And in the midst of the shuffle tf2 loses its best organisation. Pity.

It's a 24hr ban right of passage to becoming a good streamer.

I prefer the NA system of playing 1 map per week and you go hard on it. 1 map between two teams is preferable to 2 maps against a single opponent imo but I think that aspect is way less important and way more personal preference than winlimits/rulesets/whitelists.

The timing of this thread is so perfect lmao

Big daddy suave reform yes please

Well then if you can't watch it all, I'd make time for the Lower Bracket games starting with Full Tilt vs Jasmine and go from there.

Literally every streamed match was awesome and the stuff in between with the analyst desk was often hilarious in a particular way. I'm not exaggerating when I say you should watch p much everything.

Thank god for british border control??!

My line of thinking was the same as WAR's just after i55, but after running a range of cups and stuff it's basically wasted effort. Nobody cares about the cups or leagues, the only thing that drives players and hypes spectators are the LANs.

YO UPDATE

Made a Discord for this so that we can organise our thoughts in one place. If you spam it with BS discussion I will remove you, keep things structured and on-topic. Feel free to keep using this thread as well, but people with specific ideas, skills, or contacts should go to the discord. I laid out a couple of channels to break down the project into individual manageable tasks.

https://discord.gg/sfuCD

The biggest question for my mind is if the whole compendium idea and riding the hype from i58 would be good enough to provide at least £5000 worth of funding for travel. That would be 500 compendiums sold, doesn't sound like toooo much but it'd be with only a few months break from iseries.

I'd rather not focus on any idea that relies on Valve. If they do anything it'd be nice but let's gravitate away from in-game stuff that counts on their official backing.

The £17,000 extra it would cost for a second global LAN cannot reasonably rely on fundraising as there’s no way of knowing if you could raise $10k just half a year after an iseries, and without approaching them one can’t rely on the same sponsors. There are plenty of potential sponsors who would be interested in an event like this though despite it not getting over 10k viewers, and the best way to build up the money is through gathering a range of sponsors. Companies like Plantronics and OCZ have thrown a couple of thousand at us in recent tournaments, and people such as Twitch, Tt, Razer, ZOWIE, etc. have all been involved before. Naturally some of them won’t sponsor mutually but often they do. I think it’s eminently do-able with a proper pitch, the effort I’ve put in to build sponsor relations so far has not been exhaustive.

In addition, by moving sponsorship away from existing cups in TF2 and into this second event you could repurpose about £7,000 per year (using rough prizepool spreadsheet calculations from that other thread). This would kill all the random cups that we were running throughout the year but let’s be real nobody played in them or gave a shit anyway. Would also kill the DreamHacks but they are a pain for multiple reasons and I think the tradeoff would be worth it if needed.

In summary, would you be interested? Do you think it’s worth the effort for the sheer fun of it? Do you know of any potential venues? Do you have experience approaching companies in your job / building sales pitches? Do you have any insight into the best places in NA from a travel perspective? Do you have any ideas of how to monetize the competitive scene without help from Valve putting items etc. into the game? Do you have organisations that you’d recommend for TF2 teams to approach, big enough to offer money but not too big to dismiss TF2 outright? Basically help me brainstorm, find flaws in the plan, and come up with something more concrete. I must stress that I’ve only thought about this for a couple of days since dashner couldn’t get to i58 and I got talking to b4nny and samiface at LAN. It’s a vague outline of what I’m thinking and nothing more.

After i58 was so fucking amazing, now appears to be the most motivated people have been in ages. I normally discuss ideas like these extensively with key community members before acting on them in any way but by then I’ll probably get bored or busy, and others won’t feel the same fire to help out. So I’m throwing out this half-baked idea in the hopes that we can all discuss how we could achieve it and use the motivation from the iseries to create another event before i61.

What I wanna stress with all of this is that it seems very possible based on my experiences organising stuff so far - the only thing I have going for me is initiative and a desire to learn how to do things and I’ve been able to get a few cool cups going with new sponsors and the dreamhack shit etc. As far as I’m aware I have been the only person actively looking for new sponsors for tf2 and even that in a half-arsed manner. If we got a proper pitch together I think we’d be able to get everything we need. We’re small, sure, but we’re not so small that we can only gather one LAN per year, that’s dumb to accept imo.

The global iseries is always in August and has a huge impact on the community - it’s above and beyond anything else, only comparable to a DHS on crack. There’s been nothing else at all that got r/tf2, twitter, and tftv buzzing like the global iseries. If you checked out reddit at all during the event it resembled the CSGO subreddit - with mm released it seems people became way more open to the idea of comp and then when they checked it out they loved it. Online cups do not permeate the public psyche at all, they get viewership comparable to league games and appear to be a waste of money.

The summer iseries happening annually means that teams don’t care about the rest of the year and teams fold straight afterwards - case in point FT/Jasmine being “dead” and players quitting froyo/crowns. It would be great to have two of these per year to keep players in, teams motivated, and see more of the only good tf2 all year. November or February are the best times for these, at the opposite end of the calendar from August, and USA would be the best place for it from an idealistic perspective as there’s no event there. One must remember though that EU teams are generally poorer and don’t have esea winnings to use.

In order to run a LAN like iseries you need (might have missed stuff too):

• Venue that can hold 100 people and has an area that can be used for viewing, preferably with somewhere to socialise afterwards as well and one that doesn’t kick you out if you go late is best. Needs accommodation nearby and has to be accessible.
  
• Sponsorship for prizemoney and production. i58 had a £8,500 prize and $5,000 for talent/equipment. i52/i49/i46 had £5,000 prize and I think the prize only needs to be that big as long as you have…
  
• Travel costs paid for intercontinental teams. At i58 teams raised roughly $10,000 to attend, all without organisations.
  
• Rental PCs or PCs provided for at least the intercontinental teams, so 15 minimum. The more rentals the better, or if PCs are provided for the whole event like

Venues:
Currently the only venues we’d have for an event like this are DreamHack Winter (Sweden) and the winter/spring iseries (UK). We do have somebody with links to Esports Arena (Cali), we had FLAN which is now moving to Chicago, we had an event at Assembly (Finland) in the past, and there have to be other smaller LANs all across North America that we can persuade to host us. It requires a lot of work to get in touch with these places but the first step is just to throw out names and contact details so that we can show them what i58 was like and if they’d want one in their venue. If you know a venue with an existing lan then that’s how you can help. This is a huge point and there’s a reason I’ve put it first on the list.

We'd be aiming to get a minimum 8 teams there (inc. two intercontinental teams) or at least 4 invited teams with lotsa specs. 60-100 people with space nearby to house them and space inside to watch/produce.

Money:
As I said above, you really need about £17,000 of sponsorship per event, which is $22,000 and includes the travel costs for teams. It breaks down roughly to £5k prize, £4k production, and then £8k travel. There is a risk that teams won’t be able to afford the bit out of pocket if it’s twice per year which would add another few thousand, but if they were able to find organisations (which again no teams are hardcore searching for) then that cost could be mitigated.

So we’re looking at raising £34,000 per year for those two events. Is that worth it? I think so. We tried running standalone online events but people don’t engage in them since leagues and scrims are the norm, and pumping money like this into online cups/leagues would not generate anywhere near the same level of engagement. It’s not the money games that gets people hyped like in other games, it’s the personalities and players being there in person and competing between regions.

At the moment the teams rely on fundraising for travel support, with the rest covered by the range of sponsors you saw on display at i58. Relying on fundraising isn’t great long-term, and I think we’ll see it in a huge decline if we had two events per year. It’s speculation but none of the fundraisers met their goal this year; they raised about $10k, normally the amount is more like $15k, though this year they were announced fairly late and without much hype.

As the beginnings of a solution, I’d like to push the teams toward organisations that can afford to help with at least accommodation to reduce costs marginally as well as aiming to get more sponsorship than is required for the prize/production and using that for travel of top teams. This should reduce but not replace fundraising, which I think is still a powerful tool in TF2. I’d prefer to see the fundraising be event-specific rather than for each team, with an event compendium. More on that idea below as it’s a little tangential.

Please remove metalworks and put reckoner in, it'd go a long way to making the scenes closer in their rules.