question for you harb: what do you think about the mindset of most invite players who don't want to put the time in to become the best and instead call our team a 'superteam' instead of focusing their attention inwards and becoming better players? i'm sure you'd agree that our team is easily the weakest its ever been considering we never practice and every one of our games is streamed and recorded, and i agree with you that the talent is out there right now.

what bothers me is that even when i was on a bottom of invite team for multiple seasons before working my way up the ladder, i had a ton of fun getting rolled by top players and tried hard to take even one round. the incentive to improve has never changed, yet just because we have top players people think its either impossible to beat us (which is a joke) or not worth the effort (incentive to be good has never changed). you were on multiple teams that upset the 1st place team (mix, x6, etc) and i'm sure you also have some good perspective on the topic.

though i agree that if your team stuck together it could have been the same situation (considering our teams' games against each other were close at that time), i would argue that the i52/s16 ESEA mixup was easily the strongest roster your team has had overall, basically a direct upgrade in every role compared to your i46 roster

lot of ignorance here

the community has always funded travel for american teams in order to provide entertainment to the community in the form of a high level tournament. otherwise, it doesn't make any sense for any american team to fund the trip out of pocket based on the prize pool.

ESEA-S17 Lan 1st Place: $6360
i52 1st Place: $3810

for i52 where we sent two teams with community funding, both us and mixup spent $600-$800 out of pocket per player on the trip to cover basic costs. our team broke even in terms of expenses and mixup likely lost money on the trip overall (they earned $1300 for 3rd place).

point being: if we paid out of pocket, we'd be losing nearly $4000 at best when we have nothing to prove. immunity has had it much worse than us as well, paying their way to the tournament twice with higher costs. the tournament has always been about the competition, and it makes no financial sense for us or immunity to go without funding considering the costs.

also, spec UI suggestion:

make the player names

http://puu.sh/fGQBj/6f4205c38b.png

clickable to jump to that player's POV in sourceTV. unless you are a cameraman with binds for the players, this would be a very easy way to quickly watch someone's pov.

edit: all this would take is a bind to make the cursor show up on screen when you hold it, like shift/control

adding a very simple 'tournaments' tab in-game that shows streams of high level matches (think esea lans, i52, ugc finals, etc) would make a huge difference in exposure for the game. every comp player realizes there is a lack of a 'standard format' for the game, and we likely will never have one. give us a convenient way to nudge people into watching whatever format they find interesting, and let them act upon their interest from there.

all this would take is for someone to read an email once a week to check for any big tournament matches coming up (with all the details worked out long in advance) and a link to the stream gets placed in the tournament tab. people could watch it through the in-game browser possibly, no need for all the work to create the in game spec system that dota/csgo has.

these bug fixes would be great QOL improvements, but i think everyone agrees there are two things that can make an actual difference for the game. a tournament/broadcast system in game, and a matchmaking system (which would take 9999999x more effort to implement)

http://puu.sh/f7oXj/60f4322250.png

my ticket has been open since

http://puu.sh/f7paZ/c5d4821fa4.png

several other people have opened tickets as well, but they were removed since there are already other tickets about the problem

thread

awesome read. the stat breakdown is a nice addition, though just showing the number of frags/deaths/ubers is always going to be skewed to the people that played more; incorporating the 'per min' type stats would better represent all of the teams.

a long-established problem with the pug system, at least for TF2, is that there is no system in place to let people know when pugs are forming. we shouldn't have to use a steam group to let people know there is a pug starting.

csgo players don't have this issue because the player base is large enough that you can basically open the client and immediately find populated servers during normal hours.

all that would be needed to fix this is a page showing the status of the pug servers, could be easily turned into a chrome extension to show a notification when a new pug is forming (something along these lines).

all of this is only relevant if people decide to really give the esea pugs a shot, but this discussion tends to happen every few years with barely any long-term change.

lets use this thread to document the changes you want to see in the servers. if we show some dedication in trying to improve the system, esea admins would be more active in implementing the improvements (like the server lag issue posted a week ago).

there have been random freezes for 2-3 seconds happening on all esea servers (even the lan servers from S17)

http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=619486

made a thread on the esea forums to try to get this noticed, lets get this fixed

disappointing, the price increase will even further discourage new talent from making the step to invite (which people already avoid for fear of losing, ez IM paycheck, etc)

solid collection, well done

i found this doc that shows some of the differences between the real and fake ones in case anyone hasn't seen it

definitely agree

in addition, this would obviously require a lot more preparation, but I've always wanted to see longer sit down interviews with top players, in a similar style to this interview with strenx. having long interviews about a player's history / life would definitely help the community to learn more about its players.

edit: since a lot of players are quitting this season, 'farewell' interviews recapping their careers would memorialize their accomplishments and time spent in the scene. maybe some of the mixup players would be willing to do this.

4g

lansky
http://steamcommunity.com/id/lansky/
http://play.esea.net/users/391030

b4nny
http://steamcommunity.com/id/b4nny
http://play.esea.net/users/361802

he got very strong DM and is dedicated to being the best. definitely deserves a high IM team