https://i.imgur.com/Zr7UwLt.png

https://push.dubthink.com/2024/05/20201024221314_1.jpg

https://push.dubthink.com/2024/05/20210319225247_1.jpg

https://push.dubthink.com/2024/05/20211204190936_1.jpg

This so much, imo it's one of the best renditions of the tf2 spytech aesthetic - every once in a while I'll load it up locally just to wander around and explore it for an hour.

Yes lol, like back when feno was *super* obviously cheating his ass off and and it was just kind of public knowledge, no one had ever submitted any reports. The only reason he got banned is bc one of the 6s admins mentioned it to our AC team.

Just please, for the love of god, report players you think are cheating. Even if they've already been reported, report them again when you see more sus ticks. Reports with stv demos and ticks save literally hours of AC time, since that means the AC team doesn't have to trawl through as many demos themselves. More reports is literally always better (other than resubmitting evidence you know someone else already did obv)

The short answer is money. The long answer is that for an AC client to be even remotely effective, you need it to both be closed source (so the community wouldn't be able to verify its benevolence), and have *far* more access to your machine than a community league with no legal responsibility or fiscal reputation to uphold should have. Additionally, AC clients take ridiculously specialized skills that it's very unlikely anyone in the scene has.

My brother and I weren't allowed to play video games other than Minecraft growing up bc "violent video games" or whatever, but our friends got us into tf2 and we'd play late at night after they went to bed. One night after a month or so of this, my brother stayed up way too late and when asked why he was tired, fessed up the next morning (snitch).

But then we pulled out the pyrovision goggles and were like "see it's cartoon violence it's totally fine :)" and they let us keep playing lmao

Lowkey owe my career to that tho, bless pyrovision

https://pm1.aminoapps.com/7175/c1b4b1ea03e6e442cf15fe76e228c956015ad8dfr1-260-267v2_uhq.jpg

I've got a few clips from years past - idk if any of them are what you're looking for, but I at least had fun looking through my old shadowplay folders :)
frags as med:
https://streamable.com/0195jl - med2kWithAirshot.dem
https://streamable.com/dqiesg - med2kOnDemoMed.dem
I also had some old med frags from RGB4, but I only have POVs and it looks like they can't load any more?

Not a frag, but a bonkers surf + arrow on 1 hp scout:
https://streamable.com/j91nn4 image - surf1healtharrow.dem

Just dumb:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S-6rPt-UEA - 4airstrikes.dem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-V95Y5HVmY - Idk if there's anything good for this project in here, and it's like a dozen ticks, but I can hunt down the demo if desired

I wish I had a picture of it, but StarSucker would play on his shitty college mandated laptop with Quadro graphics, sitting on his bed, $10 Walmart mouse (no mousepad, just fuckin rawdogging it on the bedsheet), and used the left half of a controller for movement rather than keyboard. When questioned about the controller, the only answer he would ever give was "360 degree movement".

We could also tell whenever someone used the microwave at his place since the router was right next to it and his ping would hit like 400.

Edit: pom found it, I forgot about the cursed headphones too

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/356572176779968513/1127476086335352842/starseup.webp?width=516&height=917

Why is this being downfragged? Like ik people sometimes like to cj on Rendoas, but it boggles my mind that "maybe we as a community should do something more serious about blatant transphobia/racism/etc" is seen as a bad take. I've been getting an irl friend into tf2 recently and I'd love to show them some competitive stuff, but I'm too fucking embarrassed to show them with how y'all act.

bro I gotchu

https://i.imgur.com/YzcLCHt.jpg

Home status goes to the team that's been home less so far. Iirc if both teams have been home the same number of times, it goes to higher seed, but it might be random.

For a while I've personally been interested in trying the bo2 2 maps/week approach that's used in etf2l and ozf. I think the main argument against it in NA previously was that people were attached to half-time, but with the b4nny config growing in popularity, having bo2 b4nny-config matches might be a compelling preposition. They'd run longer than our current 1-map-2-halves matches, which might be a challenge, but the idea of playing two maps per week sounds really fun to me.

Either that week's map being a better map for one team or things like ringers or internet issues can easily make a H2H result inaccurate, particularly when you're only looking at tiebreaking against close teams (where a map favoring one team can make the difference). I want to call out though that this statement isn't my argument, just a hypothesis about why the stats show rw% is more accurate. The decision was made based on rw% being statistically notably better at predicting which team was stronger.

Rough numbers:
RNG tiebreaker: right 50% of the time (baseline)
H2H tiebreaker: right ~65% of the time (better than RNG, but not by much)
RW% tiebreaker: right ~77% of the time (better than H2H and significantly better than RNG)

Strength-of-schedule is absolutely a challenge with any non-rr tournament, and we've talked plenty about possible improvements to reduce its effect. However, it was absolutely accounted for in the data - the situation you're describing happened plenty over the 6 seasons of data analyzed, and rw% still shows better results than h2h.

Why? The goal of a tiebreaking metric is that the better team makes it into playoffs. Across all of the first 6 seasons of RGL, rw% outperformed h2h, even when looking at situations where h2h should have a large advantage. Fwiw I totally get the gut reaction that h2h should be better and went into the study partly expecting to find that, but the data shows that rw% is more accurate.

To call it out again, in one of the analyses we looked at teams with identical records that played each other in the regular season and then had a rematch in playoffs. Even in that situation, rw% was a better predictor than the regular season h2h result of which team would win the rematch.

The h2h vs rw% discussion was brought up internally at RGL about a year ago. As part of that, I ran a statistical analysis that looked at whether h2h or rw% better predicted playoff outcomes using the dataset of S1-S6 playoffs (not including RR divs or am or nc). The results indicated rw% was a better predictor of playoff performance across the board, including when taking into account potential biases. Even when we looked at teams that had faced each other in playoffs, rw% was a better predictor of which team would win - which is a situation where you'd expect h2h to have a significant advantage. This lead to us keeping it as the primary tiebreaking metric. I've got a big writeup draft somewhere with all the stats and methodologies that I wanted to publish back then, but we got busy with S7 and it got put on the back burner.

Through doing the analysis, I figured out that the general reason rw% is better than h2h can be qualitatively stated as "it only takes a single thing happening to mess up a h2h result, but it takes a bunch of things happening to mess up a w% result." (which was backed up by the data and the mathematical modeling I did)

Of course, neither method is perfect - the only way to have perfect competitiveness is to run a double RR division with pick-bans for maps (which is why that's the format for Invite). RGL uses RW% as a tiebreaker because it's correct more of the time than the alternatives. There will always be cases where it's not accurate, no matter which method is used.

If anyone's deeply interested in the methodology, etc, feel free to message me on discord - matchmaking and playoffs structures are one of my main focuses at RGL, and I'm always happy to chat about this kind of thing.

Also, random interesting data drop:
As part of the investigation, we looked into the potential bias that some maps would yield more rounds than others. The data shows a small but not insignificant effect:

Data from adv-im S5 regular season
rt = rounds taken
rtow = rounds taken on win
rtol = rounds taken on loss
rtol/rtow = % of the winning team's rounds the loosing team takes = rtol/rtow
rtol/rp = % of all rounds the losing team takes
#m = number of matches
map                  | rt  | rtow | rotl | # matches | rotl/rotw | rotl/rp | avg. score
cp_gullywash_final1  | 409 | 303  | 106  | 66        | 34.98%    | 25.92%  | 4.59 - 1.61
cp_metalworks        | 407 | 292  | 115  | 64        | 39.38%    | 28.26%  | 4.56 - 1.80
cp_process_f7        | 364 | 290  |  74  | 65        | 25.52%    | 20.33%  | 4.46 - 1.14
cp_snakewater_final1 | 369 | 287  |  82  | 60        | 28.57%    | 22.22%  | 4.78 - 1.37
cp_sunshine          | 418 | 297  | 121  | 65        | 40.74%    | 28.95%  | 4.57 - 1.86
cp_villa_b18         | 424 | 306  | 118  | 63        | 38.56%    | 27.83%  | 4.86 - 1.87
koth_clearcut_b15d   | 305 | 248  |  57  | 65        | 22.98%    | 18.69%  | 3.82 - 0.88
koth_product_rcx     | 320 | 235  |  85  | 61        | 36.17%    | 26.56%  | 3.85 - 1.39