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Alright, I remove the logo for now. Gimme a shout, when it’s back up and running :)

Awesome thread.

Quoted from Skyride

http://skyride.org/2013/01/the-problem-with-pickups/

Played about 6-8 for the HL pickup last night, it does need some work though, lot of things are confusing about it.

Pixelpickup was really active then the bot died and it seemed to die along with it. The big thing the HL pickup has is a Steam group with several volunteer admins to promote it. The North American one (#tf2.pug.nahl) uses the same means of advertising, it is easily the most active PUG channel in TF2, well it was until someone made an intermediate PUG channel (#tf2.mix.hl) – they easily get up to 10-15 games a day…for Highlander without even needing to promote itself. Both channels are still extremely active.

EU HL is different as it doesn’t have as involved HL scene as NA, who have their own forums / community and it is easily the largest in the game at the moment. It also doesn’t have a dedicated league that run seasons for about 36/52 weeks of the year (including playoffs and pre-season hype) whilst in ETF2L we run HL for half of that.

Then there is the frustrating aspect of Coverage in this scene, for such a huge community we have very few people willing to do any sort of coverage, not just for 9v9. Nothing is easier than typing a couple of paragraphs about the season, about teams, about players – we all gossip this stuff in our mumbles or on the forums or on steam friends. The issue of casting is another one, whilst I don’t like to criticise VanillaTV they did 2 HL games all season and one was because I wanted to cover SNSD v Colony – now VTV do amazing work when they start covering the game but to actually cast a game they need casters and we have SO FEW and I don’t understand why I am the only one willing to cover HL for VTV when hundreds of people play the gamemode, in North America we got dozens of people casting all skill levels from top to bottom.

This rant is better off being put on VanillaTF2, it has little to do with the state of Pixelpickups, if you had several volunteers both participating and promoting the channel constantly you’d soon get it active again.

Quoted from Skyride

[…]

That was only one small point. TF2Lobby is active too, that doesn’t mean it’s any good. Trust me, in the long run it’s going to turn into exactly what I said in the article. Just look at the EU Newbie Mixes if you want to see how that plays out.

Of course nothing lasts forever, I am not trying to promote this HL channel because I think it will last for a long time and be active, I am doing it because partly nobody else seems willing to do it (well I know a few people who helped made it would have done) but mostly because TF2 doesn’t have a Highlander pickup channel. There is absolutely no harm in making it, doesn’t matter if it is done well or not, only thing I am hoping it will do is become like the NA version which has not one, but two active HL pickup channels, both getting 10+ games a night and the first one being consistently active for 6 months. Reason for it’s activity is the community pulling together plus dedicated people promoting it to get it running, it will die eventually like everything else but it’s very successful at the moment, if our channel can get half as active for half the time I think any effort would be worth it.