vatican city
liechtenstein
monaco

die rich euros

for the record, I still have no idea what I'm gonna do for the remainder of the season, whether it entails staying on the team I was filling in for or joining a diff team or sitting out the season for school

its pretty funny when teams cut 1 player and assume itll fix all their problems, then realize the problems are still there immediately afterwards

has happened more than once this season so far

gg idk if ill ever play metalworks again

your joke makes sense

yours does not

this is where I volunteer to be their tf2 -> ow historian and sow myself into their inner circle

I knew my day would come! ! !

jesus christ air 75 hrs past 2 weeks take a break holmes

pops joined already, that still makes 5 for the mutiny if homie is gonna play it like that

what does sandblast being banned have to do with lee getting cut or not

just have pops med and get a new scout what's the big deal (other than for sandblast himself rip)

my favs on my friends list/me

http://steamcommunity.com/id/mustardoverlord/
http://steamcommunity.com/id/hulkhogan42069machoman
http://steamcommunity.com/id/vinniemac204
http://steamcommunity.com/id/bobsevensevens
http://steamcommunity.com/id/SpaceGhostsCoffee
http://steamcommunity.com/id/muffin07
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mebrillo
http://steamcommunity.com/id/r0cket_wizard
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197983219266
http://steamcommunity.com/id/jellooo
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mgib

is it still lit at the night show

to be fair, catface was prolly the 2nd best player on that team

and the best is def megaboy who wasn't there

my original post:

"Hi, I wanted to ask you about your feelings on smaller competitive gaming communities in light of the continual growth of esports. Some background- I come from the competitive Team Fortress 2 scene, a game with a small but dedicated community of enthusiasts that is still tenuously hosted by ESEA in North America, but appears to be shrinking where it was once stagnant. It turns out that the skill set of TF2 translates extremely well to Overwatch, and so by my estimation about 2/3 of the top OW teams have one or more TF2 players on them. This is in spite of the fact that many of those same players find the game to be much more watered down, with a lower mechanical skill ceiling, simply because it's the profitable hot commodity right now.

In light of that, and your appreciation for the grassroots Quake community, I was wondering if you could touch on the potential negatives of the growth of esports bottlenecking the amount/nature of games that can be successful. Can we reach a balance where games are slightly more casual, yet still afford enough room for the best players to display their talent (I would argue that CSGO, Dota 2, and perhaps LoL fit in here), or will games of the future focus so hard on appealing to a wide player base that the competitive scene is naturally handicapped (I would argue that OW falls into that category, League is moving continually towards that place, and newer games are likely to follow)?

Further, as the expectations for the minimum size and money flow of a competitive game grow, will grassroots communities continue to become less prevalent, as the incentive to put in the effort becomes less rewarding, with no exposure available whatsoever? I think this relates somewhat, in a roundabout way, to your journalism video, for the record- with the advent of only 3-4 games at a time truly qualifying as 'esports', perhaps people with more diverse interests are fading away, and it's harder to find new people capable of building the network of connections and sources required to thrive in a giant esport.

Finally, a completely unrelated question, but one I'm interested in: we all talk about how the next big thing in esports will be the arrival of the non-endemic sponsors. However, won't that necessarily lead to a bursting of the bubble that is gaming orgs (fnatic, EG, TSM, Liquid and so forth), as they are exposed more and more as middlemen, with these new sponsors folding teams directly into them? Obviously, this is what we see in, for instance, the LCK in Korea."

I thought Thorin, out of anyone, might appreciate the long-winded nature of my post, but he tried super hard to tl;dr it

are you suggesting that a company trying to crowdsource their labor to unpaid players in order to change the most basic elements of a 9 year old game that a 30 minute email chain with b4nny or someone could explain instantly is the opposite of laziness

sadly, this only has tangential relevance to the question I asked Thorin, but he just skimmed it cuz it was so long and didn't really give a satisfactory answer (definitely the worst I saw so far)

first of all, dota definitely did not "languish in obscurity" it was bigger than tf2 ever was or will be by at least 1 order of magnitude

second of all, the success of lol was mainly because they were lucky enough to recognize early on that twitch.tv was going to take off and the top players took advantage of it and got massively popular

third of all, even if you accept the premise of this point, it still took ENTIRELY NEW GAMES to get people interested. is all this valve meeting stuff in preparation for tf3? if not, its not going to matter

CS:GO was indeed terrible when it first came out. it also

a) was, again, an entirely new game
b) had carry-over from 1.6 and source, two of the larger esports up until that point, which had already had many international tournaments and a few tv broadcasts as well
c) really started to grow less than a year and a half after it came out (again, tf2 has been out for NINE YEARS)

you're taking this quote so much out of context it's ridiculous. scoots isn't talking about "cs:go's turnaround here", he's literally comparing it to 1.6 and source. I agree, it was definitely possible to have a mainly community driven game in 2001, that is not up for debate. the point is, when the new title came out it had developer support basically from the moment it was released, and it also had a successful scene to piggyback of from the era when DIY scenes could still grow

what we have to acknowledge about tf2 is how unfortunate the timing of its release was. it came out in late 2007. why does the date matter? well, it was long after the complete wilderness of competitive gaming, when new IPs regularly sprouted up with completely grassroots support and supplanted the market share of incumbent titles. quake, cs, starcraft, warcraft, halo, cod, and a few fighting games were already hogging a lot of room, and it was hard for a new game to dislodge them, especially one that required so much of a departure from the standard way of playing to actually be balanced for competitive play. yet, tf2 came out before the wave of entirely developer-sponsored games, when we saw sc2 really pioneer such a business model. valve is good at making money in an extremely conservative manner, and they were clearly the last of the big 3 developers to embrace this top-down approach. tf2 was just a product of its era. did blizzard go back and fund warcraft 3? I don't believe so.

of course, this has nothing to do with tf2, or how much we like it; this sort of thing happens in any market all the time. my dad, for instance, is a computer programmer who was the lead developer on NFL Challenge, the first ever NFL-licensed football computer game. However, it came out in 1985, which some nerds might recognize as the heart of the great video game crash, prior to Nintendo and their Japanese ilk swooping in and righting the ship. at the time, such a product might appeal to a few niche consumers but wouldn't exactly hit Madden numbers. I'm sure my dad is proud of the work he did and the official stamp of approval he got from the NFL, but sometimes life isn't fair. grow up now, guys, it'll save you in the long run.