After the major penalty was issued by the Invite division admin, this was appealed. As a result, the RGL team had more 6v6 division admins review the STV demo of the match. Here are our findings:

• While half of the additional admins reviewing the case found evidence of intentionally throwing, we could not conclusively determine that it was not caused by extreme tilt and roster issues.
  
• The other half of the admins that reviewed the demo concluded that throwing did not occur and that their actions can be justified through their playstyle, tilt, and overall roster situation.
  
• Due to conflict of interest from being rostered on Invite team GlobalClan Ice, I was not able to directly rule on the situation.

Due to the context of tilt playing a significant factor in the match, we have decided to revert the penalty.

It is worth mentioning that in a more sensitive context (playoffs seeding, playoffs, or qualifiers), the tolerance for thrown matches would be lower and this match would likely have been actionable.

Furthermore, it must be reiterated that the teams would have been fine to reschedule the match due to roster issues, as Ford’s medic leaving at the last minute is a valid reason to reschedule a casted match. It is also clear that a major case like this should not be reviewed by a single division admin. Having more eyes review the case at hand and making sure a head admin greenlights the decision (admins that have a potential conflict of interest are void of this) are steps that should have been done from the beginning with this case.

Quite frankly, we're just as tired of these things happening as you are. While these are largely innocent mistakes rather than malicious actions as so many of you jump to, and we correct mistakes we make as quickly as possible while allowing time for due process, this frequency of mistakes is completely unacceptable. We need to make some serious changes, we know that, and we’ve set in motion a plan to do so, which is outlined here. This article discusses staff changes, admin procedures, and training we are working on fixing, and our plan to improve relations and build trust with the community.

The lie he tells himself every night

Shiki got hit too https://steamcommunity.com/id/AliceRabbit/

https://i.imgur.com/VC7wVDO.png

First, I want to clarify exactly when this rule applies, who it applies to, and why it exists.

As you bolded in the quoted rule, this rule applies to scrims (two RGL teams playing each other) and pugscrims (an RGL team scrimming a mix team). It does not apply to scrims between PUG teams, PUGs, or any other form of competitive TF2 game. I will update the wording to make sure this boundary is extra clear.

This is also not a ban by association. As detailed by the rule text, the ban applies to the person responsible for the player's inclusion in the scrim or pugscrim. When enforcing this rule, RGL makes the assumption that the person who organized the scrim or pugscrim is responsible for each player's inclusion in it, which is true in almost every situation. If this is not the case, a player is welcome to appeal with evidence of them not being responsible for that player, which usually takes the form of evidence that someone else got them. Ultimately though, as a scrim organizer, you take responsibility for your team in the scrim. This rule is also by far our most widely published rule, being displayed in a large banner at the top of every banned player's page, so we feel it is reasonable to expect players to be aware of this rule.

Originally, this rule did not exist. However, we were seeing situations where several league players in good standing would organize a pugscrim with players with substantial bans (1 year - perma). These banned players would then spam slurs in chat without remorse since they did not care about a slur ban on top of their already very long ban. This was also unavoidable for opposing teams, since the scrim would be scheduled between upstanding players. Since the beginning, we have stood by the idea that any RGL player and team should be able to play in our league in a slur and harassment free environment, which includes scrims as a fundamental part of playing with an RGL team. Contrary to popular belief on TFTV, the majority of the community supports slurs in scrims being regulated, as detailed in July's article, and we stand by our policies.

It is unfortunate that this ban happened during an important time to your team, but RGL strives to apply rules evenly across the board, and this is no exception. This is a well established and widely published rule that's been enforced regularly, dogb was the self-admitted scrim organizer, and indra was previously banned for egregious slur usage and toxicity. If there's proof that someone else was completely responsible for indra's inclusion and dogb had no responsibility for it, he's welcome to appeal. Otherwise, the ban stands.

With that in mind, let’s go through the bans brought up and evaluate them.

Div-1

Monsta, umplst, donovin, and ambroon have all placed in Div-1 or its equivalent one or more times and have a track record of playing at this level without playing invite. By the format-wide guidelines, they are appropriately restricted.

Alan placed 2nd last season of Div-1, which means he should move up into invite. While he's a borderline case, so long as we have less than 8 teams in Invite, a restriction like this will stand.

Ether is being restricted from soldier, which is the class he played in invite and won advanced on.

Exile is a borderline case, since he has mostly competed at an invite level on demo, yet has placed in Div-1/Adv on scout. To bring this in-line with our other restrictions, Exile's restriction will be changed to demo to reflect his Invite experience.

Mirrorman was restricted to pyro when the team was initially placed in Div-2. They were moved up to Div-1, where mirrorman would only be restricted from soldier, but the site was not updated before the team died.

Div-2 and the rest

A handful of class restrictions in the lower division were a result of the aggressive Div-1 policies being applied to the lower divisions where they shouldn't be. This was a result of the shift in admin staff happening so late this offseason and us not having formalized guidelines. These are both problems we've fixed, and are working to avoid in the future.

yumyum - this was a case of the above. Since he has only placed in Div-2 once, and isn't demonstrably better than most or all of the division, he will be allowed to mainclass in Div-2. This brings him in line with both our policy and DonDorito, who's unrestricted for similar reasoning.

ult and penny are both borderline cases. We will be unrestricting ult to maintain consistency with these.

As mentioned in the guidelines, we care much more about recent experience and placements than historical behavior. KTB has no experience higher than Div-2 in RGL, and has been performing on-par for the division.

Parsuh is another case where the Div-1 standards were incorrectly applied. Their restriction will be lifted.

Wacky and Fanta are both on a team that we initially wanted to place in main. At their request, we restricted Wacky, the player with the most experience, so that the team was able to play IM.

I definitely appreciate the communities' concern over this, and I think we can all agree that fair sandbagging policies are an important part of making the league better. Like you, we realized something was off here, and this was already a hot discussion within the admin team before this thread. While we largely stand behind all of the decisions our team makes, we do make mistakes, and owning up to them and being able to change them is a huge part of our philosophy at RGL. This is an ongoing process, so feel free to message your appropriate division admin regarding specific player restrictions or me at _Makkabeus#9603 for anything regarding RGL 6s.

This is an important topic, and a big point of discussion among the admins in the past week. We're always aiming for consistent decisions, but we've fallen short of that mark in a few places this season that we want to address. We also haven't done a good job communicating the guidelines we use for sandbagging, which is in part because in the past they haven't been well defined. We've drafted a more formal set of guidelines that will be our benchmark moving forward and we want to share it here.

Our Sandbagging Guidelines

In general, we will class restrict:

• If a person has made top 4-6 in playoffs multiple times in the same division (depends on the division size)
  
• If a person has made playoffs in the division above or higher
  
• If a person is demonstrably better on a class than everyone else in a division

In addition, sometimes a team will want to play a lower division than they are able to. In this case, we may further restrict their stronger players to bring the team in line with the rest of the division, even if they might not have been restricted otherwise.

In general, we largely favor recent experience and demonstrated current skill to historical performance as we find it better reflects a player's actual ability. There are also always exceptions, such as when a player is particularly bad or good at an offclass or were noticeably the strongest or weakest player on a previous team. We also handle medic experience differently, and will largely look at a player's fragging class ability rather than med level when evaluating what division they can play. At the moment, we operate mostly under the assumption that if you're rostering on a team, you're able to play at or close to that level. In the near future, the RGL site will have built-in log tracking for matches, which will enable us to do a significantly better job of differentiating mains, subs, and roster riders.

We haven't always hit these ideals, but these are our goals. Several of the current restrictions listed in this thread we revisited because they didn't meet these ideals, while others are a miscommunication of the reasoning behind the restriction.

The Invite and Div-1 Situation

Our ideal goal for a healthy Invite is to see enough players and teams wanting to play Invite that we need to run qualifiers. Having that upward draw propagates through the rest of the league and creates a much better culture of improvement and competitiveness. In an environment like this, we'd see the weakest restrictions in Div-1 as players try to establish themselves as invite-worthy.

Currently, we have the opposite situation. In 3 of the past 4 seasons, we've seen less than 8 teams playing Invite while we see many of the same players repeatedly play Div-1 instead of moving up. Historically, when we've tried to move teams up, they've died or threatened to die. This season, we've been cracking down on this behavior. We'll be expanding on this with additional incentives for moving into Invite and more well-defined and aggressive restrictions until we see a healthy Invite division of 8-10 teams form.

While we're taking a particularly aggressive stance with the proverbial stick this season, there's definitely plenty of carrot too. Many people don't realize, but for every season of RGL Invite, any team that has lived through the end of the season has broken even or made a profit. When accounting for the Invite div fee, placing dead last in S3 Invite earned the same as winning Div-1. There are few to no practical reasons invite-level players should not be playing Invite if there are less than 8-10 invite teams.

We will be refunding anyone who has already paid the Adv fee, all you need to do is get in contact with me, and it will be refunded

https://rgl.gg/Public/Articles/Default.aspx?a=1449&r=40

TL;DR: Div-2 is using main fee, Div-1 using adv fee, and get your people paid up ASAP (minimum 5 tonight, 6 by first match, talk to an admin if you have questions).

https://i.imgur.com/H4wkAvq.png

not banned

ahhhhh fuck it, bumping, read the post though, still not 100% on the season

LMFAOOOO i shaved my head dude WILLINGLY, i don't give a fuck about my hair <3 xoxoxoxo

All the matches are completed, so that means we move into playoffs! Top 4 teams will duke it out in a double elim bracket. The matches are Best Of 3 maps which are determined via pick ban. Teams are allowed to determine which maps they will play in steam, discord or some other messaging service, but they must be agreed to within the match comms for them to be valid (copy paste the chat log and have the other team agree to it). Once the maps are determined, message me and I'll input them into the match page itself. As always, if you have any questions, don't be afraid to message me.

RGL's statement: https://rgl.gg/?r=40&a=1415

"Intercourse Speedrunners" was allowed, but rgl had locked names for invite like 5 mins before we put that in. We were still gonna use it tho