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

I'm not really sure where this myth got started, but RGL doesn't do any kind of chatlog scanning to ban from - all our bans come from reports, and we keep an eye out for reporters that are completely unaffiliated with the thing they're reporting and just witch-hunting.

This is the exact opposite of what freesync and g-sync do lmao. Adaptive sync modes let your monitor adjust to match the game's framerate. If tf2 is running faster than the monitor, you get the usual behavior (same as no adaptive sync). If your fps drops below the monitor's max refresh rate, the monitor'll wait for the next frame before updating, eliminating tearing entirely and reducing stuttering.

Sorry bro but the legendary T6 PanFrie }svny{|DF| had you beat by 8 months

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMbqWATk2fw

Source 2 is a drastically more modern engine designed with modern hardware and techniques in mind. In 2007, game engines were designed for machines with one or a couple threads and modest gpus. Even your basic gaming computer in 2021 has 4+ threads and the gpu is an order of magnitude (or several) more powerful than 2007 hardware*, but a large portion of that goes to waste since current tf2 isn't designed to use it. A source 2 tf2 port is likely to blow the current tf2's performance out of the water for the same graphical fidelity, or largely improve the graphical fidelity while also improving perf.

Of course, a lot depends on what level of access this team has to the tools (i.e. a mod will never be as fast as having native access), but the potential's there. I'd personally love to see stv support so that games played in TF2 could be casted/produced in TF:S2.

* I looked into this for fun - some gpu benchmarks
639 - GeForce 8800 Ultra (arguably the best card on the market in 2007)
1503 (2.35x) - the Vega integrated graphics in the first $500 gaming laptop I could find
19509 (30x) - the RTX 2080 Super I have
benchmarks are definitely not everything, of course - there have been substantial architectural improvements to GPUs as well

https://push.dubthink.com/2021/08/e56.jpg

Finally got around to taking photos of the board I built last winter:

https://push.dubthink.com/2021/07/denseboard_mk1_top.jpg

I wanted the most compact 104-key I could get, couldn't find any good options, so I made my own. Lefthand numpad is objectively superior for RH mouse users and I will die on that hill - not sure why there aren't more options for it out there.

Laser cut aluminum frame with SS standoffs, kailh speed bronze switches, hand wired matrix, teensy++ 2.0 controller, MT3 Susuwatari keycaps. Finding a sculpted keycap set that fit this layout was honestly the hardest part.

https://push.dubthink.com/2021/07/denseboard_mk1_front.jpg

https://push.dubthink.com/2021/07/denseboard_solder.jpg

Hey, quick post to clarify a couple points here:
- ire was uninvolved in this (other than being the leader of antlers' team, who jemond contacted about the demo request). Ire was not involved in any way with the ban, which was entirely procedural.
- antlers did not record his demo for his Week 8A match. We will (obviously) not penalize people for not recording pug or scrim demos.

To illuminate why we took action here even though antlers' last failure was 16 months ago:

From Aad, our head AC admin:

At the end of the day, there's a few major points for why we enforce demo recording this way:
- We don't want to give any potential cheater or suspect any leeway - we did this in the past before hard demo requesting rules existed, and we have 1000000% missed out on some extremely good evidence. Anyone who has a hard stance on cheating should almost always make sure they also have a hard stance on demos. Otherwise in a game where VAC is straight up useless, having an AC team in any league would also be useless w/o ability to have pov demos when desperately needed.
- The community expects us to be consistent - I've been extremely consistent with making sure we apply demo failures correctly, and it should be expected at this point because it hasn't changed. We also are consistent with other cheating related topics of "cheating anywhere = cheating @ RGL, if VAC doesn't catch you cheating, doesn't mean we can't"
- We're going as far as developing a plugin to ensure no one has an excuse to accidentally not record by spitting out in chat anyone not recording when a game goes live - literally no other league has explored this option, even though pieces have been out there for at min 5yrs now.
- We're also being consistent with the other major TF2 leagues:
Ozfortress just says see ya for 4 games, no decay

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/580467385119801367/864304880318283776/unknown.png

UGC similarly bans for first miss, and have no decay.

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/580467385119801367/864304827014053918/unknown.png

ETF2L's ruleset has 0 decay for demo requests for many many years now without issue.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/580467385119801367/864304940980502548/unknown.png

tl;dr In the past, some of the cases we've had to let go due to missing demos pisses me off and no one has a reason to disable recording once the season has started.

https://media1.tenor.com/images/d66420dd8a94136a3bda9d976b15ca3f/tenor.gif?itemid=16972880

https://push.dubthink.com/2021/05/6Ui6XtSJIC0HMPQe8Xt9648xds74nK90hgNFNQindf0.jpg

PSA: The deadline to have 5 paid up on your roster is TOMORROW, Saturday at 11:59 pm est. If you aren't able to, please go ahead and reach out now by creating a support ticket in the main discord and we can figure something out. The deadline for 6 paid is before your first match, which start next week.

If you have questions or requests regarding team placement or class restrictions, please reach out via support ticket in the main discord so that we can assist.

PSA: The deadline to have 5 paid up on your roster is TOMORROW, Saturday at 11:59 pm est. If you aren't able to, please go ahead and reach out now by creating a support ticket in the main discord and we can figure something out. The deadline for 6 paid is before your first match, which start next week.

If you have questions or requests regarding team placement or class restrictions, please reach out via support ticket in the main discord so that we can assist.

PSA: The deadline to have 5 paid up on your roster is TOMORROW, Saturday at 11:59 pm est. If you aren't able to, please go ahead and reach out now by creating a support ticket in the main discord and we can figure something out. The deadline for 6 paid is before your first match, which start next week.

If you have questions or requests regarding team placement or class restrictions, please reach out via support ticket in the main discord so that we can assist.