and if so where can i donate for them to get better servers

I remember asking Paulsen who the best player he played against at LAN was and immediately he said Blaze. Called him "impressively annoying to play against. Never put a foot wrong." The man was always right place, right time, and gave everything for his team. His synergy with his flank scouts throughout time was incredibly tight and impressive as was his overall teamplay. Thanks for the memories and letting us all bear witness to one of the best roamers to ever play the game.

was there a moment where the energy for the team/in comms shifted and you all had that feeling of "we might actually do this?" what was that like?

favorite album?

NO MORE HALFTIMES GIVE US 30 MINUTE MAPS (BASED) 2K21
TWO MAPS A WEEK COULD BE POSSIBLE - A NEW WORLD. NO MORE GRINDING METALWORKS FOR AN ENTIRE WEEK YEESSSIIIIIIIR

https://twitch.tv/videos/1116695875

Enjoy! The entire series is a thriller

YYESSSSIIIIIR

I'll answer these with my own anecdotal experience from doing ozfortress stuff

1) imo it's both organization pre-cast and ability to coherently spectate during a game. pre-cast stuff is a multitude of things but the things I tried to focus on leading up to a cast was:

• picking out casters ahead of time based on division, their relative skill level, perceived/known cohesion with their co-caster. Last thing you want are two low-level casters casting a high level game. Or two people who both have playbyplay styles of commentary etc
  
• knowing at the beginning of the week what game you're interested in producing ahead of time and organizing ASAP
  
• having all your backend stuff setup an hour before show: twitch titles, scoreboard and other nodecg stuff etc
  
• getting casters in ~30min ahead of the match just so you dont have to hunt them down

Being organized and ready to go well ahead of time saves you a lot of pain.
In game you really want to be following the flow of the match and adjust your camera based on what the state of the game is. My general spectator theory is that you want your camera to be on the team on the offensive during the push - so if Blu is pushing Red 2nd, get on a Blu combo player. If the tide turns and blu is retreating get on a red camera etc. Helps keep the game exciting.
As well, there's a few other things:

• Being confident with ce_autocamera tools (static 3rd person cameras)
  
• Making sure you keep track of players who have gone behind or are hiding etc
  
• not "panic hopping" between cameras and being OK with letting the scene play out as is.
  
• getting on the camera of the team that's captured last/won the game before the point is capped/game is over. Just ensures that the victory music always plays and never the boos.
  
• not overly relying on cheatfeed if you use it

There's a lot of minutiae for casting and other things I won't list for the sake of brevity.

2) Hardest part is just how random TF2 can be to spectate. sometimes on mids you'll be on one camera and the entire fight happens on someone else's and you catch nothing at all. It can be hard to know what camera to be on at all. KOTH is especially tricky. Otherwise every other issue is alleviated by proper planning and execution.

3) i produced a lot of ozfortress/fbtf games last year and earlier this year because i was so tired of grinding the game but i still wanted to be involved and saw it as a useful way of staying involved without having to do demo reviews of any sort. this stupid game still captivates me a decade on.

4) Sideshow, Bren are the most prominent examples. I don't think eXtine has had big opportunities for casting but I would imagine all the work he's put into TF2 over the years has bolstered his resume significantly and helped him get non-casting roles in esports. Wiethoofd gets paid to do EA NHL esport games. The skills you pick up from producing are immediately translatable to other aspects of esports/broadcasting as a whole, you just need to market it.

5) I think there's a big untapped market in Tiktok and Instagram for highlight reel/big play style videos. RGL has started doing something along those lines on tiktok but I think there's a lot of potential there. Generally I think the more comp TF2 content that isnt just frag videos/casts that is out there the better. If you build it etc

6) For TF2 yes, especially for smaller regions. It's understandable though, not everyone wants to invest the time it takes to learn all the small things about production, and even if you did want to, you need a beefy computer to run OBS/TF2/etc. The scene could always use more producers and could always use more commentators knowledgable about the game (or at least are good enough at playbyplay that they can get a high level analyst to fill in the gaps)

legendary event

i love you

+rep fun guy to play with

I've had the chance of playing all three of these maps in ozfortress seasons/offseason cups before moving to NA so my thoughts come from those seasons and this recent RGL cup.

Logjam is a weird case because there are some parts of the map that are decent and other parts that are really not good. The biggest culprit is the second point as a whole. If you're holding 2nd, the choke the enemy team comes through gives them a mile's worth of height above you before they even enter. The choke itself is massive, too and it being a Yukon-esque half choke doesn't help to alleviate it (but admittedly is a massive step up from the 3 mile long old flank that used to exist). Soldiers don't really have anything to jump off for sacs, but rather stuff to jump on to spam from. There's a lot of height but it's awkward to play off. It's like the entirety of second is made for scouts to run around and have field days on. The flank through logs into 2nd favors the team with mid too. They have height, props, corners etc. all around it's just bad. I've never played on a good 2nd in all my time playing Logjam.

There's the making of a good map there, but I don't know how it gets to that point without redoing all of second.

Reckoner is quite good and my favorite of the bunch. I don't believe the mapper is active anymore but that's fine because I think the map is at a point where it's league ready as evidenced by ETF2L and ozfortress continually including it in the various seasons. It's a map that, for me, favors fast scout transitions without necessarily making scout too beefy. I've seen a lot of Reckoner games where soldiers and demos have really great games. The biggest complaint for me is that 2nd feels a bit crowded.

Mannbase gets better with each iteration (and I say this as someone who's playtested it from a3). The addition of the 2nd opening in Quake room (flank from mid to 2nd) adds an interesting bit of height to play on and bomb through. I like the readdition of the flanking doors on mid that puts you right in the enemy's side of mid. I used to feel that you had to keep constant watch on that room during midfights but it didn't feel like that on the games I played. It would be interesting if they were 1-way doors out of the room. Last is probably the weakest part of the map mostly because it feels so big. You've got a lot of room to push into, push across, or climb.

must be nice

the amount of times i accidentally overwrote my binds because i forgot to move everything in my cfg folder to a disabled folder is too many times to count

I actually have a script written for this, I just havent gotten around to making the videos. I did heaps of streams for cappingtv back in ozf s29/s30 a bunch of fbtf, even some rgl. getting everything set up is easy, its knowing what to look at/whos camera to be on thats challenging. Even moreso for HL.

Hmu on here or discord Rah and I’m happy to share my philosophy on spectating and producing

I wonder what “numerous security and stability improvements” entails