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ETF2L up until season 9 has been growing and growing and growing. Look at the signup figures for the previous seasons. The admins have even made additional slots open to try and satisfy the demand of the teams. Sponsorship deals with Steelseries and Multiplay being additional factors owing to the success of the ETF2L.

What we have now is, with all these changes being made ( here http://etf2l.org/2011/03/03/announcing-season-9-cinnamon-and-other-rule-updates/ and here http://etf2l.org/2011/03/01/announcing-season-9-maps-and-schedule/ ) the known names have decided to not signup for this league. This will, in my opinion, be the death of the ETF2L. I say this because, whilst there may be many teams still signing up, the known names have gone. The majority will think “Doesn’t matter if the top teams go” but literally think about it. TF2 has always struggled to make its way in the esport-industry and only recently has it started to take of, the amount of LAN’s this year and the potential tournament at dreamhack. If the known teams and organisations disappear from this league no aspiring team will bother to play for the simple reason: who is there to challenge them?

What is most peculiar is the ETF2L’s complete ignorance towards polls about maps or unlocks. An example of this is koeitje’s poll on vanilla based upon the maps that people wanted to see in season 9. Yes admittedly in the past there have been fail polls due to people creating spam bots and ruining the statistics. The polls are seemingly not even taken into consideration, admittedly there wasn’t an even balance of votes from the 7 divisions, but a much higher concentration in the top 3/4 divisions. This shows that the people who I would class as the Flagship players (ie the players that showcase competitive TF2 at LANs and such) want the league to be changed.

With this comes the old arguments that competitive TF2 is going stale. I will admit playing the same maps over and over again does get a bit tiring but the map problem is just getting ridiculous with the addition of 8 maps to the pool. This is too many maps to create tactics and play regularly.

It’s impossible to practice and perfect tactics for 8 maps. In prem you will see certain teams only practice the three new maps (bazillion, warmfront, turbine_pro) to beat “better” teams, making the end-scores quite random because they will be based on who practices which maps.

That was written by F2 on the announcement of this map pool. This I find will also be true throughout the whole league as teams will only really want to play their favourite maps. What we have seen as a result is a flurry of maps being created and added to the map pool where they either succeed (gullywash) or they fail miserable (cp_gorge). Many favourite maps however are not included even when, the majority of people who argue about maps want them in the map pool. This could easily be disputed by saying the people who don’t post don’t want these maps, the people who don’t post obviously don’t care enough about what maps are in and therefore will play anymap that they are told to play.

Regarding unlocks, this is the worts decision this admin team have made for the competitive side of ETF2L. The entirety of the top divisions are screaming for vanilla + medlocks. I don’t honestly see why they cannot be granted this wish as they are the “Flagship players” allow them this exception as they are the people who will make TF2 grow as a competitive game. It wouldn’t be hard at all to separate the top 2 / 3 divisions and allow them a different rule set. This in effect would be a brilliant idea from my perspective. It would be easy to manage and you could even recruit an admin specifically for these separated divisions.

I am proposing a separation of the top 2/3 divisions which has the same map pool as the rest of the league but runs vanilla + medlocks as the unlock rule. Many of the players in that divisions (certainly myself even though i’m not in that classification) bought the game when it was purely vanilla and do not enjoy the game with these unlocks and/or see problems with them. Had a ruleset similar to ESL’s set been implemented (vanilla + medlocks, unlocks only allowed if both teams agree) this split wouldn’t have happened.

Regards

nova

TL;DR: Read last paragraph

Quoted from Edd

wall of text

ETF2L admins unluckily do not give a dime about the top teams, due to a warped sense of ‘fair’ which is treating e.g a div 6 team the same way as a prem team, while there are obviously big differences between them.

To anyone arguing for a separate ruleset, they will say it will create a split, to anyone saying why, they will say ‘because teams going up from e.g 2 to 1 or prem will have to adapt to a new ruleset’.

To anyone saying that these unlocks have little to no merit and/or are unbalanced, they will turn it around and say “why do you care if they’re allowed or not, in that case?”.

This is an endless argument with the admin team using the same arguments, reasoning like pubbers with no understanding of the game (Ashkan) or supporting the retarded arguments of the pubber just because he’s a fellow admin (RaCio).

Edited with paragraphs and wall-o-text

I understand your point dummy but I’m making a formal proposal here. Without these top teams ETF2L will lose its place as the best tf2 league in the world.

Quoted from Waebi

and that would be a bad thing because?

They would use etf2l.cfgs are the i-series and n0va could never go again :(.

Quoted from Edd

I understand your point dummy but I’m making a formal proposal here. Without these top teams ETF2L will lose its place as the best tf2 league in the world.

I completely agree, however the posts of admins in the last few days/weeks and the stuff going on in #etf2l on IRC in the last few days… Because of those things, it’s hard to keep faith in the admin team, and as the ESL site is not as horrid as I expected (though its still pretty dire) and the ruleset is like Jesus, it’s probably better to give ESL unless things change here – which they won’t because due to the things I mentioned in my prev. post

Quoted from Cloud

Waebi that’s the most obvious troll I’ve ever seen, what the fuck?

–edit

Oh right the league not the teams, I’m a spaz, though it’s still a
(HOWTHEFUCKDOIHIGHLIGHTSTUFFGUYS?)bad thing unless something takes it’s place :D(HOWTHEFUCKDOIHIGHLIGHTSTUFFGUYS?)

ESL
or wireplay
:D
also forgot to mention, wire is for me atleast much better than aquitas or however it was spelled for me atleast (when I tested the previous one it took a crap on my fps)

I think it would be really sad if Etf2l dies. mostly because I really enjoy the well made forums and how it’s so easy to manage things. When I make or manage teams in wireplay or ESL I just feel confused. I’d play vanilla + medlocks just to have the prem teams back though ):

Quoted from Cloud

Yeah but Dummy, someone’s gotta tell em the problems, even if nothing will actually change and we all move on to ESL/Wireplay/etc

EVERYTHING n0va said has been said multiple times in previous threads or on #etf2l, the problems have been known for a long time but they do
not
care
derp

sell outs