https://twitter.com/b3arodactyl/status/1138568399737565184

Except for the fact that, yah know, it's brought up just about every single time we talk about whitelists and maps... Hell not even two months ago we had this exact discussion.

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that specimens logo looks like crap

sandblast apparently told sigafoo that he intends to make a team and to reserve a slot but it's definitely misleading to say the least lol (dunno maybe the rest of the team will stick around hard to say this early)

Ascent members were also not informed, I guess ma3la made the decision for them as well?

I have a roster for the invite slot for Ascent. Whether our NA team decides to play next season is up to them.

Sorry, what?

We had discussed a replacement league, before ESEA even announced it. Due to unforseen reasons, the managing team at HQ made the decision to not go ahead with it. I tried where possible to find a way where it worked but we had agreed it was for the best.

why not just make a survey with every map on the planet and then give everyone 7 or 8 votes and then just take the maps that get the most votes

and if it turns out that badlands and granary get enough votes, then maybe never have this conversation again

i dont know rgl's ringer policy and its not mentioned anywhere in the google doc, but if i need to sacrifice uber fare or panhandle in a tftv thread again to gather the $15 needed to get a 6th for a single match, im done with competitive tf2 for the time being

fix this one lingering issue from esea and ill put aside the rest of rgl's issues and give it a shot

i just wanna pay the advertised price once and play my f2p game

@sigafoo How are you going to stream all your leagues on just rgl? Are they at different times or all different days?

make the reg fee for the team and not the players, rgl uses admin discretion anyways so ppl wont be able to abuse rostering a ton of ppl randomly

Shout-out to all the players just now learning they're cut after this season of esea

what happens if 6 players of higher skill than the weakest listed invite team pull together a roster? swap? or will you add teams to invite still if they apply?

1. who will the admins be? were they voted on or are the application based? how much does exprience weigh in the selection of admins?

2. what is the ringer policy? since we're using "public" servers, will we be allowed a ringer without having to shell out the price of them rostering as a sub? to add to that will subs have to pay to be on the roster or will they only have to pay to play a match

3. i understand you're very strict when it comes to alias rules, but what's the rule for players who are known by different aliases, like garbugio/purpleshirt or campy/xaler. what about phlps or dingo who've been playing with different aliases for a while at this point, will they have to use phlps and dingo? if you change your alias on the rgl website will that count as an alias change?

4. will you enforce alias rules in official match servers even if it's not being casted? if you're playing a match will you have to wear your team's tag and the alias that's on the website or can you have any steam name as long as it's not a casted match?

5. what happens if team's can't agree on a server and there's no official servers avaliable?

that's all i can think of now but im sure there's more questions out there

https://imgur.com/a/rlP4lBA
https://streamable.com/t04w3

So a couple of different things, we have always lowered the price of playing as a rostered player throughout the season. So come playoffs is 50% of the starting price.

We haven't got it set in stone, but our plan is to create a new system where players can purchase a small block of passes. (e.g. you pay to play in 3 matches, rather than a full season.) Then every match you play in it removes from your stock. Whether that's with your team or with another ringing.

Matches are going to be streamed on our RGL channels either RGLgg or RGLgg2, we'd cover 1 to 3 matches per week. One thing that was mentioned is that we'd like to try to work with Invite teams to purposefully stack their matches so we can do double match coverage on the same night, but that'll depend on how willing the invite teams are to do that. What times for the matches? I'm not sure, as many teams reschedule their matches.

Hopefully, though we'll have one night which is a consistent night with a match that we cover. Probably Wednesday.

EDI: I also reached out to Marmaloo directly and clarify on the first part. He was asking how are we going to cast 4 formats at once. We aren't. The plan is to have only two formats per "season." We have the main season which is 10 weeks for our most popular formats. And then an 8-week "offseason" for the other formats.

I have about 6 admins right now who are actively slotted to be working with us. We didn't do any voting, not sure how that'd work, but they applied. I talked to them 1 on 1 and went from there. Currently, our admin staff for sixes is light on experience, which is not great, but fortunately, I've had several people reach out who are higher level who are interested.

So we might be adding in 2-3 more higher level players who are more familiar with the community and can help rank players better for placements and such. At the very least, we might "contract" some players in the pre-season to help with rankings.

We will be making our staff public in our next public release about the season, once we have it 100% sorted with who's doing what divisions, etc....

See above

We don't let players change their name lightly. They need to have it, keep and sustain it. The other thing to is that we don't enforce aliases outside of casted matches. Mostly the aliases policy is for the viewer to be able to easily track players season over season. Also also not get confused when someone get's called garbugio over and over again, despite the stream name listed as purpleshirt. I don't think that experience is good for viewers who are not in depth in the scene.

We have changed names for players on the site a few times, so we are willing to do it.

No

As it would stand now Home team would have to choose a server where both teams get a reasonable ping. If a server cannot be found, admins can help them obtain one which works well enough for the situation.

That's a really tough call, generally it just really depends on the context. Like if they were in Advance, they'd likely stomp advance, then we'd push them into Invite. If Advance was really strong with some pseudo-Invite teams, then we'd be more likely to let them stay. Also depends on the health of Invite and who these players are. Are they trying to dodge Invite for an easy win? Are they just some up and coming players with a strong roster? etc...

We also would talk and work with the team and keep them updated with what we're doing and try to get their perspective as to what they believe is correct.

For that situation a lot of things to take into account for making the final decision. So I cannot give you a black and white answer, as it's a gray area and context is everything, but that's some of our thought processes when looking at it.

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Also thanks to everyone who's signed up, we've already had a staggering 35 teams started already!

This notion that the Global Whitelist and centralization of rules leads to bureaucracy nightmare and stagnancy within the esport is close-minded at best. The key factor that creates friction between leagues are discrepancies and the unwillingness to compromise. RGL has yet again demonstrated, to my understanding, a complete lack of advocacy towards working with other leagues to work on a cohesive map pool, whitelist, and ruleset.

As Dreamboat rightly said earlier on, and I must clarify that this is my own opinion and not one representing anything to do with EssentialsTF, but a lack of a centralized method of play proves difficult when determining how events are to be played. Things like time and winlimits can be shaped to fit the LAN setup, but Map Pools and Whitelists prove to be tricky since we wish for all teams to not be disadvantaged when attending an international event. However, due to the difference in how regional leagues approach their ruleset, there has been a consistent discrepancy between key rules and such.

It is disappointing that one of the game's best opportunities to take a step towards progress is hampered by this short-term mentality of rapidly iterating rules without giving them a chance to truly see their effects. For people who want to implement change, forcing people to quickly adopt new ways of playing the game and such month by month is risky and historically has proven unsuccessful. Gradual implementation based on consistent feedback over longer periods of time globally would be far more effective than throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks.

Your consistent alienation of the community, leagues, and current players makes me concerned for the scene as a whole should RGL be the main choice post-ESEA.

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I think all of your points are fair and I think our goal should be to come to some universal standard. I just got done chatting for a little while with you on discord, as I wanted to understand your position better and explain mine as well. And I appreciate you taking the time at 5am to chat with me <3.

I think it's just a difference of mindset. What's more important, being able to be nimble and adaptive to your community and league. Or be more structure and plotting.

I would argue that RGL's success is in part because we've are very open-minded to our own community. Listen to concerns, criticisms, and ideas with an open ear and go from there. We aren't afraid to try new ideas and push them forward or pivot and change if they're not working.

What we want, is what you want, which is what everyone wants. Growth in TF2. And I think it's just a balance of what will get us there and we think part of what will get us there is having a nimble and adaptive mindset.

reading all of these horrible rules and looking at this garbage map pool makes me think this is just a bad dream

i will never have respect for someone who bans a team for being too good and none of u should either

i have a feeling quickfix could be unbanned very soon if this gains popularity. why unban solemn vow? its a crutch for bad video gamers, u can just see enemy uber if medic has line of vision to other medic and ruin the point of uber counting thank you for your effort mr engineer main but let someone else do the all the important balancing etc...why would u remove badlands and granary for new untested maps, even though badlands and granary has its flaws, they are a way better option than relatively untested maps.....push changes slowly and think it thoroughly with big boy 6s gamers, no point just making drastic changes...if you want to attract already estabilished 6s players u need to appeal to comfort zone okj

I hope that the first season to bridge the ESEA > RGL gap has the 'halves' for 5cp maps and afterwards can be brought more in line with the leagues and LANs in the rest of the world (ETF2L, ozfortress, Copenhagen Games, iSeries, RGB) where there is the 30 minute timelimit per map and no halves.

Same for the whitelist, which is currently ESEA S30/S31 + Solemn Vow, where after the first season the global whitelist discussions and test cups for leagues can be started up again to get rulesets for items and maps more in-line and towards a more universal standard.

A more uniform ruleset should also make the viewing experience a lot easier if you don't need to wonder about which weapons are banned or what the win conditions are for a map if you're an NA or AU viewer on an EU stream and vice-versa.

Honestly I kinda have a problem with this, if I wanted to play demo for a season I would have to play it in advance / invite just because I can play medic at that level? that'd be a fucking disaster lmao I would do like 100 dpm it would probably be better just to make it so that if a team starts main classing they become disqualified mid season?

like 50 percent of all invite/high im players who have ever said this ended up playing their mains. kinda ruins it for people who want to legit offclass

yea so as I said admin discretion can be used here if the team starts try harding they can be disqualified

does it have 6

Honestly not really set on the inclusion of clearcut / kalinka. Both maps are pretty unknown / unplayed. Don't know why we couldn't just use proven maps like logjam or reckoner in the place of badlands/granary. (I think logjam is really slept on in NA and it has always seemed like a pretty decent map to me)

Although I do think testing and adding new KOTH maps is good

also @ phantom honestly i really disagree with the offclassing thing. literally every time I've played in the same division as one of those invite player offclass teams by the time I've played them in a match they're on their mains and scrimming normal days lol.

like just this season fyggs team went from having 3+ people offclassing to only cukei offclassing. (not to call them out just an example)

or like last season in open the kronge realm guys offclassed until playoffs and then when playoffs started it was just a high IM team playing open players.

It feels like most us (us as in IM / Invite players) have fallen into the mindset that sandbagging doesn't really matter that much because we had to deal with it when we started, but honestly I think if RGL actually has fair lower divisions we could see a lot of growth, personally, I know several people who were turned off of their first season of open because they were just getting dicked by people who'd been playing forever and didn't have a chance at all.

i wasnt aware actual invite players could make decisions this bad

Just copy ETF2L and make NATF2L and its golden