Ryno (Ryan)

All the things you mentioned are great, but where do you see people trying to get started in team cs or local Lan events from them? So I'll use myself as the example as its the easiest way to explain. I only found out about esea due to a random guy on CSGO matchmaking saying thats where you play to get better. After signing up I knew NOTHING. I didn't know about or use HLTV or reddit forums, and I had 1 or 2 discord servers MAX for me and my friends. When I started pugging on ESEA I wanted more as I had a dream I wanted to persue. I started a team and by using the forums I met my first IGL leading to me learning about ESEA League and the CS community from on social media. From there I learned about a 10k Lan being hosted in Washington DC through the forums. The forums then helped me build my first Lan team as I knew no one and had no one to go with. There was really no where else for me at the time to find Lan teammates. I basicially built every Lan roster I ever played with in GO on the ESEA forums becuase I only knew a handful of people that played the game much less ones that could attend Lan events. I learned about other events as well through the forums. People could also see I had attended events and put together teams through the forums. Also that I could be their way of attending their first Lan. When I wanted to take practice more seriously I had to use the forums to find the NACS Scrimcord as it was not easily accessible for new players that didn't know someone in it. Pracc .com wasn't something I knew about either until I made advanced the first time and someone told me about it haha. A lot of the team CS world is shared by word of mouth or knowing someone esepcially when you are new to the game. Having something built into ESEA where I saw I could start taking team cs seriously and have people tell me about it before I had any social media presence or knowledge of the scene specific to Team CS is the only reason I am here today. If there were no forums someone like me who knew nothing, only played matchmaking in CSGO and was not on reddit/hltv forums would have likely stayed that way. I have noticed without the forums many pick up squads in NA have stopped forming as no one really knows how to get into this complicated mess. I was fortunate to come up in a time with the forums and people willing to teach me, which then built up all I have now. I built the NACS Lancord and it's biggest struggle is TELLING PEOPLE ABOUT IT as it cannot be found in many places that the target playerbase is. My final thought is, and I'm not kidding. I would love to see the entire faceit website scrapped for something that is modeled heavily off of the original ESEA website. The faceit website has had 3 or 4 "UI overhauls/updates" yet somehow is never even close to the superior product. The ESEA website somehow is still significantly better in almost every way years later with its simple look, ease of navigation, personalized profiles (I have almost my entire early Lan history in my esea bio can't keep track of that on faceit haha), easy to find player stats/history, complete LFT/LFP section, and most importantly the esea forums where the community can be informed on anything and everything cs related in their region without having to use social media or a million discord servers. I can't think of a time I needed a separate support or community discord when ESEA was being used as a stand alone product.