eXtine
I get where you're coming from, but at this point, I feel like any growth in TF2 is going to be in spite of Valve. At this point it's clear Valve doesn't care what happens to the game or the scene, whether you're talking about the monolithic Valve Corporation, or the "work on whatever you feel like" people there. Either way, nobody's working from the inside to make TF2 be the best thing it can possibly be, and as far as we can tell from the outside, nobody is working on the game period. I agree we should keep building stuff and trying to grow our community, but at this point, expecting anything from Valve is a mistake.
I guess what I really want to say is that I wish Valve weren't part of the equation. I wish that TF2 were a game from one of the hundreds of long-dead studios out there and that there weren't the shadows of Counter-Strike and DOTA to make us feel insecure. I wish TF2 could be TF2 without having to be "TF2: The game Valve forgot" I wish Valve wasn't even a consideration, so that we could just get on with a promod and a compendium and majors and everything else that proper grassroots esports do without having to talk about how the non-existent developers might feel about it.
The fact that they are a part of the equation, and yet patently refuse to even communicate with us about literally anything to do with the game or the scene, let alone take any action whatsoever to make the game work better in a competitive context, is what's so frustrating about our relationship with Valve. Because I think we do understand them, at least as well as we can when they are literally incapable of communicating, and I don't think that understanding them is the issue. It's the fact that they're standing with their foot in the door just enough to make all of us think that they might come back some day, but when you ask them if they're coming in or leaving, they pretend not to hear you.
If Valve is going to stay a part of the equation, they should stop pretending that their presence is irrelevant to the community around the game. And if they won't, then we should tell them, and more importantly ourselves, that we officially don't care what they think, and whatever we think is best for the game and the way that we want to play it, that's what we're gonna do, Valve be damned. I'm just so sick of their ghost looming over every decision we make like that of an abusive step-dad. We should be doing and building things because we love the game and want to share it with as many people as we can, not because we think that maybe if we build enough and change enough, Valve will come down from on high and save us from ourselves.