Q: Much to the delight of fans and customers, Valve has always believed in ensuring the longevity of their titles. Counter-strike's continued popularity is in large part due to the competitive scene that has developed around it, what are Valve's thoughts on the competitive TF2 scene at large?

A: We're excited to see the steady growth of the TF2 competitive scene around the world, and we try to keep track of what we can do to help it. So far, most of that help has taken the form of feature additions to the game, but in the future I think we'd like to get more insight into what else we can do. In particular, I'd like to build some more bridges to organizers within the competitive community, which is something we've tried to do but still continue to have trouble with.

As an example of the kind of work we could do for them, several of the competitive organizations have built external tools, server mods, and scripts to help organize & run their tournaments. We'd like to see if we could move some of those systems directly into the game.
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