cu@

https://twitter.com/LuckyLukeTF2/status/1689657032729616385

Haven't tried this myself but might be a fix.

Ignoring whether Entropy is "ready" to be played in a season or not, something that seems more concerning and part of a way bigger issue is that League Admins originally tried to bring in 3 new maps while removing Product and Granary. Afaik the idea to replace this many maps for Prem/Div 1 was based on a map poll voted on by players of all divisions which seems very weird to me, as the map pools for Prem/Div 1 and lower divs are different.

Communication between League Admins and Prem teams appears to be lacklustre at best and nonexistent at worst. There is a Prem feedback channel on the ETF2L Discord but it's not being used in any useful way, while there are a lot of shitposts in there, there are a lot of sensible comments being made too. There appears to be a general disconnect between admins and players in what should be a league run by the community for the community and it's not the first time I have noticed this happening. It's just a shame to see.
If I understood the feedback given by people correctly a lot of them would be way happier if there was better admin communication in general and if new maps were introduced gradually over time so teams can actually learn them properly. The way this season's map pool was originally decided just feels like admins were trying to force in too many new maps at once just for the sake of having new maps.

https://i.imgur.com/k1y0FBI.png

One issue with P-REC is that if you crash/timeout and rejoin the server in an ongoing match the plugin won't automatically start recording again, you need to do a manual recording. Not sure if that's also the case with the built-in demo tool.

I asked the responsible people at RGL about these VODs months ago and the reason I got was that these are "bad quality" games (=rolls?) they don't want first-time watchers to see when they find the RGL YT channel, so they "hide" them like this.

Putting VODs behind a paywall is garbage, you can't watch them on Twitch either because they've been deleted on there.

I have left the RGL AC team some time ago and I won't voice any personal thoughts on this particular case. However I can generally state that the AC staff has been struggling with activity even when I was still on the team trying to help out. The inactivity combined with their massive case backlog was one of my biggest concerns with the NA scene and quite demotivating, and with my other time commitments ultimately were the reason I left as I could no longer justify the time spent on it vs. what I got out of it.
The fault doesn't really lie with anyone in particular, it's more so that it seems there aren't many people who want to do this work, are qualified enough, and have enough free time. The ones who are available have other big commitments eating up their time, like Aad who afaik is very busy with site dev work. That being said alting cases are usually acted on much quicker. I would say another issue I noticed was the general workflow from a case getting reported to actually getting eyes on it, and a lot of workarounds being needed for staff work, for example requesting demos by having to go through League Admins which makes everything even more time consuming. I know RGL is working on site updates with QOL improvements for both staff and players so hopefully that will improve case work in the future.

As for getting new people in, I introduced a test case for applicants similar to the one ETF2L AC trials have to go through and many potential trials just displayed a poor understanding of cheats or jumped to conclusions way too quickly. Many of those who showed enough promise lost interest as soon as they realised how much work they would have to do and left before completing their trial period. I'm not really sure how the entire process can be improved since it generally works fine the way we do things in EU. Although we certainly have had cases in the past that sadly took longer than they should have. RGL/NA has the additional pressure that there is money involved in higher divs which doesn't help.
For RGL itself I would recommend making POV requests possible for teams similar to ETF2L and to make those uploads publicly available. The reason why I advocate for this is because it's good for report quality, otherwise NA players are limited to STVs or other type of recordings. I heard RGL is looking into implementing this so that's good.

Besides applying for AC (please only do so if you are prepared to work on many different cases in the future and not just the ones you are interested in), the best you can do is write conclusive reports on players that include evidence, demo ticks and explanations to help the AC team with their work. For the NA scene overall I hope that AC staff can become more efficient.

cu@

Hey, can you please change my Twitch stream URL to https://www.twitch.tv/samus_tf ? (might have to re-add me to the sidebar in general, not sure if I requested to be delisted a while back)

There are some images of the BYOC area and the stage finals uploaded by the event photographers themselves if you haven't seen those yet:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/p1e/albums/72177720302287938 (need to scroll a bit)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/p1e/52374797316/

https://i.imgur.com/SXKO7NP.png
it's over

You mean the stream VODs?
Day 1: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1576875981
Day 2: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1576877558
Day 3: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1576940814
Grand Final: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1576934913

I'm sorry i apologized for my aimgod
I'm just 2 T i m e s O f 1 s t P l a c e r P l a y e r

Imgur has recently updated its ToS, which will go into effect on May 15, 2023: https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029/

Affected isn't only NSFW content, but also images and albums uploaded by non-registered users. Usually a lot of the user content in TFTV threads is uploaded via Imgur, so if there is anything important you want to archive you have less than a month to do so before they start purging.

Looks like this year's summer event is not going to happen at the end of August like usual, they sent out this email about an hour ago:

Didn't state a reason why.