The competitive scene in Left 4 Dead 2 can charitably called on hiatus. An unfortunate lack of teams and sponsor interest has created a hole in which little to nothing is going on, and many of the competitive teams have moved back to try and restart the Left 4 Dead 1 scene. L4Dnao Community member Bainshie aims to fix this problem by starting up a brand new Left 4 Dead 2 tournament, Last 4 Standing.
Attempting to address the chief problems Left 4 Dead 2′s original tournaments had, a lack of understanding for how the game mechanics worked and a lack of administrator interest in the game, Bainshie has taken it upon himself to run a community cup solo, without administrators or moderators. The cup has received a huge following and massive community support so far, providing servers and volunteering to shoutcast matches. This sort of community response is rare for the Left 4 Dead series, but not unheard of. As of yet, no announcement has been made concerning prizes and ground rules, but Bainshie did have this to say about the tournament.
Originally Posted by Bainshie
“Right now L4D2 has finally reached the stage where it can be called competitive. Confogl 2.1.6 seems to bring the game within 95% of where it needs to be, the great changes to scoring and other balance issues, where now the games see the best team winning rather then the luckiest team winning. The new coder for confogl seems awesome, and I’m looking forwards to the next update. The updates by Valve are also important, keeping the public interest in L4D2 high. Overall the entire future of L4D2 is looking good. However…
The beginning of L4D2 hurt it more then anything else. The failures of vannila, CEVO, and the previous confogl configs kept the game from being truly competitive. All the serious competitive teams left. This creates a void, which means most E-Sport organizations don’t really support L4D2 like they support TF2, HoN, SC1, and CS. Even though there is public interest in L4D2, there is a lack of competitive players. In effect, the game has been, by the competitive community (pun intended) left 4 dead.
Now I could continue this post by ranting on about how nobody does anything and ESL sucks, and how my pants are too tight. But ranting never got anything done, apart from increasing my blood pressure. And as good as the few leagues and cups that are running are, they don’t target the right people, the large quantity of casual teams who currently have no idea there is more then just team matchmaking, instead catering to the few people who have stuck it out this long. And as the saying goes, if you want something doing right, you have to do it yourself.
This is the part where I explain who I am. I’m a computer science student just finishing his first year. I’ve always followed the L4D1 competitive scene, and joined it in L4D2 with the ESL team Her Majesties Hard Men, eventually hit within the top 20 before the game turned us off. Kept an eye on the game until confogl finally came together and created something great.
The cup would be a fairly short term thing, running not long over a month (would be max 10 rounds in total, so probably try to get a round played every 3-5 days), double elimination*, 32 teams, confogl 2.1.6*.. The high end teams like Area 51 etc etc would be barred from the cup (not like the high caliber teams care, but meh), as this is designed to attract new people, not smash them to the ground. The main thing it would be looking to accomplish is two fold. Firstly to try and get several new teams into the pool. Secondly would be to increase the public knowledge about competitive L4D2.”
It would appear that the time of the tournament is going to attempt to begin at the end of Confogl Fo Sho, the other community cup being held and managed by BRBBOWFLEXIN, already a tremendous success despite having no prices and very few servers.
If you wish to join the tournament or just voice your support, you may register on www.l4dnao.com and visit this topic http://www.l4dnao.com/index.php?site…pic&topic=1959
Bainshie can be contacted at his steam page http://steamcommunity.com/id/bainshie, or on L4Dnao via PM. Expect more news about Last 4 Standing, as well as news on Confogl Fo Sho as they near their beginning and end respectively.
Bainshie recently created a trailer of sorts for Last 4 Standing, outlining the rules and showcasing some sweet plays by team HAUSEN.
The credit goes to Forum member Sarah.
