The first Invite Disrupt PUG is just getting started on twitch.tv/rglgg

The first PUG teams are:

Captain A: Alfredodan
Players: Deadlyseed, Peppa, Quacks, Rave_AC and Raven

Captain B: b3arodactyl
Players: Donovin, Fireball, Hami, reero, yosh

Maps will be: cp_sunshine, koth_bagel and then a secret fun map to be reavealed!

Friday night's matches raised over $600 for this Summer's RGL LAN prize pool!

I had a great time at this event and going to have some pride forever in playing the tiniest part of making it go.

Shoutout to:

Lacy for letting me be on the admin team and not firing me for having wrong opinions about formats and rulesets.

Drhappiness for being super chill and putting up with a geezer as his admin table partner all weekend.

Witness for bringing great teams to the event, and the EU and AU players for such a great show.

The Open event teams for coming in and having fun playing this ancient game, especially the players that stopped by to introduce themselves and chat - way too many to name.

Grape Juice and Lake Fairy Crew for playing through and being good people

That Dad that showed up on Monday with his teenage kids to watch the event

Deltamarket for sharing your uber ride to the airport at 3:30AM on Tuesday

ecchymoses for sharing a hotel room and being a great caster

whoever it was that thought I was siyo at the event.

JMaxChill, Samus and everyone at EssentialsTF for a great B stream

Dang, this is getting way too long, sorry for rambling, but one more:

Huge shoutout to Siyo, Antlers, Lacy (again) Resin and everyone at Fireside for giving this event so much and making it happen. Really appreciate what you've done for the community here.

Congratulations to manulization and Ninjago!, both of whom earned spots in RGL Invite Sixes this season by winning the Qualifier event last week.

We are able to take registration of one additional team into the Invite division for Season 18 up until May 28th. As above, interested teams/leaders should reach out directly to discuss creation of an Invite team.
Site registration is closed as Advanced and lower divisions start season play this week.

Update for RGL Sixes Season 18 Invite:

We are extending the registration deadline for the Invite division only until Wednesday, May 28th in order to give more time to players involved in the PFD LAN to fill out rosters and prepare for the Summer RGL Season + RGL Philly LAN in July.

The Invite Season will be shortened to five weeks to allow completion of matches in plenty of time for teams to plan for LAN.

This season, Invite Qualifiers will be held, with four teams competing for spots in Invite. The teams wining placements in Invite will secure spots regardless of additional teams registering through the deadline.
Teams interested in participating in Qualifiers should reach out to Plinko or Kitty as soon as possible.

Teams must have either created an Invite roster on the RGL site or confirmed to Kitty/Plinko/Je'Mond of their intended plans before the extended deadline.
Revised timelines for S18 Sixes Invite will be as follows:
Qualifier Teams Announced: Sunday, May 11th
Invite Qualifiers: May 13-16 (exact dates and times TBD)
Invite Registration Closes: 11:59PM EDT Wednesday, May 28
Division Payments Due: Sunday, June 1 (must have 5 rostered and paid)
Matches Posted: Sunday, June 1
1st Default Match date: Tuesday, June 3
Last Day to Reschedule Regular Season Matches: Tuesday, July 2
Invite Playoffs at RGL Philly LAN: July 18-20

Other division deadlines and schedules will not be affected.

That's awesome, thank you!

Donated, really looking forward to seeing International competition again!

The Unusual Raffle is off the list of perks - did it sell out already or did something change?

Just a reminder that the Season 17 team creation deadline is Saturday, Jan. 11th, at midnight, EST.

Teams planning to register for Invite or who have interest in Invite Qualifiers (if needed) may reach out directly to either me or Kitty before the registration deadline.

We will be planning to have a pre-season meeting with Invite team leaders either Jan 11th or 12th, depending on availability, to go over important details, including map pool, pick/bans, match/playoff schedules and - very importantly - the RGL Match servers beta.

I think that might be a logs.tf issue as I've been seeing that happen in scrims on a few different servers the last couple of days.

Saph's IM spreadsheet thread here.
(I suppose might as well just link the sheet)

Raising Cane's is very good. The Chik-fil-a swag cow on he other hand. . .

pulp fiction reference for us boomers.

I am glad if that's the case, I don't mean to imply it's like that now.

I really mean more that anywhere without strong gatekeeping has a real risk of being infiltrated and ruined by those folks. I've seen it happen in other sites and groups many times and so I am wary of any open access pug service, I imagine I am not alone in that, is all.

As an older, mediocre player with life responsibilities, the current situation is awful. The limited time I can set aside to play the game, waiting around 30-45 minutes for a pug that may or may not start is terrible. I would love if we can get back to having a service that I can reliably know a pug will start at any time. I don't think I've played a pug in at least two years, and it saddens me.

The current state of in-house pugs is terrible because it's fragmented such that pugs can only happen at time when a critical mass of that subgroup are on, all other times there's never a critical mass anywhere, even if there might be 20-30 folks open to play among all of them - there's no way for them to know.
Even TF2CC, which is probably the most workable for newbies -IM/Main level pugs are still running consistently only in the hours before scrims. Weekends are dead, after scrims are sporadic.

Given how prevalent trolls and cheaters are as Valve gave up on policing the game, truly open experiences like tf2center are a big risk and I have no interest in devoting time to them knowing odds are good it'll be terrible. It may be hard to ever bring them back to the old popularity because of that.

I have high hopes for RGL open pugs, but they don't seem to attract much vs. captain pugs, would love to hear why more people don't try to utilize them and what could be done to get more adding up.

You are supposed to be able to roster up to 8 players. If you're having issues with that, post your players in the cup-support channel in the Fireside Discord and we'll get them added.

In the rules, teams may also ring up to two players not rostered with the agreement of the opposing team.

As far as scheduling, group stage matches are planned for 10:30 EDT May 13-16. Playoffs at 10 EDT May 20-23.

Draft format is interesting, and will be great to hear eXtine casting again.