So the money RGL should be spending on demo hosting is instead spent on a Windows license.
That's almost reasonable, but still depressing.

Though let's be real, even at twice the cost (and half of ETF2L's cost is the domain, which shouldn't actually double), that would work out to an extra ~600$ per year. That would shave around 100$ off of every season's price pool.
Doesn't seem like a real dealbreaker to me.

Now, most community leagues would probably come up with an estimate for the cost, and then put it to a vote by the people who provide that money. Put I guess we'll just have to trust RGL when they say that it's too expensive and simply can't be done.

Incredible, isn't it?

I'm sure RGL will tell us there's some reason why it's just completely impossible to do it like that in North America, and it will be headache-inducingly stupid. Probably something about how they've got no EUR, any service in the US offering the same would cost at least 500 USD/month, or how RGL is just so incredibly popular that they'd need a million times ETF2L's bandwidth and pay for it accordingly.

Truly, the american condition is a complex one.

If you think RGL's AC team is so bad at identifying cheaters that you expect random players to do a better job just with the STV demos, then the AC team might as well be replaced with a monthly vote.
In ETF2L you can at least request POV demos. ETF2L also somehow managed to figure out this apparently hugely complicated and expensive "filehosting" thing before RGL even existed, so you could upload demos directly to their website.

Are you really sure that the problem is that cheaters aren't reported for months or even years and that's why RGL is so slow with banning them?
Are you really sure that the TF2 community goes straight to making hackusation videos without reporting the suspected cheaters even once?
Are you REALLY sure?

I didn't want to bore everyone with the math, but that's exactly how it works.
Without some magic way for the AC team to git gud, a 100% sure way to tell whether someone is cheating or not, it's just statistics.
There will be false positives, and there will be false negatives. It's impossible to reach 100% confidence. Yes, only a majority of the AC team needs to be convinced, but clearly that bar is still too high and that results in a disproportionate number of false negatives. Aka way too many cheaters are sitting in the limbo of an "ongoing investigation" that'll never produce a result.

Getting more samples helps, but like I said, if you rely on that then all demos should be uploaded so it doesn't take years. And like Waldo said, if Tempus can afford a public demo archive, RGL should be able to as well. So I really think that's not too much to ask for, even if they "have to" limit it to a private, time-limited archive just for the AC team to reduce the costs.

Otherwise, or even in addition to that, just accept that false positives happen, acknowledge that they'll happen more often if you ban suspected cheaters with less evidence than you might like, but ban them anyway or the AC team stops being a threat to cheaters. Like I said, it's not life or death. And like Waldo nicely put it, RGL is not a government. Hell, even governments do falsely convict people and that's a lot harder to undo than unbanning and apologizing to someone.

Even if RGL for some reason doesn't believe that TF2 should be fun and that occasionally banning someone who didn't actually cheat is worth it to keep it fun for everyone else, it simply makes sense from a business perspective.
If you've got one customer who negatively affects the experience of many, many other customers, you do something about it. If 10 customers tell you that the 11th shat on the floor, you might want to ban him from the store, even if CCTV didn't catch him in the act. It's better (for a given definition of "better") if you've got it on tape, but even if you don't, waiting a few months until you do while customers keep complaining about finding shit every week, would be insane.

"We will not ban any paying customers unless we're absolutely sure they've kept cheating for multiple months in a row. If they tone it down to less blatant levels, we have no choice but to let them continue, instead of banning them for the offences we can prove. Please do not publicly complain about it, or do our work for us, or accuse anyone of cheating, or we'll feel even less sure about our decision and take an extra year to deliberate, just in case."

More seriously though, if you find indicators for cheating in demos, someone points them out publicly, and suddenly they disappear, you shouldn't spend months second-guessing yourself and searching for different indicators. Bring the banhammer down. This isn't life or death, and 99% of the time it's not a coincidence.

An AC team is also supposed to be better at spotting cheaters than the average player. If you've reached the point where random players are correctly pointing out evidence of cheating, you're not banning the cheaters quickly enough. And honestly, the alternatives, (forum) banning people for exposing cheaters or just nicely asking people to wait a few more months (or years) aren't going to get you anywhere good.

If you really need X demos until you're sure, make demos mandatory for everyone, for all matches, all the time. No need to publicly host them, only the AC team needs download access, and no need to keep them for longer than a season or two, so storage requirements won't keep rising. Please don't tell me a paid league can't afford that. That way the AC team can look at a dozen demos whenever they want and don't need to wait a year for a handful to trickle in via the "random" demo requests. Yes, this'll get a lot of people banned temporarily for failing to upload demos, until everyone gets their shit together, but if it also gets cheaters banned, then people will deal with it.

If they have to continuously monitor everyone who has ever been reported forever until a majority of the AC team is absolutely sure they're cheating, then it's no wonder they're not getting anything done.
Without banning everyone or expanding the AC team to keep pace, the workload will increase until the AC team can't function anymore and either ends up informally closing cases anyway, by simply not working on them anymore, or putting an equally tiny amount of time into every case so that it becomes pointless.

New RGL Bad Decision Thread any% speedrun record.
Not sure if they're actually trying to do better, or just have become so used to the process.

Also, rgl.gg is throwing an internal server error now (500), so apparently the website can't cope with decision making that fast.

Yes.

Also Yes.

The 7800X3D should be pretty good. The 7900X3D and 7950X3D might be even faster, but it's complicated.
However price-to-performance gets worse beyond the midrange. Even using street prices instead of MSRP, a ~400€ 7800X3D gets you less bang for buck than a ~230€ 7600. A lot more bang, maybe 30% in TF2 if I had to guess, but asking even more buck, an extra 70%, for it.

I'd probably still reach for a 7600X for ~255€ if you can, but a 7700 or 7700X are valid steps in between, if you think the extra cores will be useful for something other than TF2. I'd also generally favour the X variant for the higher power limit, since you'll need that to get the higher boost clocks that TF2 benefits from consistently.
For the absolute most bang for buck there's also the 7500F without in integrated GPU for ~195€.

#3992
AMD.
Driver problems 10 years ago really shouldn't concern you, and unlike nVidia, they don't pull shit like only unlocking new driver features on the newest cards. Remember when nVidia made a big production out of calling the 20 series RTX instead of GTX, to justify why only the newest cards would be allowed to use raytracing and everyone without one should just cough up more money to buy one? And once people got mad enough the 10 and 16 series miraculously got a driver update that allowed them to use it too, despite nVidia vehemently claiming that only the 20 series had the special sauce hardware required for it for months.
And then there's the whole GameWorks / HairWorks bullshit where nVidia wasn't content with not giving driver optimizations to older cards, but actively designed new features with tesselation to have a disproportionate performance impact on their older cards (and AMD's by virtue of hiding the source code from them, preventing any attempt at optimization despite the AMD cards at the time having a lot more tesselation hardware than nVidia's) and then cranked up the settings that needed tesselation to the max, not because it would look much better, but because the last generation of cards losing 50-75% of their fps while the new ones only lost 30% made the new ones look like the best thing since sliced bread.

Anyway, rant over, nVidia isn't just content with letting their older cards age like milk, sometimes they piss in the milk too.
In a weird twist, AMD's usually get better for the first one or two years because they don't have the same manpower to throw at driver optimizations.
So if you're in it for the long haul, the AMD card got slightly better performance than the nVidia, which should make up for less optimized drivers on a game's release, and is cheaper, then I see no reason not to get it.

PSU might be a bit overkill, but isn't worth cheaping out on either, SSD is also probably faster than you need, but nothing wrong with the build.

#3993
It's Australia. Apart from one terrible A620 mobo that is somehow 132 AUD, you get mobos that are still A620 trash for 170-190, and then you're looking at 200+.
Meanwhile the GPU is already cheaper than most 6700 XT and 4060 (non-Ti), so 60 AUD more get him fuck all.
Sure, he could get a cheaper mobo, ram, SSD, case, and PSU, sacrifice it all to get a slightly faster GPU, but I'd bet all of those parts are going to stick around longer than the GPU. So if he thinks 6750 XT / 4060 Ti performance is good enough, then I'm going to just trust him on that and answer the question he asked, instead of questioning the premise.

I came for drama and what I get is a double post necro with the first post even being edited.
And said first post is just quoting a random post from two pages back to ask if they're banned on etf2l...
This feels like a new low even before somehow drifting off into greek healthcare.

Provide drama or lock.

Can we get a betting pool going how long it'll take for RGL to ban not!elijah?
5 bucks say he gets to play for at least one season.

It's like the call of the void. When someone calls something perfectly normal weird, I get that urge to do something actually weird. And then the americans are happy again because they can bond over something that isn't RGL dropping the ball again.

Anyway, I'm mostly checking this thread because I'm waiting for some good RGL drama, regarding that admin who got into playoffs via this ban, but nothing so far.
No beans to spill?
No juicy rumours?
Not even unsubstantiated theories?

Now in all seriousness, wanting to get wrecked by likely or known cheaters at LAN to not feel bad about getting wrecked by them online is weird, right?

I really didn't want to say anything about cereal's posts sounding like a craving for cheater dick and wanting to meet them at LAN because of that, but wow...
I mean is that just me or does he really give off these vibes?
Now thankfully, most LANs don't just copy over RGL's bans so that won't get in the way of his romantic plans, but it's still weird to bring it up.

Nah, weird is showing up in a thread about a known (and now banned) cheater in RGL to say "I wish RGL bans for cheating wouldn't stop cheaters from playing at non-RGL LANs."

Also I literally saw how you first just quoted "What exactly are you suggesting?", which is a good way to shorten the quote, before replacing it with a bit of ye olde ad hominem. Don't know why you thought that would improve your argument.