This is false, and keeping this mindset is what is preventing people from working together. You all assume no one likes each other or that the capable people just don't care.

No? Most people are fine with one another, and I guess I should have been more clear. The issues is the few people who are not only willing but also have the capability to project lead for something like an entire league are not willing. Its not that people can't work together or hate each other or something, its that the key positions are missing people. If someone wants to make a league I am 100% sure they could find people to make something work, but depending on what experience those people have, or lack, it might very well be worse than RGL. I have said it before, and I'll say it again, running a league is not easy.

Apologies for misunderstanding. Your point of running a league is completely true. If you cannot dedicate your time and effort to run what would be considered a business and manage volunteers then you should leave for someone else to step up to the act, and if that person can't, and so on.

It’s true we can all love each other and work together to make things better, while still being able to say things like “24 is a bitch shotgun denier on playoff matches and still looses”.

Anyone romancing about moving to UGC probably hasn't heard of all of the shady shit that UGC has done in it's past.
-Some players would be determined to be cheating by the AC team, and then Fornaught would step in and keep them (m4risa, stones) unbanned because it would look bad for the league if a high level player was banned for cheating.
-Sexual harassment wouldn't be banned if the player was a notable player (dK Karl)
-Admins would pick and choose which players to throw the book at - example, I was banned for a whole year for using the same profile picture as another player, while this didn't result in any ban whatsoever and slurs would regularly be dropped in every match without consequence.
-No admins or mods were ever available during match times because they would all either be playing a match, or if they weren't on a team, would all conveniently be offline at match time. I guess this one still kinda applies to RGL
-Oh, and don't forget about that time the highlander head admin unilaterally falsely banned shay for cheating so they could get a shiny 1st place silver highlander badge since they were on the other team despite the rest of the anti cheat team determining he wasn't cheating!
-Admins improperly log ban reasonings in ban archives. GeneralNick had me banned from TF2center because in their archive I was banned for cheating instead of "harassment" lmao

I don't agree with a lot of what RGL does. I think they try to expand what the league does at the cost of neglecting issues that need to be fixed in the league. Providing actual, properly functioning servers for the cost that 6s players pay per season is sorely needed. I don't know why 6s teams have to pay on a per-player basis, when highlander teams raised hell about this system very early on and within two seasons we were given per-team payments and didn't have to pay for ringers. I still think the actions of a lot of the RGL admins are justifiably criticized for being stupid and unilateral at times, but at the very least RGL cares about trying to improve how the actions of their admins look. I'd rather that than UGC, where there was no oversight at all of a shitty head admin, or when there was, it'd be to "save face" from the league banning a cheater or predator. Tbh I'd rather RGL just be a free league than the seemingly incessant drama that comes from payments and wondering where services RGL has promised are. RGL pugs coming soon™!

rgl bad, ugc bad. but at least some of the rgl admins want to improve what they have.

https://i.imgur.com/sLubbPs.gif

Oh yes sure let me just play your league with 200+ping!

No, no. Wait. I’ll just move! Yea, I’ll fucking move to Europe for TF2.

meanwhile some of the dumbest motherfuckers have started successful pug groups with dedicated servers, discord bots, and competent running/admining that can run all night every night for weeks

with the state of discord anyone could start up a functional pug group in like 2 hours. this cannot just be RGL being incompetent

esea client was a glorified bitcoin miner

I wanna know what the money went into

my hot take is that rgl isn’t gonna take tf2 anywhere

even if it sounds like some hater shit it’s pretty much true. u guys are paying so much money for literally no real service. if anything, just to complain about the lackluster experience

whoever said to stop giving them money is honestly right. some of y’all act like sigafoo even hears the shit you have to say or is even /that/ involved with the competitive community… bro he does not care what you think— and frankly he doesn’t have to— so long as you keep paying him money to play in a league you don’t even enjoy. this is the same person who tried “funding” more money at the beginning of a global pandemic to “secure a venue for a LAN” by forcing players to pay a service fee to play in his leagues. if that doesn’t scream “i’m a scumbag who only cares about money” idk what to tell u lol

i beg the tf2 community to challenge these people and to hold them accountable for their wrongdoings, because i really think that anyone else could (and probably should) make a better league than rgl the way there’s a thread about how awful it is every month

nobody in rgl makes money

there are plenty of great arguments to make about why rgl sucks but its a complete and 100% fact that all money paid into league fees goes into prize pots / lan funds and nowhere else.

Gonna derail a bit and say that top 4 invite has plot armor when it comes to RGL rulings and if you guys ever thought we don't receive special treatment, you are delusional. If some of you knew even 5% of the decision making behind scenes to stupid shit that happens even in the public eye you'd probably rope.

Basically if any of us fuck up, they will make some dumb fucking rule or say "well other admins handled this, but they don't play the game anymore" so that we are fine. I have heard 1000 times that "no, we literally banned top HL players!" but when you look historically wise at shit we got away it, it's insane. I mean I literally made the rule for picking maps a day and half before match time, so if I can do that, what else do you think can be made reality with those guys?

I still have respect for exa and makka for at least putting in the time to handle situations, but the league as whole, you'd have to be insane to trust any decision making. I still remember teams outright lying about match situations and their friend admin just giving them whatever they want, then having to go through 3 admins to get it solved. Actual aids, I miss ESEA where the match page was your one and only god and if you fuck up it's 100% on you and no admin can do shit.

idk man… hes done some pretty sketchy shit at the expense of other peoples money, to not be making any off his own league. i don’t wanna say you’re lying, but i personally side-eye the idea that he isn’t making any profit

he also surely makes some amount of money if not gets credibility from the twitch channel which they conveniently make the only one allowed to stream any big matches because fOr tHe sAkE oF tHe gAeM

Thank you for saying this. Why would someone build a business that doesn't make money?

If people don't play for money, why not take some of that profit to, I don't know, compensate those who are literally running your league day-in-day-out?

Is this actually a hot take tho?

Building the technical infrastructure for a league (minus all the game servers I guess, but other leagues like ETF2L don't provide those either) isn't that hard to arrange and I strongly doubt that no one in this entire community has the skill set to build something that matches or outclasses RGL.

The real problem imo is that the people who are capable to make this have no guarantee that people will actually move over to a new platform, and it'll probably end up segmentalizing the existing playerbase over multiple leagues. No developer is going to spend a few weeks coding for the laugh just to realize that people would rather stick with RGL because b4nny plays it (while said developer(s) pay out of pocket to keep that infrastructure running). Marketing a league, sustaining it, finding volunteers to actually run the whole thing and do admin/AC work + incentivizing people to play on it (with or without prize pools) over RGL is the hard part, Valve's not even adding new medals to the game afaik and just rehashes old models (which is one of the bigger incentives for newer players to join like it or not).

When ESEA died it was a no-brainer to move to RGL since all it took was for them to add a gamemode to their already existing platform (also b4nny plays it). The only competition at the time ESEA died that wasn't a wip or ran by questionable people was UGC (lol)

The important distinction to make here is that almost all of these issues happened years ago. No one from UGC today, or in the community at large would lie and say that UGC is flawless, but all of the largest administrative flaws have been ironed out to the best of our ability. The admins that once made those egregious rulings are no longer working for UGC, and any admin who was to make rulings like that would swiftly be removed from their position. 4/5 of the points you brought up happened under an entirely different set of admins who have been out of their position of authority for 3-5 years depending on who it was. And to add to the final point, our ban archives are meticulous, however in your case, at the time I was not a head admin and did not have access to the archives and had to rely on someone else to play middle-man. Regardless, I on behalf of UGC and its administration team, wholeheartedly apologize to you pajaro and I hope your inability to play TF2C didn't cause you any additional and uncalled-for stress.

No league is perfect, but UGC wants to listen to the community and we want to hear from everybody so that we can continue to improve the league experience for everyone. UGC has had issues in the past, no question, and I am sorry for all of that, but that was several years ago under an entirely different set of admins. It would be unfair to criticize new Presidents for the actions of the previous administration, and that exists in this situation as well. If there are any other major concerns or comments about our league that needs to be addressed, feel free to reach out to me or any other head admin. All we want is to show the community we have improved since the years past, and we are excited to prove it to everyone!

so kumori isn't general manager of all ugc tf2 leagues?

Ha Ha Ha!!! You kids are getting everything you have coming to you. Enjoy!!!

Didn't your league ban me off a twitch clip and then you just typed "interesting" in the thread about it?

get the fuck out

Yeah when I said backend I was more talking about admins and project leads etc. Not IT infrastructure.

No, the league did not ban you off of a twitch clip, but yes I did type interesting in the thread pertaining to it. You were banned after an AC investigation that utilized more than just a twitch clip. If you would like to discuss it a little more personally, feel free to reach out to me on discord for more information. However, in regards to my comments in the thread, as per UGC Admin Code of Conduct Rule 2.1, I am forbidden from discussing the specifics of any cheating ban/accusation with the impacted parties or the general public, hence my reserved response in the thread.

LOL

No she isn't

This is probably going to be the only time I agree with you steph. AC (esp now) has people I'd actually trust with AC work but the pure volume of reports + these volunteers actually having a life and jobs leaves it less than optimal for a full time effort like this.

However, I'm so sick of you acting like you were some sort of godsend to RGL who offered to do so much and acting as if things never changed since you were kicked. You were not some saving grace for RGL, working hard and putting in 110%. You were a ticking time bomb that multiple people desperately tried to defuse until it literally exploded in sigafoo and exa's faces and you had to be removed for your actions. You also weren't

So let's go through why your staff permissions were slowly stripped away until the few human staff members at the time were begging and writing formal appeals to have you removed from RGL entirely. I don't remember the timeline 100%, so stuff probably isn't in order.

During the whole nursey broking etc pedophile thread, you made multiple attempts to reach out and message everyone and anyone who was possibly involved on behalf of rgl in a disgusting breach of privacy. No concern for who you were reaching out to regarding an extremely serious and sensitive topic. You continually pried at possible victims/individuals who wanted nothing to do with the situation at all. How you were not removed over this alone, I have no fucking clue.

You left dozens of AC cases unfinished while rushing to ban others off of singular logs or demos alone. Not to mention you were warned multiple times to stop calling out players/talking about suspicious players, who were reported and actively being investigated by AC.

Your posts on forums like tftv or in discords like the rgl discord as an rgl staff members ranged from inane, to straight up fucking bullying, to sharing information regarding anti-cheat or other RGL bans. You are probably one of the biggest reasons (definitely not the only one either) why admins often don't comment on issues. They don't want to wind up being the next PR nightmare like you constantly were.

In multiple projects inside of RGL you tried to plaster your name on everything and take credit that wasn't yours. You credited yourself on the RGL Updater Plugin without the original creator's knowledge or consent while barely actually updating or fixing anything inside of it. When Ashville had the nobuild discussion in the highlander scene you took a copy of a nobuild ashville that a player made, did some "bug fixes and edits" and slapped your name on it. You claimed the original creator would get some credit. Not only did they not, but when another staff member actually looked at your map compared to the original, you barely changed anything and didn't actually improve/the map. Taking credit for more things you didn't actually contribute to.

Your moderation inside of the RGL discord (both through pugs and through chat moderation) was atrocious. Who the fuck puts an 8 hour slowmode on the general chat of a league discord because you couldn't handle the job? Me and other staff members were begging you to not put Another Fucking 8 Hour Slowmode on the general chat because we knew it was going to blow up. You did it anyway. In pugs you banned people for calling you slurs. Gold star good for you, congrats on doing something well for once. Then you banned them for focusing you in pugs? You also banned them for trolling and running "throw weapons" while running sticky jumper yourself?

Enough ripping into you though, RGL has/had staff who care a whole damn lot about the game. Problem is that the people who would be/are good enough to do it shouldn't be and aren't doing it because they can do less work for more gain anywhere else. Their internal organization can still be a mess sometimes, but is it anywhere as bad as steph described, absolutely not.

TLDR Steph's removal was absolutely warranted and I'm shocked it didn't happen sooner. RGL is nowhere as bad as she left it but definitely not perfect.

This.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQSTFiJXYAE2Aox.jpg

should probably clarify with her then considering her steam profile says "I am the TF2 General Manager with UGC and Head Admin in charge of the TF2 Ultiduo format. I have been an admin with UGC since 2011. I took a break May 2018 and came back February 2020."