Hi all,
Continuing to maintain RGL is a learning process, a challenge, and a pleasure. Competitive Team Fortress 2 has such a special community, whose dedication has kept the game alive for many years, and hopefully many more to come. At RGL we like to think of ourselves as a part of the community, not above it, and part of that is a collaborative effort, hearing from the community through our surveys and forum posts, and trying our best to adapt in kind with the whole community in mind. This is not a responsibility we take lightly. This all being said, we are fully aware of how one-sided RGL's relationship to the community can seem and how we often feel like a foreign entity to players. Of course any one mistake or decision will lead to controversy from one side or another, but we understand that outside of any controversies there is still an air of distrust, misunderstanding, and sometimes even animosity. So that's why I'm writing to you all today, to be more transparent on how we operate so that the community all knows what's going on, what our philosophies are towards running the league, and what you can expect or not expect from RGL.
To start, I'd like to talk about a common grievance among players: "I pay all these league fees why is everything so slow?". At the moment, RGL operates at a net loss, with all the money coming in going back out through prize pool, as well as the upcoming LAN this summer in Philadelphia. What this means is that we have to make decisions with our limited resources that lead to trade-offs. At a baseline, we do not want to compromise on quality. We want our final decisions to be the best ones possible, and this is where our collaborative relationship with the community is so important. Well, if we want the quality of the league to be as good as possible, then we have a trade-off: the league can be affordable or it can be fast.
RGL currently runs off of the work of volunteers who dedicate their time to maintaining the day to day functions of the league. These are people who have jobs and lives outside of RGL, who contribute their valuable time towards running RGL as smooth as possible, and relying on volunteer time from the community is just going to be slower than paying people for their time. With that in mind, why not pay people for their time? That's where the trade off comes back: cost. In RGL 6s Season 13, our total income was under $10,000, meaning our expected yearly income is about $30,000. To hire just two full-time positions (head admin and anticheat staff) would either introduce a division fee across all divisions in addition to increased fees, or quadruple fees for currently-paying divisions. We firmly believe that
keeping the 6s Newcomer and Amateur divisions free to enter is in the best interest of the health of the competitive TF2 scene, and we deem that the costs of hiring staff impose on paid divisions enough to outweigh the benefits of fast service.
Hopefully this demystifies how RGL operates and why we can be slow to operate. Our goal is to provide an affordable, sustainable, high-quality league, and the realities and restrictions of operating such a league has led us to a structure of trusted staff volunteering their time. This allows us to make the best decisions and run as smoothly as we can while still being affordable for players, but it simply means we are going to be slower than a similar league would be with all the resources not afforded to a small, grassroots community like TF2.
I want to reiterate that the relationship we'd like between RGL and its players is one of collaboration. This means that our operation and decision-making should reflect the wants and needs to the community at large, and that the community at large should give RGL feedback on things that you want to see changed. Its quite difficult for us to get feedback from players without that feedback being given directly to us, and we haven't been very clear about the best avenues to do so. This has led to a situation in which RGL may appear as a brick wall to the community's wishes, with the only way to get a decision re-examined being to make a thread concerning the topic. This is such a regular occurrence that its become a meme of the "Monthly RGL Thread", where we finally get to hear the other side of a dispute, or made a genuine mistake that needs correcting, and the process of reaching a collaborative outcome starts. Despite this we still aim to make our final decision the best, and I'm certainly not going to chastise people for discussing competitive TF2 on a competitive TF2 forum, but this isn't healthy. It's not healthy to the players to feel like their only way to get change is with an angry mob, and its not healthy for RGL staff to only get feedback from the people frustrated that a decision was made without proper feedback in the first place.
Of course, I want to change this dynamic, and that starts with being clear about the best ways to communicate with RGL, that being tickets in our discord and completing our pre- and post-season surveys.
A discord ticket is currently the best way for your concerns to be seen and they can be anything! We're always looking for questions to poll in surveys and ways that we can make our league better! We always try to run our league in the best way for the whole of the community and feedback from you all from tickets and surveys is how we get a feel for the full scope of the TF2 community, as opposed to the rather small forum userbase, so please participate! I look forward to making RGL even better, on a foundation of communication and collaboration with such a special community.
Now with that all being said, there are still a few commonly-asked questions I get that I'd like to touch on:
"Why not change the season structure? Fewer seasons per year?"
Leading up to the Philadelphia LAN, our finances required the same season structure to continue up to the event. Since then, we've gathered data from surveys on the topic and the number of players that prefer the current structure outweigh those who want it changed, so we've kept the structure the same.
"Cups?"
Yes! We are trying our best to host more cups, but between operating both HL and 6s its hard to make time to organize. We love to offer players something outside of a competitive season, from PASS Time to 6s to other events. It takes a lot of time that is in short supply, just know it is being worked on.
"What are you doing with RGL? Is it for sale?"
In short, no it's not. With my time here, my team and I have been working on new software and technology to not only be smoother and more accessible to users, but also cut down the manpower and time needed to run the league smoothly. Long term it'd be great to bring on individuals with great administrative skills and communication, which I tend to struggle with. For the time being I'm still working hard to improve RGL for all parties involved, and hope to make it an easily sustainable staple emblematic of competitive TF2, but a couple of years from now I expect I'll be ready to move on.
Thank you if you took the time to read,
arcadia