Hey lads, it's that guy ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I've had this idea for a while, but I figure I'd officially propose it here.
Almost every big game that warrants it regularly features some sort of best frag or best plays video, much more frequently than we do. We've had the commft top 10, but obviously it's run into some difficulties as:
1.) it's become less frequent, and is released too far after the fact.
2.) the quality of frags has slipped, both in terms of the frags themselves out of context and the level of the players in them.
I want to make it clear that I have the utmost respect for eXtine and eXtv and don't really think they're at fault for either of these problems. The former problem is more because of the giant workload those two have, that makes each project more difficult to accomplish (especially when other projects with stricter deadlines must take precedence, e.g. live casts and eXtravision). The latter is obviously a fault of the community, and the lack of incentive to submit footage.
Recently, I've seen two top 10 series, plus two other videos, that have inspired me to find a solution to this problem.
The first is the French top 10, a monthly series that highlights the best plays from French (and Belgian lololol) players, commentated by Luzzu and Pognon (two well-known, roughly div 1 level EU players).
Here's the most recent example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb16XwNh1Rw
Now, I'm not suggesting this is the perfect model to emulate. The video still came out at the end of July despite being about April and May. However, by narrowing the frags to the close-knit French community, the quality of submissions was actually higher, because of the increased pressure for every player to submit their frags.
The second is the top 10 plays of ESEA-I for 1.6 and CSS that eseanews puts out every week, corresponding to a particular map in the season.
A recent example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5PuUjNbNbo&feature=context-gfa
Other than the obvious fact that this isn't TF2, I think this series is the best possible example of what I'm goin' for. It's professionally edited, it comes out frequently and on a regular schedule, and all the frags are great and are from high-level players. Hell, I don't even like CS, and these vids are great!
Besides those two series, the videos that inspired me the most were Beater's stv watching nerd compilations, which said "fuck it, I'll do it myself!", and Prem by CUBE, which showed just how easy it was to get frags from the top level of competition if you focused exclusively on that goal.
But, I'm rambling. To go back to my original point, I'd like to create an top 10 plays of the week for ESEA-I, and host it on teamfortress.tv. I was thinking that, by the time other content (such as demo reviews, instructional videos, cast vods, the podcast w/ sal and cbear) becomes available on tf.tv, more tabs will need to exist alongside "articles", "streams" and such. If one of them were "videos", these could be under that, with either embedded youtube videos or tf.tv-exclusive vids holding the content. I might start by making a pilot via looking through stvs from esea, but ideally I could have one player from each invite team be the "representative" of their team, and gather pov demos and ticks each week. On behalf of the individual player, you'd only have to watch 2 of your own demos a week, something most people would probably do anyways. I think that, rather than getting less content because of the narrowing of scope, this initiative will produce an impetus on players to send in their stuff, because the burden is more greatly on them.
(cont'd below)