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.

Slin keeps on posting as if the people who don't have faith in valve to suddenly make tf2 an esport are impatient and short-sighted.

Yet, the idea that a 9-year old game that has languished in obscurity could suddenly compete with a game that came out in the past year and already has major sponsors, big lans, a league in korea, and a league in america is ridiculously naive.

What you are calling for is not just rare in the history of competitive gaming, it is literally unprecedented. Why should people believe that it's going to work out prior to something positive actually HAPPENING?

Even if valve spreads awareness about competitive tf2 to people that don't know about it yet, why would they themselves take the plunge on playing a game that came out when the biggest titles were brood war and counter strike 1.6?

For a long time, the challenge was merely to try to expose pub players to the competitive side of things more, and to create a matchmaking system to bridge the gap more easily. Now, even the pub population is fleeing to greener pastures, and the world of esports as a whole has become far more monopolized and with much higher entry fees than a few years ago.

Expecting tf2 to get big in 2016 is like thinking that David Hasselhoff will win an oscar or something

thanks to the help of 2 different teams, the muffinz factor has been quantified

the reason mae's team is #1 is that mae is a top 4 demo in na, maybe top 3, and they play entirely around him

i think its important to note that the vast majority of people who really fit this description are scouts

the reason for this should be obvious hopefully

not on that team

no

THE MAN THE MYTH THE LEGEND THE TK

https://play.esea.net/teams/85721

rip blues?

its ok none of the others are famous either

if this were csgo, I'd be ocean

I'm the uncle rico of tf2

wait how does exile have a chatlog of me and catface that I literally sent to no one

is someone haxxing my pc

am I being rekt in the cyberrealm