This editorial is of the expressed opinion of its author and not a reflection of GotFrag or MLG.

It's funny how good things always seem to come in groups. After a somewhat quiet summer, the NA TF2 scene had an explosion of activity in the final weeks of August with the NVISION 2008 GeForce TF2 LAN Tournament taking place down in San Jose, CA, as well as the culmination of the 2-month-long CEVO Sennheiser Open, both won by resident TF2 titans, Pandemic. We also saw the release of the Heavy Update, which had almost no impact on the competitive side of the game but gave us an amusing sound bite at the very least (nom nom nom) as well as a new gamemode to fiddle around with (#tf2arena tourney, anyone?).

Meanwhile, the ETF2L 3rd Cup has finally reached its finals after a long and somewhat arduous journey, with Weapons of the Rebelion taking on Dead Cows Strike Back in a to-be-scheduled Grand Final.
^wotr^’s run took them through a 5-map Semi-Final against Excello, who sadly died shortly thereafter to the great disappointment of yours truly. The European Scene is in a bit of a transition period, with some new teams rising up to the top level amidst the departures of many other well-known names, which makes me wonder who’s gonna come out on top of the next ESL Major Series.. :)


By all accounts, the GeForce LAN was pretty much a complete success. Teams enjoyed a slick tournament that ran free of the usual hiccups & glitches that crop up at Johnny No-Names Basement LAN, while fans were able to keep tabs thanks to the quick fingers of Nick "Shrews" Bee, who was passing along anything and everything he could find for me while covering his own tournaments (little thing called ESWC). No slouches themselves, many players at the LAN also went the extra mile to keep track of their POVs and get them uploaded to the site, as well as snap pictures and provide commentary on the first major TF2 tournament in a hella-long time.

The tournament itself also proved to be quite the show, even with the predicted winner pulling out the top prize yet again – it showed, first of all, that Pandemic isn’t just a bunch of online allstars, but rather a group of guys who really are at the top of their game at all times... well, except for that cp_granary match against Eximius Sports, lol. It also proved that they are, in fact, beatable, and highlighted how small the margin of error is in TF2, especially on such a fast-paced map as granary – one small slip up and the push is dead, the combo is dead, you’re down 3 or 4 and trying desperately to hold off the counter-push while recharging as fast as possible – all the while still trying to do some sort of damage to the other side. There’s something appealing about a game that rides on a knife’s edge like that where everyone has to be focused at all times - as opposed to, say, CS where generally at any point, one player can hit his shots and save the round.


When I was putting together the Grand Final Melee, it suddenly hit me that this tournament had stretched over two whole months, with the original group play starting way back in the beginning of July. There’s something that bothers me about that – not that I didn’t enjoy the tournament or anything, but when you’ve got such a long event running there’s inevitably going to be a larger and larger group of teams that have been knocked out and have nothing to do while the rest of the teams battle it out. It almost makes me think TGL’s Mini-League isn’t too bad an idea by comparison, with maybe a few changes.

At any rate, the tournament itself was pretty fun to follow, and brought to light some new faces and old rivalries in a perfect run-up to Season 2 (is anyone else excited for an Awakening-Devastation rematch? Or how 'bout Eximius-Xen? Or Sway-Dev?). The group of teams at the top of the NA scene have grown somewhat, with a solid 5-6 teams having a good shot at taking the other down on any given Sunday. Pandemic, of course, will remain somewhat above that field, but they ain’t all that far off..


Speaking of Season 2, the details were released and almost immediately criticized for a variety of reasons from a variety of places, myself included (I think it might be human nature to assume you can do the job better, lol). But despite a few interesting map choices and a team-picking system that surprised the hell out of me, we do have some solid facts that give hope of a very entertaining S2. First off, there are definitely going to be two divisions (thank god!), which wipes a whole bunch of legitimacy issues right off the table. The fact that the A-calibre teams are going to have a division of their own to compete in, rather than getting pounded by their betters in one big happy clusterfuck of a division, is by itself a move worthy of applaud. I’m sorry, but there’s no faster way to kill a scene then by beating up teams that are still trying to develop their abilities and creating a massive skill gap between the pugs and the pros (hello competitive NS?). That’s assuming, of course, that we don’t get too many sandbaggers..

However, one immediately visible flaw and a major griping point of all players are the prizes. I personally don’t think it would have been too much of a leap to make CEVO-P pay-to-play and gotten a bit of prize money in there, regardless of how epic-fail Season 1 was (it did have crits, remember) – and teams that have more than 6 players who play in a match during the season are going to run into an interesting issue come time to split up those 6 RAM sticks (soooo if alexwut, newby & hubris are sharing playing time.. they get to share sticks, too?). But, one must work with what one has at hand..


Can you hang with the Pros? CGS pros are waiting to find out.

I think I’m going to go ahead and call this league a joke before it even begins. There’s nothing that pisses me off more than a flashy, sleezy setup that’s all talk and absolutely zero execution – flashy lines like the above and big fat cash numbers beside the pictures of screaming e-Idols don’t make up for a 4-month old press release and a total lack of updates, emails or even forum posts. Amusingly enough, even as I write this I decided to bounce to the Pro-Am page and see if I could still create a team, just to show that they hadn’t even locked that up despite the Sept. 4th deadline listed, when I found this little diddy of a date in the "Find A Team" section:

Team Fortress 2 Season 1
- Find a Team by Friday, Oct 10th at 11:59 pm

..only to be promptly followed by this..

Website Under Maintenance - Sept 5th, 2008 - 11:30 PM EST
Sorry for the inconvenience, but the CGS Pro-Am website is undergoing upgrades and will be down for a little while. Please be patience during this process. Thank you.
- Website Development Team

So, in other words, they don’t have their shiz together and might be delaying the Pro-Am till October. Great. Thanks all the same, but I'd rather wait for MLG to add TF2 to their PC Circuit – at least they'd actually deliver if they ever decided to pick it up. But then again, we all know I could run things better anyways.. ;)