All of this exists already either in RGL or with third party tools. The problems people seem to have with RGL often stem from how central they are to the NA scene and disagreements with how RGL leadership make decisions that end up being unilaterally enforced across NA tf2 as a whole. I don't think making a different RGL that does the same stuff but aims to be even more centralized is a very well thought out idea.

Hope its cool and dumping what is clearly somebody's independent wealth into TF2 is pretty hype. That said the amount of "will be" I see in this post makes it sound like you have a design doc with a list of existing tools you plan to repurpose except with you in charge. If that isn't the case and you plan to rebuild all this stuff from the ground up (not just reskinning more.tf and the dozen docker image on vps solutions that are out there for automated match servers) I am very skeptical that a release date of this year will actually happen.

I'd usually say competition is good for stuff like leagues but I think realistically you either split an already very small scene for no good reason or we end up upfragging "TFCL bad" posts instead of "RGL bad" posts in 2 years when the new league that planned to be an even more centralized authority than RGL turns out to be... an even more centralized authority than RGL.

I am glad my forehead was present for this historic moment

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/squadron-eighteenwheelers-lead-way-down-260nw-650334397.jpg

Guys this is just the price we have to pay to eradicate woke! Please try to remember that as the world plunges into poverty and the hopes and dreams of you and your loved ones are shattered. The life of scarcity and debt that awaits you and your children will own the libs and that really makes it all worth it.

Oh the no foreigners rule is news to me. That's insane, high ping really just affects the player with the high ping. Consistent high ping on an enemy team is basically a non-issue. As someone who has gotten facerolled by SA teams I don't think ping was ever a contributing factor. Let the brazillians cook.

$650 is very literally 40 hours of work at 15$/hr and there are 6 of you.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Shinygoldfish.jpg/1200px-Shinygoldfish.jpg

every clip being a last fight where heavy is good or the other team throwing so hard it looks staged is very funny

I use AI for tedious but simple stuff. Regex, excel formulas, python list comprehension, stuff like that. Usually a 1 liner of some sort that I can thoroughly test without too much effort. Sometimes when I have to implement a new concept or understand some terminology AI is nice as well. "What is X in the context of Y" sort of thing. If the stakes are low that can be a lot quicker and more effective than reading the docs, or it can help you to narrow down what docs you need to be reading. I do not trust AI to be more than like 70% correct even on a good day, so I really don't like using it for anything other than getting a jumping off point or generating something that can very easily be tested and corrected.

Keep it out of art.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250220040934/https://steamusercontent-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/56961211789843601/D8B4BE3D988E2A9C966EAEB65DF8DBD7BD9B3AA8/

this post doesn't have enough Defender of the Fatherland Day spirit, tonight you will be visited by 3 ghosts.

I definitely think its a good enough reason! The issue is the enormous dev effort.

You're stripping VAC from the equation and your solution needs to be much, much better before its worth it for leagues to even think about switching. There are people in the community with the skills and knowledge to do this pretty well it would just be a major lift. In fact my understanding is that people like steph have done some really cool anticheat work on similar standalone TF2 mods (not sure which one off the top of my head, but I've heard good things). The tech is possible, its just a wild amount of ongoing effort by people with very specialized knowledge and limited time. This is especially the case as leagues/ pugs switch over and the cat and mouse game with the cheat devs ramps up.

I don't think that anything in this vein actually gets made for a multitude of reasons, but man the anticheat implications are exciting. You reduce scope enough and there may be a real argument for just treating this as a glorified league client.

I actually don't think this is true. Properly done, installing a free game where all of your items and stuff can still be used with 1 click directly from the store page is much less of a barrier to entry than what we currently have.

Cool that valve has basically given a full green light to a project like this existing now. What sort of things would we actually want to see that couldn't be achieved with just server plugins? I can think of a few but not enough to justify a full standalone promod.

• More visual options (flat textures, no restrictions on viewmodels, larger max fov)
  
• Merged optimization improvements from like teamcomtress
  
• Sane default settings and a general optimization of the pipeline from install game to play 6s on a server with other humans

Everything balance related doesn't really need a standalone mod. You have been able to do balance stuff with server side plugins for almost 2 decades and we don't do that. If there are compelling reasons to require something standalone I'm all for it, especially now that the fractured community argument that has been going around for 10 years is less relevant. In game items and what not being usable is a huge win. Maybe anticheat is the real upside. I'm pretty confident that a standalone client would provide some real options for properly implementing and maintaining an anticheat system.