why even bother changing the rotation if we're keeping the rotation virtually the same...?

every rotation has had process, snakewater, metalworks, gullywash, and sunshine. I would rather play reckoner or granary than play process lol

ah yes, learning two new maps in one season and not even knowing what the 2nd one is before the season starts. give us bagel and skip adding a completely new map until people have actually had time to play it. also not having reckoner/logjam as options here is pretty sad

really impressive how you guys at rgl one up yourselves every season in how tone deaf and removed from reality you can be

badlands please i beg of you

badlands/gpit/granary/warmfront

I don't think this is the best way to put a map into the pool, but both clearcut and bagel entered the pool and they are both pretty well-liked maps now. lots of the same people (B3ar and mustard for example) came into the thread to talk about how rgl was adding bad maps into the pool that no one wanted to play. Now they are somewhat regarded as good maps that are regularly chosen in pugs and pretty well-liked at least from what I can gauge.

I personally like granary and I think it's a more developed map than the 4 here, but From what I've seen, it looks like rgl is just giving new maps a shot, and then keeping ones that are well received and removing ones that aren't.

why all the new maps. i just want to play badlands again

I don't think anyone has a problem with bagel/clearcut, people like koth, the problem is them forcing in some other random map nobody has ever played (and also deciding to get rid of one of the three of bagel/clearcut/via every season for some reason, if it aint broke dont fix it)

i miss ESEA lol

putting aside the question of how good clearcut and bagel are, I disagree with how those entered the pool as well, with the former being shoehorned in when it was so poorly optimized and the latter being put into invite only

Invite having an extra map isn't a big deal, since they play every match with pick/ban and therefore giving each team three bans and then picking from the remaining three. Having an odd number of maps to choose from matters. You can see this issue in the other divs where during playoffs it always benefits to ban first.

I just can't fucking believe they're going to run a New Map Cup literal days before the first matches get played to decide what map will be in the rotation FOR THE SAME SEASON. Even when they ran the previous cup and Villa received the most support / interest, they waited a season before introducing that into the pool.

The clear solution was right in front of them: remove Villa, add Bagel. New Map Cup decides potential new maps for S7.

the time between rounds increasing is so fucking dumb. in theory its fine (talk about what went wrong/what to do next round!), but if you are the losing team and want to talk about the previous round, then your going to pause to talk about it. what does 10 more seconds/whatever give you time for? if you go down 4-0 but are trying to come back, 40 extra seconds have gone by, and you have way less time to come back. its annoying to just have spent one minute of your life saying "ok lets do this next mid" when that can be said during rollout, and 10 seconds is not really enough time to actually discuss what went wrong that round.

Alright, took some time to look over the maps. My opinion that doesn't matter because we havent actually played them

Mannbase
>
Workflow
>
Craneway
>>>
Mist

All 4 need a lot of work IMO, but there's some potential with Mannbase workflow and craneway. I feel like mist needs too much to be viable.

Workflow I'm not a fan of mid from how I think it will play, with a couple tweaks I think second could be solid and a tweak to lobby was my only thought for last.

Mannbase I didn't like last, but the rest of the map I think is the best of what's there.

Craneway intrigues me, but sort of reminds me of budget reckoner. I think the mid could be alright, although it feels relatively condensed due to the big buildings. Second is a little spread, not sure how I feel about it. Last I really dislike the walls on the side of the point.

(I still want to play reckoner or logjam and im sad we never played either in NA)

Who the fuck actually makes the decisions at RGL and why is there no transparency/accountability? The season hasn't started yet just add back in clearcut and get rid of these abortion maps jfc, it's not too late to reverse this stupid decision

I tweeted at them and the guy running the acct was like "i normally don't browse tftv" and then when I linked this thread they said "Timing of the cup wasn't intentioned to be so close to the season, it just happened that way. I'm personally disappointed with the removal of clearcut for the season (I prefer Clearcut and Bagel over product myself) but it will be back next season! -QQ"

I was told to directly message admins instead of posting on the forums so I messaged the Invite admin and I didn't even get a response back (a week ago), so yeah they just don't give a fuck anymore in case you're wondering. I would not care for the decisions they made if they didn't say "league ran by the people", just say we don't have a choice and get it over with?

Every season I have to deal with this stupid RGL shit and go through 3 admins to get anything solved, it's just getting extremely tiring when the decision lifecycle is:

Admin 1 -> Open Ticket -> Admin 2 -> Admin 3 -> TFTV thread -> RGL news post

What if we skipped this whole fucking process and just make a POLL with what maps WE WANT in the poll instead of having your Open level admins who don't even play this game decide what we should play? And then you wonder why you get so much shit when this is the type of decision making involved. Makka and exa are legit the only two people left who can be reasoned with to do anything in this league and they don't even manage invite anymore so it's beyond a lost cause, just make us play cp_McDonaldsWorld_b3 so we can go fuck ourselves.

this may be a fruitless appeal, but I really hope the invite qualifier isn't like 5 teams or 6 teams competing for 4 spots and we have to do some massive round robin just to have most of us make it, that sounds like a big waste of time

if you want 10 teams, I personally believe it should be:

froyotech
witness gaming
ford gaming
globalclan ice
my team
yambo
cat posse
platypugesports
six paths

and then the other teams (cleanbuddy? kyler? whatever the exile team is?) competing for the 10th spot

if you wanna make it a set 8 teams in invite and add 1 of the above^^^ to the quals that's reasonable too

but I do think it'd be a bit of a waste for rgl to only give 5-6 of those teams guaranteed spots when there's such a clear line of demarcation between the teams that are clearly invite and those that may not be

obviously I am extremely biased here but this is my opinion

What if the S6 preseason map testing cup determined the map (not maps) to potentially be added in S7, instead of S6? The map could be run in pugs and scrims during S6 so that people were used to it and ready for it when it came out.

You could even run a fan-voted Invite Allstars showmatch on it before invite grand finals, like how CSGO does showmatches on potentially new maps at big events or majors (Cache remake showmatch) (Tuscan remake showmatch)

This could help prevent the natural dislike people have for new maps due to unfamiliarity, and provide more transparency to your playerbase, allowing you to enact your agenda of rotating maps in the pool seasonally, all in a way that's fun and community-sourced.

Who is going to run these pugs? Who will want to scrim those maps? It's hard enough getting players to scrim new maps in the current season, let alone getting them to pug/scrim the maps in the season after. The argument of; "just playtest in scrims and pugs" is so naive.

RGL™ PUG Service™ Coming Soon™

I think the idea is that if RGL would be forward enough to say they will add X map to the map pool the season after next, it would allow time for players and teams to become much more accustomed it. I agree that its a pain to find good (or any, really) playtest groups, but this is different.

Allowing more time between a map being announced as officially in the map pool and game-day would be appreciated by pretty much everyone IMO. Even though newer teams might avoid scrimming them, and invite teams might just perma-ban them, giving a seasons worth of heads up seems miles better than this. Players shouldnt feel like they are being surprised by the league, or that the league is working against them. Giving a seasons gap would even make some people look forward to that season, instead of feeling like the current one just got thrown a curve ball. Not even valve does CSGO map pool changes in the best way IMO.

Of course its easy to arm-chair quarterback the league admins, and tell map makers to "just polish it" or "just make it better", and thats not what Im trying to do.

The whole purpose of qualifiers is to give people a chance to play invite. Somehow this is the complete opposite of ESEA (lol). I would also disagree and say a lot of the qualifier teams are similar in skill level. For example, one of the teams you left out, cleanbuddies, has tony (played invite, top 4 adv), Bumbo (played invite, top 4 adv twice), ed (multiple seasons of invite), alan (top 2 adv and top 4 adv), cleanbuddy/rowpieces (top 2 and top 4 adv),and FrickMyNick (playoffs adv on offclass and experience playing medic in invite). I don't see how this team is any worse on paper than any of the qualifier teams, and I don't think it's fair to straight up leave them out, as there is not really a clear winner out of the majority of the teams, none are really head and shoulders above the rest.

I didn't ask this directly, but I did ask why are Badlands and Granary not being considered for maps and was told:

My question is... if it doesn't poll well with the player base, why not include it in an actual poll for the player base? Hell, if you really want options, what I would do is:
take entries for maps the community wants to play
run a poll where you choose maximum 4 from the submitted list
run an offseason cup (NOT THE DAY BEFORE THE SEASON) where the 4 maps that won the previous poll are the map pool (like they're doing now, but with community chosen options not admin options)
run a poll where players can vote on which of the 4 maps from the cup they want to play that season.

If granary and badlands really poll poorly with the majority of your player base, then there is no harm including them in a poll, because they wont get voted in.

Alternatively:

If you really want us playing a new map, this at least gives us 2 major things:
1. Motivation to playtest them and provide feedback (If the map they pick is broken or needs things changed, feedback can be given and changes can be made before it even sees a minute of match time)
2. Time to actually prepare. (Normally my teams would spend some time in the lead up to the season actually looking over the map and getting a feel before you have to actually play it. The current system is giving us zero time to prep. And either RGL puts it early in the season and forces us to learn quickly, or gives us time but forces us to play the map with serious stakes involved late season.

didnt mustard list cleanbuddies as a team playing in qualifiers

Scream's point is that the tony team has players with Invite experience, comparable to or even moreso than the manacute team. In mustard's list, the latter is (in his eyes) worthy of not needing to play the qualifiers, while the former isn't. So if RGL decides to thin the pool early by having certain teams bypass the need for qualifiers, it leads to more case-by-case decisions or admin discretion, and we've seen how that has played out before in past decisions.

It'll be "interesting" to see how they go about this process for sure. I'm personally just amazed we have an overabundance of teams wanting to play Invite for two seasons in a row. It's been a loooooooooong time since that's happened, so keep up the good work everyone. And may the best teams in the qualifiers win.

Edit: Look back to last season for example. There's no telling how the original Burnsiders would've done in Invite, but they lost during qualifiers and thus their chance. And of course the whole pootis.org / Rebirth death and resurrection, and that team skipping qualifiers. This current offseason is basically that but on a grander scale with more teams and more time, of which these can be both positive and negative.

RGL theoretically

Yes you're right its much smarter to not allow any playtesting at all.

The point of this is largely that it puts it into the players' hands to start practicing. it's saying "hey, we're giving you a few months heads up here that next season you will be playing officials on this map!" If people still choose to not scrim it that's on them.

Again going to CSGO, Valve, who are still relatively non-transparent, give a few months of time after a map pool change is announced to actually add it. Teams are free to ignore it or permaban it, but that's crippling their map pool. And even then, maps are given YEARS to settle into the map pool before new changes are made. RGL are somehow doing both parts wrong by adding new maps abruptly and then also removing them immediately when they don't get played as much as process and snakewater.

Brace yourself for a long one folks!

I have nothing against giving people a chance to play invite, but there are many ways of doing that. ETF2L's approach is generally to holistically move teams up based on a combination of experience and scrim results, and then run quals if it's too tough to call. I'm fine with that, but etf2l never goes more than like a 4 team qualifier for 2 spots, at least off of memory. What I don't like is when teams that should either obviously be invite or obviously be div 1/advanced are roped into the qualifier because admins haven't done their research.

You said you wanted to give teams a chance to make invite, and yet you're basing this team being 'similar in skill level' on their previous experience, not their current scrim results, or just as importantly, their scrim ambitions. This team has barely existed, and they've only scrimmed the other team I suggested should be in the qualifier, and Cat Posse (who beat them relatively convincingly). Compare that to the artist team, who have much less invite experience, but have traded maps with multiple other teams trying to be invite and have also scrimmed froyotech, showing their ambition to improve.

If we look at the (not very recently-updated) RGL spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f2B-iRBUALd0RLRHb0cwVWMMwCSsyvvLjtn8UYus02M/edit#gid=925585840

We see 6 teams already in invite, and 6 teams in the qualifiers. One of those teams is a really weird RainofLight team that I highly doubt has any ambition to play invite with people like stoper, goldfish and carnage who definitely don't care to try super hard. Them aside, that means there's a 5 team qualifier for 4 spots. Doesn't that seem a bit excessive?

The way I see it, you have 3 options that make more sense.

1) my original idea of the cleanbuddy and kylor teams fighting it out

2) include a couple more teams on the basis of slightly worse scrim results- like the rio team perhaps

3) include a couple more teams on the basis of less invite experience- like the artist team

Either way, from a selfish perspective, my team a) has a lot of people with significant invite experience and b) has clearly performed at a higher level in scrims than the 'obvious' qualifier teams. If we play a team like the cleanbuddy team in the qualifiers, is there a greater than 0% chance they beat us? Sure, anything is possible, and we'll play it if we have to. But I also feel like it's a bit of a distraction when I want to be scheduling weeklies against a lot of the teams that are automatically in invite and preparing for the season. Even if my team does have to play it though, I'd rather see 7-8 confirmed teams and then 3-4 teams competing for 2-3 spots rather than 5 teams for 4 spots.

If the rubric we're using isn't prior experience, but rather how well teams are performing now, then yes, I think that team is actually pretty good.

You worded this like the default is to have qualifiers, but I can't think of a single situation where you had 11 teams trying to play in a 10 team invite and the admins wanted 5 of them to play in a qualifier.

Putting aside the current RGL admins, it really shouldn't be that difficult to figure out which teams should automatically make invite. I haven't even discussed the fact that Yambo seems to be grandfathered in from playing last season or that Cat Posse got in for winning advanced, even though those teams are definitely close skill-wise to the better teams in the qualifiers. If we've established that some of those teams can be let in automatically, I don't see why we can't make reasonable decisions about teams based on their scrim results or prior experience.

I'm pretty sure looking at that Burnsiders team's scrim results would make it pretty clear that, even if they made invite, they'd clearly be at the bottom.

The pootis.org thing is not comparable to me, because they're a team that legitimately put the admins in a no-win situation. On the one hand, their re-emergence would force a team back down into the quals that had already been told they could just play invite. On the other, they were clearly MILES ahead of all of those qualifier teams. This season, I'm trying to get out in front of this topic BEFORE the qualifiers even start.

Anyways I know some people will laugh at me for going to such lengths to try to get out of playing a couple maps and call me chicken or big ego or something, but it's not even only about that, I just think the league should be run more logically in situations like this. Hell, it's very possible that that google doc is SUPER outdated and there will be far fewer teams in the qualifiers (again, why the fuck is the RoL team there lol).

the clear solution here would be to have all 11 teams play the qualifier

when is the invite qualifier even going to happen and why is it not just being done instead of this stupid new map cup lol that seems pretty important to get figured out as registration deadlines are kinda over so if your team doesn't make invite and ends up dying you're just screwed basically (didn't esea figure this stuff out way beforehand I don't remember it being such a scramble)

They should have a poll so we can vote mustard out of invite.

Qualifiers are starting next week on the 10th. Details I presume are only known to the captains of qualifying teams.

ESEA definitely did not figure this shit out beforehand, because ESEA never had a season where there was an extra amount of rosters wanting to play Invite. It's uncharted territory for any NATF2 league, I just fear for RGL's decision-making based on their history. Only time will tell how it all plays out.