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So, lets use this thread to discuss the upcoming tournament

who is going? who thinks it will be an epic fail?

i was reading other thread, and with a bit of *off topic* stealthy said some good points, ill make a sumary:
-> out of 26 teams: 3 are offically booked and 2 teams are maybes
-> lan location not suitable for most of the comunity
-> PCGamer lan is going to kill the opportunity of tf2 becoming a lan game

In the end its down to the community to make it happen just as much as the organisers. Sure, there are a few legitimate reasons why it may not be as successful as it could be, such as the timing (right at the start of university term/semester and freshers week for many students) but honestly the biggest reason, or rather excuse is basically that many people in the competitive community can’t be arsed to seriously consider it and attend.

Realistically, it shouldn’t be much more expensive for someone to travel from western europe to the LAN than someone that actually resides in the UK, there is just an assumption that it’s too expensive instead of actually bothering to invest any time and effort to search for good deals on travel – there are fucking loads. I suppose its partly the prospect of having to plan and take long journeys to make it happen that puts people off more than anything, but to be fair you can’t expect big LAN’s with attractive prize pots to show up on your doorstep.

I suppose if there was an option for TUP (turn up and play) so that players didn’t have to bring their entire PC’s/monitors etc with them then it would be more appealing to those travelling long distances, because then they could easily take a cheap flight.

It is expensive, and always will be to attend major LAN’s unless you happen to be one of the lucky few who live close enough to the location that travel and accomodation are not an issue. I imagine that a large proportion of teams don’t attend because the expense doesn’t seem justifiable unless they feel they are in with a good chance of winning some prize money, and in TF2’s case, that’s limited to a very small number of teams, and even smaller if only considering the UK teams.

Considering that even the CS:S community is struggling in terms of predicted attendance for this LAN, it’s not surprising that TF2 is. Many of the TF2 teams will recently have attended Multiplay’s i34, so the expense of attending another LAN so soon after isn’t really justifiable unless there is cash to burn, or in the case of teams such as wotr or TLR, a great chance of finishing well into the prize pool.

TF2’s competitive community is still well in its infancy in terms of recognition in the wider eSports scene, and may remain that way indefinately. Recognition will only happen if the community can become a large, self sustaining competitive playerbase with LAN events offering big prizepots that are attended by many teams regularly. Either that or something huge in eSports will take on TF2, for example the CGS.

PCG LAN is the first of these large LAN events that ALSO offers a considerable prizepot, and perhaps the community is not yet ready for it, regardless of issues of timing and cost. Multigaming organisations that offer sponsorship for LAN events are predominantly still sitting on the sidelines, which reduces the number of high level teams that are almost guaranteed to attend LAN events, as well as the general interest in the TF2 competitive scene.

The addition of such organisations to the support of the TF2 scene may be the catalyst required to ignite the competitive scene into recognition and LAN activity, although unfortunately this is unlikely to happen unless we can show that the community is self-sustaining and active on its own, without their support.

There are also issues with knowledge about the event. Advertising of LAN’s such as these is currently limited more or less to those who hear by word-of-mouth or regularly check popular esports sites supporting TF2, such as Cadred.org. No doubt PCGamer have advertised in their own magazine, although this isn’t particularly effective given that it caters to an entirely different target audience. It wasn’t made particularly clear that online qualifiers are NOT a pre-requisite to attend the event, so many will likely be under the false impression that they can’t attend after missing the qualifiers.