BETA TESTERS NEEDED

Howdy everyone, currently we're looking to get beta testers for the FACEIT Comp Sixes Matchmaking and begin testing our initial beta testing next week.

If you're a NA or EU player who'd be interested in playing some comp sixes matchmaking on FACEIT, please go to

https://forms.gle/78rePPebm3HJiQPP7
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I'll send you an invite to the discord channel where we're doing testing. Currently, I'm looking more for players with higher skill levels, e.g. in or above Main in NA and in or above Mid in EU.

Happypurple is an admin at RGL and is helping run prolander.

RGL PUGs are still in development, they did not stop, which are separate and not connected to FACEIT.

It's a job, my current title is 'TF2 Project Manager.' I'm overseeing all TF2 related projects in FACEIT.

So yes, I was brought on specifically for TF2. If something was to happen that TF2 sadly did not work out, there are it's possible I could potentially in the company (if there was another good job fit for me here), however... I hope you can understand that's not even a thought in my head. My focus is on TF2 and making sure we deliver the best things we can for the community.

The number of questions you see will be variable based on the answer you give. "13 questions" is a reference to what I saw for my route at the bottom of the page when answering the survey.

Howdy everyone,

If you haven't heard, I've recently taken on a new position at FACEIT. Currently, we're working on creating a comp sixes matchmaking service and revamping our casual TF2 as well.

Initially we're looking to get feedback from competitive players on what you're for in a comp sixes PUG service.

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/7QD59MX

Please take a moment to fill out the survey, it's only about 13 questions.

Thanks!

I'm really excited to be involved in this.

I can say at a high level, there is active development being done. We're focusing on Trad. Sixes Competitively and, separately, making a better casual experience.

I'll be reaching out to many players over the coming weeks to get thoughts, feedback, and to begin testing the new systems.

In cases related to verified targeted harassment/doxxing/death threats/etc... Protecting the identity of the victims is important. By default, we do not share the identity or any information that would reveal the identity of the victim. This can lead to further or worse harassment to them by the person in question or by their friends/community, etc... We would only share that verified information, if the victim is okay/agrees with sharing it.

Things not related to those types of bans, we do share the information. For example, if you say a slur in a match, we will share the log with you and what you said, because it does not reveal the identity of the reporter. Though in the vast majority of bans, it's uncommon for people to reach out to request this information, as they generally already know what they did.

Typically, most threads are made while we're in the middle of the conversation with the affected player or prior to the person reaching out to us. In our current ticket system, which is only a year old, almost 3000 tickets have been created and resolved. The vast majority of these tickets are resolved on the same day the ticket is made. We also have systems set up for misconduct reports, ban appeals, probation appeals, probation lifting, etc...

On top of all of this, in the majority of threads we do have a post, including in the aim and ford thread referenced. The issue with responding in public threads, versus in a ticket, is that posting in threads tends to be more thought out and that takes time. Typically someone needs to sit down and dedicate a focused time to write a post to address the points. Sometimes this also requires others to review it, to make sure they're not misrepresenting the league.

We also release monthly articles about rules, bans, and more. These are posted both on our website and on our forums.

Per your example, aim's ban went through in a way it shouldn't have in our league, it didn't have a proper review. It happened six months ago, so my memory might be incorrect, but I cannot find any communication that was directly opened to us in terms of an appeal, prior to the creation of the thread on TFTV. Though it’s possible it was in a DM, not through the appeal process or a ticket. Either way, we went through our process, which is not an instant thing. Discussions had to take place at night when people were home from their job/school, we needed clarification on what happened and then decisions were made and the ban was lifted the same day.

I also did a page-long post in that thread explaining how the situation happened and how we'd avoid it happening again and also things we plan to change. Including doing more warnings and less bans, which we have done. Overall, I do believe that we’ve accomplished the goals I set in that post.

If you can provide examples of where players have created tickets in our system and they were ignored, please let me know and I'll look into that, but to my knowledge when players use our communication system they do get replies. Keep in mind though, more complicated issues might take a few hours to days to fully resolve, depending on decisions that need to be made/reviewed. Still, even if it might not be an instant resolution, we would communicate with the player in that ticket, that we're working on it and leave the ticket open.

I don't believe it's at all required for players to make a thread to have a timely response from an admin. We have a clear and easy-to-use ticket system on discord that would result in communication, though the resolution might take a short amount of time to happen.

We’ve also been using this for qualifiers. We’ll add all the captains of the teams to the ticket and use that as a place to discuss scheduling, issues, etc… Another example would be for situations like contested forfeits, or rescheduling of matches, or playoff scheduling issues. Instead of using telephone DM tag, we bring everyone (both teams) into the same ticket, so we have an open forum to discuss and resolve things.

I don't feel superior to others and I don't think anyone on my staff has that mindset. It's a volunteer staff of people who want to dedicate their time to help the TF2 community in some way and if you have examples of a lack of communication through our ticket system, which is our main form of communicating with players who have questions or issues, please let me know (sigafoo#0685).

We also check our communication every season, we have a question in every end-of-season survey, how did we do with communication?
This last season:
82% of respondents rated their admin as adequate to great
91% of people said it was easy to get a hold of/response from an admin
83% believed that admins usually made reasonable decisions

Is that good enough? No, we should always strive to do better and we do. Every season we're trying to make changes in our league, in our system, in our processes to make them easier to use/follow and will continue to get better. I think RGL, as it is now, is different and better than it was in 2020, and my goal is that we can say that about the league in 2022. It's virtually impossible to be perfect, but we can aim to get closer to that with every opportunity we have to learn and improve.

What you're suggesting is that we went through our normal process and then I decided to completely go against our normal process due to a tftv thread. However, that is not what happened. I laid out the situation in these two paragraphs. What did happen in the first paragraph, and how it should have gone in the second.

And then I stated it a second time, that we did not follow the normal "12 different perspective process" here

And then to your reference of avoiding bans for non-misconduct related issues. We also referenced that at the bottom of the post and also our steps to avoid this mistake in the future.

Full post

One of the big things about RGL that we try to do is transparency and owning our mistakes.

You can see that when the Invite qualifiers for sixes had confusion in the organization, despite us having successfully run qualifiers multiple times before. We had an internal review and wrote up where we went wrong, covered the fees for the teams affected, and made a clear plan going forward.

The issue with slurs from players in logs turned out to be a map review before the match. Something that we've never seen before and as soon as it was brought to our attention through an appeal, in our official process. We reviewed, confirmed, and reversed the decision the next day after being notified. We also wrote up an article breaking that down in more detail and how we want to include some questions around this in our next survey.

Now we have today, the ban that went in on aim. What happened is that there was a discussion that happened in an admin discord about the rule that was broken and the punishments that should take place. Then a ban was issued. There was confusion internally as to if this is something that is not a misconduct report (e.g. slurs, harassment, etc...), so it might not go through the normal misconduct ban review process. However, any punishment that results in a league ban, should be reviewed by that process.

Our normal process: We have two separate meetings each week where two unique groups of admins meet to review the submitted reports, review evidence, and decide the next steps. Whether that's to throw it out (most common) or issue a warning or issue a ban. We started this process about a year and half ago when we had issues with inconsistencies in our bans. Depending on which admin did it, they might have slightly different lengths or reasons to do it. Whereas when we have 7-12 people review and discuss it. We make sure that our bans lengths are consistent and for edge cases, we discuss what the correct length is and is it even ban worthy or is it covered in our rules, etc...

Since this we've switched this, we've had much more consistency with how things are handled. (Note: This is not where Anti-cheat cases are handled.)

Part of our mission statement is about admining

This decision did not follow our normal process we setup and was put in prior to our meetings. Which is very unusual. Even for clear bans (e.g. slurs in a match), we still would wait until the second of the meetings to put in a ban. That's why you would see bans go in on Friday night consistently.

With that said, here are the next steps
- aims ban has been removed
- Going forward, league bans must require head league admin approval (exa) to be placed. This is not that he is deciding them, more that he is validating our procedures were followed.
- During the next offseason we will be reviewing our rulebook and try to make it more streamlined and have more clear reasoning and punishments/warnings (where applicable.)
- We've also been leaning more on initial warnings for minor penalties. That's not clear in this case, and we don't report them on the site, but that has been an internal policy change that we've been doing more often.

At the end of the day, whatever decision is made, ultimately falls on my shoulders. I'm the league owner and I apologize for this situation. We do our best for this great community and we do our best to listen to feedback like with our post season surveys every season and make adjustments based on those results. We also do writeups about every month with any rule changes, bans, etc....
(Jan 2021, Dec,Nov,Oct, October, September, August, July, June,May,April,March,February, January)

Here is a writeup we put together last month about how misconduct reports are handled link

We also talked about the process I mentioned above in an article in June of this year link.

Still, we will make mistakes and it's important that we're clear about that and grow from it.

We have a couple of weeks left in the season, good luck to everyone for the upcoming playoffs.

I want to apologize to the three teams in the Invite qualifiers. It's completely our fault and this should have been handled better. We've been running qualifiers in Highlander for seasons and to my knowledge, this is the first time we're trying to it in sixes and clearly we did not hit the mark.

As Ire pointed out and many on here, the solutions for this stuff is straightforward: Give teams advance notice, have clear and open communication with team leaders, and create expectations that we follow through on (e.g. date/times, structure, what happens if you lose, etc..).

As an apology to the qualifying teams, I personally will cover the costs of your starting six players. I'm going to refund your fee's later tonight and will donate the 240/180 for the starting six players to the prize pool.

One of the foundational things that we have at RGL is listening to feedback and always trying to improve. This is why we have minor to major changes to every season in our main formats. Why we host end of season surveys to understand what players like and dislike about what we do and use that to guide decisions. There's almost never a season where we don't adapt in some way to try to either improve how we do things internally or league-wise, to try to be a better organization.

I'm not directly running anything in RGL right now, but from an outsider's perspective, it's clear to say that we could have done better. Covering the league fees is a gesture that I can do to help teams a bit more, but the real gesture is change and doing our best to fix the current situation. This is something that should not happen again, and we are going to do a retrospective with our staff to understand where our missteps happened. I appreciate the feedback and good luck to all teams in this upcoming season.

Update, there is a new link for donations. Please use this GoFundMe: https://gf.me/u/yhkvvc

All money raised through the tournament signups will be added to this GoFundMe after the tournament has concluded. All of the donations that were made to the rgl paypal in the last couple days have been added to the GoFundMe, over $3,500.

Thank you to everyone who has offered their support so far.

I didn't know him directly, but seeing all the work behind the scenes has been special. He clearly was loved and respected.

Feel free to share photos and videos/clips either directly to me (sigafoo#0685) or in this thread and I'll try to keep the website updated as they come in.

#RespectYomps

Sorry, bad wording. Business fees. I'll update.

In season 1 we gave the option to leaders through match comms to be able to get a server from an admin. I was really worried because we only have enough servers to cover about half of the ~100 matches being played each week. I thought we wouldn't have enough. Do you know how many servers were requested each week? Only around 0-5 servers, iirc. It was incredibly low, much lower than I thought we would need.

Given the lack of need/interest in requested servers, we didn't put much thought into expanding that. We also no longer have a sponsorship for the servers, that we previously had.

If the community has a strong interest in having servers which they are forced to play on, rather than being able to use their own servers for matches (like ESEA.) That's something we could aim to do.

One thing to keep in mind is that servers aren't free, so it's also a question of if players want to use money that would go into the prize pool to help cover the cost of these servers because they see value in them. Of course, we'll also be looking into securing sponsorships to help offload or remove any of these costs to the player, which we are already actively pursuing.

So we'll definitely ask this question to players in our sixes survey this season, and aim to have something for Season 4 if the community wants to go down this route.

Historically we've always operated at a loss with me covering any gaps in the budget. 2020 will be the first year where we break even. Not a single cent has been pulled out of RGL ever, to anyone, of profit.

In S3, only about ~1-2% of the league fee actually goes to help cover the costs of keeping the lights on (operation fees (e.g. website cost), business fees, taxes, etc..). The rest goes directly into the prize pool and back to the players.
So an IM fee is 15 dollars. 73 cents goes to PayPal, then about 28 cents goes to help keep RGL's lights on and the remaining ~14 dollars goes to the prize pool. This season we'll also be doing a sliding prize pool.

We'll announce our initial prize pool size and then increase it at the end of the season once we have the final numbers of all money brought in.

https://rgl.gg/Public/Articles/Default.aspx?a=1402

I reached out to Tojo over DM, since I was a bit confused by this situation. His team has an active admin on it and a former sixes admin on it, but he didn't reach out to any admins to get clarification on the situation. And no admin told tojo that the name wouldn't be allowed.

Currently, tojo's team name is Ban Daffodil. So it's not an issue that we don't allow jokes or meme's to be team names in Invite.

Or we have The Microwave which has an over the top logo of a microwave-being that is drooling while its brain is being fried. So it's not that we don't have weird shit in Invite.

Right now with the season starting up next week, we're in the middle of getting each team their own custom logo. (Like the Microwave one above.) Team names were locked last night to prevent a team from suddenly changing their name right before the season after we've already worked with them to get a logo created. Not that we wouldn't allow it, but at least a chance for us to know/talk about. (e.g. Black Swan switched to Dexter's Lab after us helping with the logo for the prior team name.)

So that lock happened last night, around the same time last night FrickMyNick (tmk) either changed the team name or tried to and it didn't save or got accidentally reverted back when the lock was saved on the same team row near the same time. Hence why there is the confusion that a team name wasn't allowed.

So this was likely just coincidental timing that caused this confusion.