Having rgl staff bickering in a public thread and giving mixed responses to the topic at hand is not how you’d want be perceived by the community. Especially if you’re trying to be recognized as a legitimate tf2 league.

I remain rather neutral on the issue but if establishing a tf2 league that will be taken seriously is the goal, having a zero tolerance policy for cheating and any actions that undermines the integrity of the game should be priority numero uno. The fact rgl has to have this discussion concerns me, but hopefully going forward they make the right choice.

fuck it ggl permanent

Dear RGL,
Due to this debacle you will need to do damage control to mitigate the problems caused by your own actions. You have proven that you are unwilling to take the steps necessary to remove unwanted elements, such as cheaters, from our community. In order to remedy this, you must now take the most unflinchingly aggressive approach. The only way to save face is to use the ultimate option. You want to be the Judge and Jury, but now you must be the Executioner. You Must Kill Elijah.

Hugs and Kisses,
knsume

i could save rgl

In this time of chaos, a rumbling can be heard deep in the TF2 cavern.

An old giant stirs, opening his eyes

It's time

CEVO.

@scream

I don't know what arcadia said to you in the admin chat, but his statement here was not that bad.Offering to give the prize money to GGL in the case teams decide to play there is a good PR move and lets the community know there are stakes on the end of RGL's leadership too. It doesn't matter if it "violates league rules" since this is a unique situation where the rules can be bent. The exception does not disprove the rule.

What does he need to "consult other admins" about for a post like this? He didn't say anything we don't already know. And besides, it's been proven that elijah is cheating so if the AC team somehow says he isn't then it'll be an OJ Simpson situation. I think arcadia should overrule any decision that says elijah isn't cheating; have we all forgotten elijah's 33ms-80ms reaction times?

Saying that the situation has revealed a problem and that you'll fix it is basic. The only decision that will "benefit everyone" is for elijah to be permanently banned, his team to be disqualified, and playoffs to continue as normal in RGL. At its core, this whole situation is not about PR, or about "the rules," or anything other than banning the cheater. Everything else can wait.

this is cool as fuck great work wbacon

it’s almost like the NBA punishes players for using performance enhancing drugs

The precedent of the "players making their own league/splinter divs for playoffs" or whatever you want to call this is a very dangerous one. Sure in this case it makes some amount of sense because elijah has clips that are impossible to justify and no one wants to play against a cheater, but it could easily get out of hand if other people or other divs try to do the same.

What if main players decide this season, the sandbag won't win, and decide to make their own pseudo-div without them? What if AM players decide fuck it I can AC better than rgl and just arbitrarily ban someone they think is cheating?

Ideas like this, while good to force change upon rgl as was intended (rgl literally ignored this entire problem until the announcement of GGL lol), should not be seen as the norm, and certainly should not be rgl sponsored. While I don't think rgl does everything right, it's the best thing na tf2 has, and if ideas like this are not only allowed to exist but seemingly encouraged, it could easily destroy rgl and comp tf2.

This is why Arcadia's decision to go over the entire staff's head was incredibly immature, as it circumvents the authority the AC team has in a problem like this. Arcadia effectively decided to shadowban Elijah from rgl, because he does not actually have the authority (despite being rgl owner) to ban him. While I personally think Elijah is cheating, I don't know for sure, and the AC team is the highest standard of proof we have to decide if someone is cheating or not. To ignore their judgment is a terrible look from rgl.

The point of forwarding the prize-pool to GGL is to show that the players on the teams are the ultimate power. If all the RGL teams unanimously agree something should be done in a certain way then it should be allowed, because the league is for those teams. In this case it is excluding a believed cheater team from playoffs who have not been dealt with all season. Arcadia being owner in the end makes the decision and he could have withheld the money, but his decision shows he respects the will of the people playing (and paying league fees). If it was something unreasonable or clearly malicious then he should withhold the money and use admin judgement, but in this case our intentions are sincere. To me that is a good precedent. Always going strictly by some rulebook consistently causes decision to be out of touch with the people. With optimization, this is the path forward to making it stop feeling like it is the players vs RGL admins. If he had to overstep the people lower on the chain of command that is suboptimal but it was certainly the right decision so I can see why he said to just trust him.

I think the rest of stuff you talk about are all valid concerns and hopefully as Arcadia continues to learn how to be owner he will improve his communication with the RGL team. He also definitely should not throw people under the bus Though I did not really notice that from the vague post he made, I can see with context it might feel that way.

I would point out from an outsider perspective, your post seems a lot more like throwing a single person under the bus than anything he said though and I don't see how that will help anything. Especially the stuff about "brownie points", "knight in shining armor" and lecturing him he should know better because he is a "grown adult with a job" seems particularly insulting, unnecessary to address what you needed to, and hypocritical.

what the fuck did i miss?

I agree it was particularly immature to say and not really helping anything. It's a pure reflection of how upset I was/am, it was a mistake but I won't pretend that's not how I feel.

Edit: I hope going forward the league will move on from this and develop more sufficient policies for dealing with this. An announcement is coming soon from RGL as to what the next steps are going to be. Advanced teams will be the first to know.

pressing the red button that says ban doesnt sound like taht much effort

WRONG!
CGA

Stop acting like giblert is a hero, he is just a Texas A&M booster with too much money.

I'm pretty shocked that this is happening with rgl support I feel like if anything the league should be so against literally fucking over a team of 6 ppl over a cheating case that hasn't even been handled yet. like I already think the way the community is going about the elijah situation is already not good but this is also just ruining five other peoples seasons who have been accused of nothing. I just think this is like an insane hoop to jump through before a verdict has even been reached by the league, so the fact that this is being backed by rgl to me is insanely stupid

Elijah rn

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/046/699/3c7.jpg

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1122374964142673960/1129575837495201903/image.png

i do think its wild that rgl is going along with this but if youre worried about the other 5 players, like what is the alternative? let them play? the playerbase has established that they have no interest in playing against that 6 in a tournament setting, and they have the freedom not to. rgl has no recourse against those players, tf2 is not big enough to get away with doing something about it.

He does have the authority though. If he didn't have the authority then he wouldn't be the owner.

wiitabix gets it

I agree with tomato tom that this was the right decision. And it will also be the right decision if arcadia decides to ban elijah based on the irrefutable evidence dippidy, etc. have gathered.

"Innocent hardworking teammates"

^

I wanted to provide an update on the situation as I understand it.

After discussing with the team leaders and arcadia, the current status is that it seems that the team leaders are satisfied to wait for and accept the results of the Anti-Cheat team's decision, which we have been told will be made soon. As a result, the GGL Playoff will most likely not be necessary at this point.

To emphasize though, while I do not believe running the GGL Playoff will be needed based on the current outlook, if for whatever reason some major concern occurs and it is needed, I am still willing to run the tournament.

The goals of this project were:

1. Encourage communication and a decision from RGL on the elijah situation.

This has been achieved to what appears to be a satisfactory result, as the team leaders, from what I've heard as of now, are willing to listen to the AC team's decision and play the RGL playoffs. Initially, the timeline of the AC investigation was a concern, but now that we have been told a probable deadline for a decision, this no longer seems to be an issue.

2. Encourage RGL to reconsider their cheating policies.

I do not know what RGL's current plans are, but it does seem like there will at least be some discussion about the topic. I am hopeful that this has raised sufficient awareness for the issue that it will not be a problem again in the future.

3. Provide a back-up option for a fair tournament if a decision was not reached in time.

To re-iterate, I believe this GGL tournament will no longer be needed, most likely. However, when this was initially planned and announced, there was very little communication from RGL regarding the situation, and while I can't make a judgement myself as I don't know enough about cheats, the team leaders were convinced that playing playoffs against someone who they believed was cheating was not worth their time. Therefore, the point of this project was to provide a backup plan if RGL did not act quick enough.

To provide some context from personal experience: In Season 4 of RGL Div. 2 there was a player who cheated and was disqualified very, very late in the season (just before finals). Even though I had heard he was being investigated since early in playoffs (maybe even before?) a verdict wasn't reached until the integrity of the playoffs was already ruined since there wasn't enough time to rewind the bracket. Keep in mind, this actually mostly benefited my team (we got 2nd place in spite of going 1-3 in playoffs) and I was still angry about the situation. The fifth seed got completely screwed out of the playoffs and the fourth seed was eliminated in spite of only having one real loss. On top of this, the admin at the time's response to the criticism was rude and unsympathetic to complaints about the issue. I have additional thoughts on the topic of cheating policies that I want to discuss later, but my main point I'm getting at now is that it only takes one person acting in bad faith to ruin hundreds of hours of hard work for a lot of people, so I felt that trying to take action some way was important to prevent the same situation from occurring again. Historically, once playoffs have started, expelling a team for cheating in the middle of it leads to very scuffed outcomes.

I want to thank the team leaders, players, arcadia, Scream, and the donors (who will be refunded assuming the GGL tournament does not occur) for being part of these discussions. I apologize that I could have maybe handled some aspects better, but overall, I'm glad that things seem to have worked out positively for the teams involved.

so if the AC team decides he isn't cheating, that is literally satisfactory to nobody except RGL and does absolutely zero to explain all the sus shit dippidy brought up originally, and - this might come as a big surprise to RGL - that's far from a sufficient conclusion. ALSO didn't we just establish like literally yesterday that the AC team is 1 or 2 people?? I definitely trust mr. aim theory scoutmain over those 2 random guys RGL found on the street in that regard. its literally the trolley problem, and the best answer is either somehow address the insanely bullshit things dippidy discovered (spoiler not happening) or don't let elijah play

It sucks to say, but the weakness of the AC team now and going forward seems like a pretty intractable problem. There just aren't anywhere near enough people who meet the standards of 1) sufficient knowledge of cheats, 2) ability to remain objective, and 3) enthusiasm for the role (given 90% of the stuff they do probably revolves around random amateur players who aren't sexy to audit).

That camp3r guy's rant may have been unprofessional, as well as very unfairly dismissive of the efforts of the organizing advanced teams (who were, in fact, being proactive and trying to find solutions, like he recommended), but there is a small kernel of truth there, in the sense that the OMG CHEATER XPOSED threads will never fully replace actual AC admins. Like, dippidy could be the absolute best judge of scout cheating, and it wouldn't matter 99% of the time, because I doubt he wants to give up his free time combing through demos of total randos with no personal stake in the outcome.

I'll admit ignorance of whether AC admins are 100% volunteer or if they actually get paid, but if they don't that may need to change in the future. I'm just not sure we'll ever get past the obviously overstretched skeleton crew otherwise.

I do want to add that I sympathize with RGL in terms of timeline/how you triage various AC issues. In theory, if a case of some random lower div player comes up first in the queue, it would be 'fair' to finalize that outcome before doing the elijah case. However, life isn't fair, and the simple truth is that far more people care about a higher div player on an undefeated 1 seed right before playoffs. Allowing a cheater to play in, and very likely win advanced is just a much worse look than some guy on like the 9th place newcomer team or whatever. I think pretty much everyone would support a process by which super high profile cases get prioritized, since the league/community as a whole has more of a stake in the outcome. Then again, it's obviously extra important that the correct decision gets made.

If no one trusts the AC team's decisions maybe we should just dissolve it cause what's the point of it then?

Again, I think that betrays some ignorance of the process. I am sure a lot of the reports the AC team get are absolutely blatant, like way more so than elijah, and there still needs to be someone to essentially rubber stamp those bans. The issue comes in high-profile cases like this one.

I think people trust AC team once they come to a conclusion. The problem is how long it takes for anything to get done which is what mustard is talking about in more detail.

Why does Gib have the best PR statement for RGL? I think the professionalism in this situation has been extremely lacking and that's the second part of communication in addition to honesty.

This has probably already been said, but i'm not reading everything.
I feel like if rgl is unable to make strong decision about the guy who was unbanned like 5 months ago and is still super sus.... then that's actually a really, really good reason to give permanent bans for first time cheating offenses (at least for adv/inv players)
like if it's not possible for them to follow recently-unbanned players, then they need to disallow those players from rejoining the scene. Especially considering the ac team apparently barely functions or is overloaded.

Hi, just wanted to provide some updates and clarity from the team regarding recent concerns that were raised by players.

Concerns regarding how staff conducted themselves on the forums

To get to the point quickly, we acknowledge and apologize for how Camp3r has conducted himself publicly. Admins are held to a higher standard and have public expectations of how they behave in public because they do represent the league. This behavior conducted is just not the example that should be set forth by anyone on staff. Additionally, we have reached out to Camp3r internally about these concerns and he has agreed and acknowledged them. It should be noted that Camp3r has been going through difficult personal situations and will be taking a break to focus on these important matters. We also acknowledge and apologize for the fact that we had staff arguing publicly on a thread. It should just have never happened, but it did.

Evaluating internal and external policies

There are internal and external policies, ranging from Anti-Cheat to public relations to internal communication issues that we will be evaluating and making sure that our new and current staff follow to prevent many of these issues from happening again. The team will never be perfect with all of these, but it’s obvious that more work needs to be done to make sure that these things get enforced and followed.

We hope to provide updates on the above so players can see that it is being worked on.

Staff involvement with AC & Update on Advanced Playoffs

It should be noted that arcadia is making sure that the case is being looked at, but is not pressuring for a decision to be made. No admin, including the owner, has any say or pressure in AC’s final decision. This is AC’s decision alone.
There will not be a delay with 6s S12 Advanced Playoffs. We expect an AC decision on Sunday (07/16), and we will honor AC’s decision. Regardless of AC’s decision, we expect to hold playoffs starting on Monday, July 17th for Upper 1 and Upper 2 rounds.

Feedback

If you have feedback regarding any of the above or anything not listed, please feel free to fill out this form here. It is an open-response feedback form that the staff team can read through it to continue to better understand concerns players may have. Thanks.