Season eight will start shortly after the conclusion of season seven.
Except… wait?
“When would you like Season 8 to start?”
What the hell?
“Monday 5th July 2010 (33%, 356 Votes)
Monday 6th September 2010 (32%, 354 Votes)
IMMEDIATELY!!!!111 (22%, 235 Votes)
Monday 2nd August 2010 (13%, 148 Votes) “
B-b-but they said… I was promised late spring-early summer Team Fortress!
CONFUSED AND BLACK AT THE SAME TIME.
I was going to crack open the window, have my customary pregame wank, and unleash the fury of a thousand unfulfilled rape fantasies upon the poor fools willing to climb the spire or jump the crates. My rockets acting as if they were homing, hunting down the indiscriminate-yet-assuredly third-world Europeans who dared to challenge MY team on MY map with ME making the calls. How can you rob me of my livelihood, of my self-expression, of my God damn LIFE?!
Well, generally, it comes down to this – a small number of people have lives, a larger number of people need their pampering, and an obscene amount of people will spend the next three-to-four months pretending to have some presence on the social compass. The debate raged, a new group of players screaming from the comfort of their beanbags that no admin was strong enough to deny a player of his vacation time, that no matter what arose, [tXc]DrAirshot1995 would have his free time – even if it meant bailing on ETF2L. So with this article, I hope to take a look at some of the separation of ideas that formed among the players, and even among the admins: what the hell happened that is going to rob me of the five-day-a-week two-hour-a-night grind of playing some motherfucking division four Team Fortress 2 YEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHhhhh…
As best I can tell, having spoken to Significant People about the specific gang affiliations forming over season eight, there are these three previously-named groups. We begin with the most easily-mocked and, as-expected, largest group – all of the people who really, desperately wish that their summer days would be full of violent sex (if your country used to be controlled by Russia, you will probably grow up to be a rapist), perpetual intoxication and late nights of general debauchery in the seedy parts of their cities. Let’s think for a moment, and come up with a very general portrait of the kind of TF2 player who creates a fantasy world where he spends four months out of the year partying and banging:
- He is naïve to a disturbing degree or has a very big collection of Flunitrazepam.
- He very likely spends sixteen hours a day masturbating to animated pornography.
- He spends ten hours a day eagerly barking out the order “PLOW THROUGH THE SHITHOUSE LADS!” to his internet video game team.
Vallone has charm that you just frankly don’t have. He can take a girl’s shoe off and act like she’s Cinderella at the ball and she might give a few drunken chuckles and silently imagine if “a cock THAT small can really satisfy.” What is more likely to happen for this hypothetical person is an overly-serious, awkward admission to a clan mate at 03:00 AM after the seventh Virgin Strawberry Daiquiri:
Wasn't really planning on it. Just kind of bored. Saw a hole. I did what men do.
On top of all of this, think of all these players who left the game and are now coming back and causing so much excitement – tell me what happened to them “quitting to focus on real life.” Think that worked out well? I think the resident TF2 Debbie Downer, kaidus, said it best when he remarked “A tiny fraction of the people who think they’ll suddenly develop a life over the summer actually will.” If you have spent anywhere between fourteen and twenty years of your life sheltered, never escaping from your mommy’s wing, having not kissed a girl until your seventeenth birthday (having spent quite a bit of your birthday money to get the prettiest prostitute to make an appearance and give you a reluctant, cum-breathed cheek kiss at your extravagant PG-13 party), working on computers in your parents’ basement while making too many posts on various internet forums – I am so sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your hopes are dim. You might spend hours examining your dick with an aged roll of measuring tape, pulling your sack upwards and downwards and outwards while praying to God that you finally get the length needed to crack ten centimeters, but at no point will you actually do a thing this summer. Your selfish lies are actively hurting a group of admins who put in effort, a group of players who put in effort, and your mother, who has to clean the spunk stains out of your sheets after each of your frenzied jackoff sessions.
The second group, while less worthy of my infantile ramblings, are those who actually manage to have a say in The Way The World Works. Admins will cater to your every demand because “ETF2L has a future! There’s something there, on the horizon, a golden glow enveloping it! I can see the light…” but then the object comes into full view and it’s just a pair of overripe honey-glistened testicles begging for contact with the hungry mouth of a bear. Everyone is working hard to bring in sponsors, with attempts being made at a money prize pool for season eight and contacts being made with various Big Names in the business. But they need DIVISION ONE to really achieve their goals – the sponsors are interested in page hits, in activity, in exposure, and the only thing that ETF2L has to achieve any of that lies in its “spectatorability.” Fans of eSports feen to see the Dignitas Dynasty roll into another season, they sit with salivating mouths while watching a Finnish mix clan constantly get double losses, and they refresh ETF2L and post comments and watch the games, driving up all of the important numbers just to achieve the internalized bliss of watching someone has failed once again on the grandest stage.
But what the hell does any of that have to do with season eight? Allow me to provide some choice comments from a Significant Person on why the admins are so willing to push back the next round of games:
- “FakkelBrigade are talking about taking a break, but you know, when you say that you don’t wanna play a season, if you put on a season, they’ll probably sign up anyway. Unless there’s some legit holiday plans in there for a clan leader, they’ll play, because that’s what they all do – they play a lot of fucking TF2.”
- “And Dignitas, it’s like, maybe they’ve changed but with Agron, he had these games where you just knew he didn’t care in the least, so maybe now it’s different and they’re fine but they don’t care about online TF2 anyway. They’ve gone to LANs and they want to go to more LANs and playing online doesn’t matter to them. So what does season eight do for them, why would they possibly care?”
- “I don’t even know what it is with teams like Rockit and The Last Resort, they just are apparently refusing to play, like they deserve some kind of special treatment. If you ask teams in TF2 what months are good for them, they’re basically going to say none. All of these people just want to only play when it’s convenient despite putting in all this time every week playing to get good, but for a league, over summer, they pretend like that will stop.”
The fact is, the division one teams drive the interest in the league, and without them, there is no reason for any of these theoretical sponsors to come on. Why would you put money into something where all of the “draws” are spending eight hours a day playing pickup games instead of actively supporting a new season, why would you offer up a prize pool to help stimulate a game when you can witness this kind of hypocrisy? For the first time since UKESA, someone is actually willing to GIVE something to to this game.
My dear, for you I would cross the oceans, explore the stars, obliterate Cutman in an arena of his choosing...
Oh, hello Generic Big Name Computer Company… my, what a lovely prize I spot in your hands…
Would you like to see the depths of my love? First, we begin with the flower. Then, you shall receive the fullness of my seed in your womb. Accepting one means you accept the other.
Ohhhh no… for ME? Tee-hee, thank you ^.^
What it comes down to is that we have a bunch of dudes who are going to play TF2 – because they want to play it, but they would rather play it with randomers in a pickup channel because after three months of daily practice with the same five people, you want to methodically and pleasurably slit their throats, watch them bleed out on the floor while remembering every dropped uber and every bad call and every missed scattergun shot or failed kill. Dedication, lads – the dedication to put yourself through grinding upwards of fifteen hours a week on this video game, but not if it means you have to play season eight!! I don’t care if people want to play less TF2 or if they don’t want to come inside at eight on a Saturday in the summer because they need to kill cartoon men, but you could at least lie about it convincingly, because nobody’s buying that the people with 250 pickups logged in a month are “above” playing a summer season.
Group number three is those people who actually have obligations that will preclude them from playing video games. Hi Fisshu. You’re… KIND OF the only person here, and even then, you’re only partly through the door. Your left foot is off in the other room rapidly kicking at the keyboard, trying to load up Mumble and wishing it had a mouth so that it could solemnly utter “Lads… I’m going sniper and someone’s going to get shit on.” Even the tiny group of social non-rejects has its share of flaws regarding this ordeal – all of you fucks, instead of actually doing interesting things with your time off, instead of hanging out with friends and experiencing summer romances, you’ll be once again confined to your keyboard, unwilling to pry yourself away from the lure of Team Fortress 2. Someone poured just the right amount of tequila on top of his fishing hook, sprayed it with just the right amount of pussy stank, and you’re fucked forever.
So consider everything here, and feel offended at it and make sure to remind me that you’re different and that you’re going to have a great summer and you will post pictures and rub it in my face and show me how special you are in that you rose above the addiction you’ve had since October of 2007 and make sure that you fill me in as to your very well-developed logically-founded reasons for why a summer session is bad, but make sure that in the same keystrokes, you include a reason why you play so many pickups and so many mixes and why you pub so much when 6v6 gets “stale” and why I can come online at 09:00 PM GMT on any given day and see people frantically spamming “6v6 mid+ /q” over IRC. I’ll have a very special present ready for you when I find those words before me:
If you can best me at my own game, if you overcome all of my challenges, perhaps your hands shall replace mine, and my hands shall replace yours - delicate caresses between thine thighs..
Cheers,
Mr. X
Also, I actually don’t believe any of what I just said – the idea of asking people to play over summer is a completely horrible idea and I know of a handful of clans who would assuredly fold if the season started before July, but it would be a lot harder to work in an image where a guy talks about fucking a party favor in the context of telling the admins they are making a bad decision. On top of that, how spineless do you have to be to be unable to reach a decision about your own league, and have to create a poll that has so many options that it actually makes it impossible to tell when people would actually want the season to start? God damn. As an added bonus to all of this, I get to perform an experiment and find out how many people actually read to the end of this article before seeing that nothing I said was true. A troll within a troll. Suck it down.
Originally published on VanillaTV (vanillatf2.org) on 2010-05-12 by theinterviewman.
Recovered from the Internet Archive (archived copy) as part of tf2esports.com's preservation of VanillaTV's TF2 coverage. The original site is no longer online. All rights remain with the original author; reposted for historical reference.