything else on your PC. It caught out a lot of people playing on any servers running the plugin using wallhack etc. like https://imgur.com/B9UjE or https://imgur.com/CrJOb.
Valve patched out the method at some point according to AnAkkk, likely due to the privacy concerns.

I've been trying to access the comp.tf wiki since yesterday, but I'm only getting host errors.

cu@

Hey!
As an EU observer/producer I'd like to ask for feedback on the current state of watching 6v6 matches in EU/NA/OCE/etc., for both online and offline productions.

What makes a match fun to watch in your opinion? Is there anything you think could be improved, or are there any specific things you like or dislike about the camera work? Perhaps some things were done better in the past that you miss in current broadcasts?

To the play-by-play casters who work with the observer feed whenever it's available: What can the observer do to make casting easier for you? Do you have any gripes when it comes to the camera work?

I'd like to work on something related to this topic, so any feedback would be very appreciated.

I'd say it affects us too as in the past few months there have been multiple instances of individuals using bots to mass invite spam players/streamers to freeze their game, forcing official matches to be rescheduled and casts to be recorded offline.

According to the Twitter account in the OP, the game was originally inspired by Half-Life and Portal aesthetically, probably back when the project was still called Citadel. It was changed to Dota/fantasy because of "bad feedback".

cu@