It has been a week since the Recharge Gaming League (RGL) commenced their brave foray into the toxic jungle of the 6v6 competitive scene with the debut season of the No Restriction Sixes League. At this critical juncture, we decided to check in with RGL founder sigafoo to see how this ambitious experiment is faring.
The RGL No Restrictions Sixes Pilot League brings Valve Matchmaking rules to the forefront of the competitive scene.
Following in the footsteps of the Prolander initiative, this league similarly continues RGL’s mission of encouraging change in the competitive TF2 scene -- in this case, by implementing the same ruleset that is currently limited to only the official Valve competitive matchmaking. This means no item whitelist, no class limits, no time limit, and a 3 round win limit for 5CP matches, among other changes.
We asked sigafoo to discuss the public reception for his latest innovative venture.
It's going well. We had the infographic up which I thought highlighted some information that we learned in the first week that really surprised me. We've had a really high turnout and only had 2 teams forfeited in the first week out of the 86 teams that registered.
From the players I've heard from, everyone enjoyed themselves, although they didn't like how quick the games are. People are so excited at how there's no strong meta, so they can do all of the crazy strats they want to do whether that's in a serious way or not. But we'll know more detail when we have our end-of-season survey.
The only people I've heard complain about the format is our Prolander players. We host pugs of No Restriction sixes and Prolander in our Discord, and I've had a couple times where we switch back and forth. One time I mentioned we'd be switching back to Prolander and they're like "thank god." Then again, I had another player who played RGL-Highlander Invite with me shoot me a message about how much fun he had playing in a No Restriction sixes scrim on Upward.
One other thing that I want to note, that I think is really interesting is that we have a division we're calling "Newbie" which is literally only teams with ONLY new players on it (this is different from our Open teams, which is like Steel level). Our Newbie division is a crazy 18 teams, while our open is a little over 20. To have like 5, or even 10, teams of completely new players is fantastic for any league these days, but to have almost 20 teams, who were not courted or pushed in through mixes but created teams on their own to play, is outstanding. It seems like this pilot league stuck some sort of nerve to get so many people to try it out.
sigafoo also gave some insight into his plans for what lies ahead for RGL.
The future for RGL is the same as it ever was: to support the evolution of TF2 and do our best to keep driving the community forward. What will happen with this format is...completely unknown. I had no expectations to run it after this season, as I assume the format would not do well. But we're going to listen to feedback, look at the results and go from there. If people liked it or maybe a modified version of it works, it's definitely something to strongly consider. We don't want to run too many leagues either, so we might retire Prolander for instance. Our goal is to find the best possible format, and if we strike something that's great, we're going to keep chasing after that.
Additionally, RGL will be holding a "pop-up league" for traditional competitive 6v6, involving 6 matches over a span of 3-4 weeks. Details will be announced soon™ on teamfortresstv.
Any players interested in No Restriction Sixes can obtain further information at mm.rgl.gg, as well as join active rosters until rosters lock on April 3rd.