A year ago we announced new future goals for TC. One of the main goals would be to sponsor e-sports teams in various games. We’ve attempted exactly that by creating an ‘e-sports’ branch to co-exist with our established TF2 community, promoting our best TF2 6v6 team into that branch and also recruiting a Dota 2 and a League of Legends team to join in.

No regrets

We learned quickly that we have not much to offer these teams (and vice versa). The original premise was that they would attempt, to the best of their abilities, to promote the TC brand within their game’s community, so as to help us grow towards becoming an organisation that would be able to afford, for example, their LAN tickets. We realised eventually that there is only so much a single team can do, and this approach was not good enough for us to reach such goals.

That is not to say we regret the things we have done, or to say that it has been a pointless experience. Not at all. In fact, it resulted in some like-minded volunteers to stay with us and now working hard with us thinking about how we need to go about reaching our goals.

That is what the latest staff meeting has been about; reconsidering our goals and working out, properly, how to get to them.

Mindset

At the end of the meeting, not necessarily a whole lot has changed in regards to our end goals. The one thing that has become clear as day is that, whatever it is we do, we have to do it with a very different mindset than before.

Our main goal is still having the ability to sponsor teams, but as we have discovered, we cannot really do that without money. There is no “sponsorship” if the only meaning that has is “use our name”. When we sponsor teams, it means we pay for their LAN tickets. Perhaps even their travel and accommodation costs.

To be able to do that, we must be able to afford a serious amount of coin. We don’t have that right now, so that means that this goal is a very long-term one. One we will keep in mind, but one we will leave for now. We will get back to it when the time is right. This does not mean that, when a team comes to us and asks to join us, we will just give them a ‘no’. It simply means that any team we do any sort of business with, it will have to be more community based.

More content

What our short-term primary goal becomes, then, is making money. With help of some of the newer additions to the TC staff, we are going to focus primarily on generating regular consistent website content. That includes written articles, tournaments, casts, live streams, etc.
We have learned from statistics that, when we release an article on our website, the amount of visitors we get increases tenfold, for 1 or 2 days. The way we see it, that means that if we release content often, we increase the amount of visitors we get often also. Once we start getting a reliable and impressive amount of visitors per month, only then we can actually look into advertising and sponsoring options.

Current status (or: Please help)

This is where we are right now. We have already started to get some stuff done (see for example swellfoop’s interview), and we are looking to see more of this coming in on a regular basis. Where needed, we will look outside our own community to find volunteers that are willing to help. If you are reading this and think that you have the time to help us out, then by all means message someone in the staff! The more we get done the quicker we can reach our goals. We strongly believe we can become a big name in e-sports, and we will stop at nothing to reach that goal. If you want to be part of something big and you think you have something to contribute, this may just be your chance.

Here is a short list of who you can contact about which subject:

• TF2 Community, TC-only cups/tournaments/events: Oxy or Spike
• Tournaments (public, non-TC only): Phoenix
• Anything Dota 2 related: Zealos
• Anything League of Legends related: Reservoir Dog
• Website stuff (technical): Spike
• Website stuff (content related) and everything else including items already listed: Spike or Reservoir Dog

If you don’t have time to commit to any projects but you would still love to help us out, remember that even a small donation will be a tremendous help!

Thanks for reading!