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After i58 was so fucking amazing, now appears to be the most motivated people have been in ages. I normally discuss ideas like these extensively with key community members before acting on them in any way but by then I’ll probably get bored or busy, and others won’t feel the same fire to help out. So I’m throwing out this half-baked idea in the hopes that we can all discuss how we could achieve it and use the motivation from the iseries to create another event before i61. What I wanna stress with all of this is that it seems very possible based on my experiences organising stuff so far - the only thing I have going for me is initiative and a desire to learn how to do things and I’ve been able to get a few cool cups going with new sponsors and the dreamhack shit etc. As far as I’m aware I have been the only person actively looking for new sponsors for tf2 and even that in a half-arsed manner. If we got a proper pitch together I think we’d be able to get everything we need. We’re small, sure, but we’re not so small that we can only gather one LAN per year, that’s dumb to accept imo. The global iseries is always in August and has a huge impact on the community - it’s above and beyond anything else, only comparable to a DHS on crack. There’s been nothing else at all that got r/tf2, twitter, and tftv buzzing like the global iseries. If you checked out reddit at all during the event it resembled the CSGO subreddit - with mm released it seems people became way more open to the idea of comp and then when they checked it out they loved it. Online cups do not permeate the public psyche at all, they get viewership comparable to league games and appear to be a waste of money. The summer iseries happening annually means that teams don’t care about the rest of the year and teams fold straight afterwards - case in point FT/Jasmine being “dead” and players quitting froyo/crowns. It would be great to have two of these per year to keep players in, teams motivated, and see more of the only good tf2 all year. November or February are the best times for these, at the opposite end of the calendar from August, and USA would be the best place for it from an idealistic perspective as there’s no event there. One must remember though that EU teams are generally poorer and don’t have esea winnings to use. In order to run a LAN like iseries you need (might have missed stuff too): Venue that can hold 100 people and has an area that can be used for viewing, preferably with somewhere to socialise afterwards as well and one that doesn’t kick you out if you go late is best. Needs accommodation nearby and has to be accessible.



Sponsorship for prizemoney and production. i58 had a £8,500 prize and $5,000 for talent/equipment. i52/i49/i46 had £5,000 prize and I think the prize only needs to be that big as long as you have…



Travel costs paid for intercontinental teams. At i58 teams raised roughly $10,000 to attend, all without organisations.



Rental PCs or PCs provided for at least the intercontinental teams, so 15 minimum. The more rentals the better, or if PCs are provided for the whole event like Venues:

Currently the only venues we’d have for an event like this are DreamHack Winter (Sweden) and the winter/spring iseries (UK). We do have somebody with links to Esports Arena (Cali), we had FLAN which is now moving to Chicago, we had an event at Assembly (Finland) in the past, and there have to be other smaller LANs all across North America that we can persuade to host us. It requires a lot of work to get in touch with these places but the first step is just to throw out names and contact details so that we can show them what i58 was like and if they’d want one in their venue. If you know a venue with an existing lan then that’s how you can help. This is a huge point and there’s a reason I’ve put it first on the list. We'd be aiming to get a minimum 8 teams there (inc. two intercontinental teams) or at least 4 invited teams with lotsa specs. 60-100 people with space nearby to house them and space inside to watch/produce. Money:

As I said above, you really need about £17,000 of sponsorship per event, which is $22,000 and includes the travel costs for teams. It breaks down roughly to £5k prize, £4k production, and then £8k travel. There is a risk that teams won’t be able to afford the bit out of pocket if it’s twice per year which would add another few thousand, but if they were able to find organisations (which again no teams are hardcore searching for) then that cost could be mitigated. So we’re looking at raising £34,000 per year for those two events. Is that worth it? I think so. We tried running standalone online events but people don’t engage in them since leagues and scrims are the norm, and pumping money like this into online cups/leagues would not generate anywhere near the same level of engagement. It’s not the money games that gets people hyped like in other games, it’s the personalities and players being there in person and competing between regions. At the moment the teams rely on fundraising for travel support, with the rest covered by the range of sponsors you saw on display at i58. Relying on fundraising isn’t great long-term, and I think we’ll see it in a huge decline if we had two events per year. It’s speculation but none of the fundraisers met their goal this year; they raised about $10k, normally the amount is more like $15k, though this year they were announced fairly late and without much hype. As the beginnings of a solution, I’d like to push the teams toward organisations that can afford to help with at least accommodation to reduce costs marginally as well as aiming to get more sponsorship than is required for the prize/production and using that for travel of top teams. This should reduce but not replace fundraising, which I think is still a powerful tool in TF2. I’d prefer to see the fundraising be event-specific rather than for each team, with an event compendium. More on that idea below as it’s a little tangential. Show Content My idea for a compendium is to replace the “perks” for fundraising with a digital item that you buy once for the event and that money is assigned where needed. It gives people more of a motivation to buy it other than being truly generous and the name is easily identifiable due to its use in dota. Charge £10 or so for the item which contains: team profiles, artwork, interviews, etc. It would also make you eligible for giveaways during the tournament, allow you to play fantasytf2 for the event, vote for players for an MVP award, vote for the teams in an all-star match, vote in a fragmovie competition before the event like i46, and let you take part in a predictions competition for points/prizes. We could make the perks fairly easily and as it is event-specific rather than team specific you have access to many more people with skills. I think it’d work very well and it’s probably less work than actually fulfilling hundreds of weapon signing requests.

After i58 was so fucking amazing, now appears to be the most motivated people have been in ages. I normally discuss ideas like these extensively with key community members before acting on them in any way but by then I’ll probably get bored or busy, and others won’t feel the same fire to help out. So I’m throwing out this half-baked idea in the hopes that we can all discuss how we could achieve it and use the motivation from the iseries to create another event before i61.



What I wanna stress with all of this is that it seems very possible based on my experiences organising stuff so far - the only thing I have going for me is initiative and a desire to learn how to do things and I’ve been able to get a few cool cups going with new sponsors and the dreamhack shit etc. As far as I’m aware I have been the only person actively looking for new sponsors for tf2 and even that in a half-arsed manner. If we got a proper pitch together I think we’d be able to get everything we need. We’re small, sure, but we’re not so small that we can only gather one LAN per year, that’s dumb to accept imo.



The global iseries is always in August and has a huge impact on the community - it’s above and beyond anything else, only comparable to a DHS on crack. There’s been nothing else at all that got r/tf2, twitter, and tftv buzzing like the global iseries. If you checked out reddit at all during the event it resembled the CSGO subreddit - with mm released it seems people became way more open to the idea of comp and then when they checked it out they loved it. Online cups do not permeate the public psyche at all, they get viewership comparable to league games and appear to be a waste of money.



The summer iseries happening annually means that teams don’t care about the rest of the year and teams fold straight afterwards - case in point FT/Jasmine being “dead” and players quitting froyo/crowns. It would be great to have two of these per year to keep players in, teams motivated, and see more of the only good tf2 all year. November or February are the best times for these, at the opposite end of the calendar from August, and USA would be the best place for it from an idealistic perspective as there’s no event there. One must remember though that EU teams are generally poorer and don’t have esea winnings to use.



In order to run a LAN like iseries you need (might have missed stuff too):

[list]

[*] Venue that can hold 100 people and has an area that can be used for viewing, preferably with somewhere to socialise afterwards as well and one that doesn’t kick you out if you go late is best. Needs accommodation nearby and has to be accessible.

[*] Sponsorship for prizemoney and production. i58 had a £8,500 prize and $5,000 for talent/equipment. i52/i49/i46 had £5,000 prize and I think the prize only needs to be that big as long as you have…

[*] Travel costs paid for intercontinental teams. At i58 teams raised roughly $10,000 to attend, all without organisations.

[*] Rental PCs or PCs provided for at least the intercontinental teams, so 15 minimum. The more rentals the better, or if PCs are provided for the whole event like

[/list]



[b]Venues:[/b]

Currently the only venues we’d have for an event like this are DreamHack Winter (Sweden) and the winter/spring iseries (UK). We do have somebody with links to Esports Arena (Cali), we had FLAN which is now moving to Chicago, we had an event at Assembly (Finland) in the past, and there have to be other smaller LANs all across North America that we can persuade to host us. It requires a lot of work to get in touch with these places but the first step is just to throw out names and contact details so that we can show them what i58 was like and if they’d want one in their venue. If you know a venue with an existing lan then that’s how you can help. This is a huge point and there’s a reason I’ve put it first on the list.



We'd be aiming to get a minimum 8 teams there (inc. two intercontinental teams) or at least 4 invited teams with lotsa specs. 60-100 people with space nearby to house them and space inside to watch/produce.



[b]Money:[/b]

As I said above, you really need about £17,000 of sponsorship per event, which is $22,000 and includes the travel costs for teams. It breaks down roughly to £5k prize, £4k production, and then £8k travel. There is a risk that teams won’t be able to afford the bit out of pocket if it’s twice per year which would add another few thousand, but if they were able to find organisations (which again no teams are hardcore searching for) then that cost could be mitigated.



So we’re looking at raising £34,000 per year for those two events. Is that worth it? I think so. We tried running standalone online events but people don’t engage in them since leagues and scrims are the norm, and pumping money like this into online cups/leagues would not generate anywhere near the same level of engagement. It’s not the money games that gets people hyped like in other games, it’s the personalities and players being there in person and competing between regions.



At the moment the teams rely on fundraising for travel support, with the rest covered by the range of sponsors you saw on display at i58. Relying on fundraising isn’t great long-term, and I think we’ll see it in a huge decline if we had two events per year. It’s speculation but none of the fundraisers met their goal this year; they raised about $10k, normally the amount is more like $15k, though this year they were announced fairly late and without much hype.



As the beginnings of a solution, I’d like to push the teams toward organisations that can afford to help with at least accommodation to reduce costs marginally as well as aiming to get more sponsorship than is required for the prize/production and using that for travel of top teams. This should reduce but not replace fundraising, which I think is still a powerful tool in TF2. I’d prefer to see the fundraising be event-specific rather than for each team, with an event compendium. More on that idea below as it’s a little tangential.



[spoiler]My idea for a compendium is to replace the “perks” for fundraising with a digital item that you buy once for the event and that money is assigned where needed. It gives people more of a motivation to buy it other than being truly generous and the name is easily identifiable due to its use in dota. Charge £10 or so for the item which contains: team profiles, artwork, interviews, etc. It would also make you eligible for giveaways during the tournament, allow you to play fantasytf2 for the event, vote for players for an MVP award, vote for the teams in an all-star match, vote in a fragmovie competition before the event like i46, and let you take part in a predictions competition for points/prizes. We could make the perks fairly easily and as it is event-specific rather than team specific you have access to many more people with skills. I think it’d work very well and it’s probably less work than actually fulfilling hundreds of weapon signing requests.[/spoiler]