And somehow it becomes 3/5/10 minutes when it gets testy....

Head admin response for reference https://imgur.com/a/VdcWNiC

good thing all the feedback about listening to the players was taken very seriously

There is just a consistent disregard for the player base. Admins ignore us and only respond to outrage when a tftv thread blows up, and this time it's such a large host of bad decisions simultaneously: double attack/defend, more paid divisions while removing unpaid ones, throwing untested maps into the pool, misusing poll data to justify bad decisions, that I worry we will remain stuck with a few terrible precedents. So please don't get hung up on which bad decision is the worst - these are all bad.

We shouldn’t choose maps based on “Which did you enjoy last season?” The question that should be placed on the survey and used to determine this is “Which map X should be swapped for map Y if we were to place map Y into the pool next season?” You can like a map but still want it replaced by one of the same game mode to maintain the balance of the current map pool. Claiming payload and attack/defend are “equivalent” because they both use stopwatch is disingenuous, anyone who has played both knows they aren’t. My statistics professor would have failed me on assignments if I tried to misrepresent data this way.

We shouldn't be placing maps into the pool have had 0 testing in our region. This is spitting in the face of devs who actively develop their maps based on feedback from cups and pugs. Theatretechie has been hard at work doing both of these to create nidal, while proside is being thrown into the map pool with 0 testing or feedback. Worse, many invite players have looked at the map and already been displeased with the changes when compared with vanilla lakeside. The map appears to buff sniper which is already very powerful on lakeside, and makes forward holding easier and require far less of a commitment since you can cross on a battlement instead of low ground, to name a few.

Finally, we shouldn't be removing IM. HL historically has allowed players to play for free until invite.This is no longer true, and previously, only IM and below remained as unpaid divisions. Now, RGL has decided to erase IM and squeeze these players into main to force them to pay a fee since main is a paid division. Worse still, NONE of these paid divisions but invite possess a prize pool. Why are players being forced to pay when they don't even have a chance to earn any winnings of their own?

UGC lasted 23 seasons before players left due to admin detachment. RGL HL is heading into Season 22. I don't want to see this league end the same way, but it feels like it's headed down a path traveled before.

Just throwing in my 2 cents - UGC only lasted that long because RGL presented a viable alternative at the time (among other factors). If there is no viable alternative to RGL, it doesn't matter how well or how poorly the league is run. Yes admin detachment did cause players to leave UGC, but they left UGC to RGL. RGL has a monopoly on NA TF2, so people can bitch and moan all they want, but unless there is an alternative, you end up back at square one.

why do the surveys not correlate directly to the next season
maybe start the survey earlier and/or close it earlier ?
also, with each new hl staff rotation there's just a growing disconnect between players and staff.
a happy medium between bending over backwards for players and making your own decisions exists but they always choose the latter

Its three fucking dollars like come on.

Saying "its always been free" is just not a convincing argument, and adding prize pools to the lower divisions just means increased league fees. People also are not playing for prize money as their motivating factor at divisions that low. What would perhaps help is if RGL is transparent with their finances to show us these fees are needed to keep the lights on.

half of the players are jobless or in high school be real

beyond parody lmao

I agree three dollars isn't a lot, but the point isn't the price. I think it sets a bad precedent to grift a bunch of IM players by deleting their division and merging it into main. As for prize pool, yea, most invite hl players play because it's the highest division of competition or because they will get restricted on the class they like to play in advanced, not because you have the chance to earn a big mac after 10 weeks of play. So what is this money even being used for if it isn't for prize pools? HL doesn't have LANs, the website is so slow you would believe it's somehow permanently being DDOS'd, and RGL match servers barely work.

do you need to borrow 3 dollars?

Proside is lowkey the biggest troll here; for 6s players imagine if next season they just announced that a new version of metal would be used with no testing with pretty substantial gameplay changes - but don't worry it's being run concurrently (so they don't even have a previous season with data) with brazilian 6's so we're all good!

Actually brazilian 6's might be even better for reference ozfortress HL has 2 divisions total lmao.

It is completely mind boggling how the RGL highlander admin team came to these decisions. I'll break this down into three main topics, the map pool, the div structure, and overall communication with the players/community.

The Map Pool
First of all, I'm all for making changes to the map pool. It keeps the game and meta fresh. However the changes should be gradual and logical. For a while now, theatreTECHIE has been working on an attack defend map named Nidal. This map is meant to replace cp_steel and is the same gamemode. theatreTECHIE has been testing this map in pugs for a while now and getting feedback from upper div highlander players. This is great! RGL decided this would be an appropriate time to put Nidal into the map rotation, no problems there from me. But for some reason they decided that instead of replacing Steel with Nidal, a map designed to replace it, it would be better to remove the long standing payload map Upward instead, with the stated reason being that both maps run the same config and Steel is more popular than Upward. For the 6's players reading, this would be as if you had Snakewater replaced with Gravelpit and the admins just said "they're both control point maps".

The community was not polled on which map we wanted to take out of the pool for Nidal, only our overall enjoyment of maps. So now the admin team has decided to change the balance of gamemodes in highlander without asking the players at all. This has serious implications on playoff map picks, as its there are more koth maps than payload for the first time in a long time.

To make matters worse, the admin team decided to make a SECOND map pool change at the same time. For the third koth map, which traditionally rotates between several different maps, they decided to put in koth_proside. This is a new community version of lakeside which has not been played before in RGL. But if that isn't bad enough, unlike Nidal, this map has not even been tested! How is it acceptable to replace a map with a new version which has had zero testing at all in NA.

For the record, Nidal being in the rotation is a good change, but upward taken out for it is what many are upset about.

The Div Structure
The admin team also decided to remove essentially remove two divisions in highlander.

The division formally called Main is now known as Advanced-2 and will be 8 team round robin.
The division formally called Intermediate is now known as Main and have entry fees.

But for some reason players in Advanced-2 will receive the same medals as Advanced-1, essentially downplaying the accomplishment of being in Advanced, as now the division formally known as Main gets the same medals.

Communication from RGL Staff
None of these changes were polled by the highlander team before making these decisions. This isn't the first time they've made sweeping changes without informing the community, and I'm sure it won't be the last. Every time it happens, one of the admins will eventually make some generic statement saying "We apologize, we will have a survey question about this next season." But at some point they should realize to add these questions to the survey BEFORE making the obviously controversial calls.

Also, in order to even partake in the RGL surveys, you must have played in the prior season. People take breaks all the time, it is crazy not to have a say in potentially major changes to the league because you took a season off at the wrong time. An IM player could easily take the summer season off due to being on vacation, and come back to their division being replaced with a paid alternative without having the chance to give any input. Perhaps change the system to allow anyone who's played in the past several seasons have a voice.

As a somewhat tangential point, when the discussion in the RGL discord (the only official place on rgl since the forums are gone) is criticizing admin communication, members of the staff decide to be rude and sarcastic.
https://i.imgur.com/Gn4qN5h.png
https://i.imgur.com/hsaZsSf.png
https://i.imgur.com/rxiV81B.png

the advanced-1 and advanced-2 is a bit puzzling. doesn't look like there was a far and above team in any of the divs outside of invite (maybe could argue for nonagon infinity but looking at the games they had on paper, they were beatable in some cases) to make a case for adv-1 and adv-2.

div sizes seemed fine too so not sure how that argument justifies adv-1 and adv-2 in the article. if your issue is div size relative to skill level there's a better solution than this, because i'd argue that this creates a further skill gap even if main in essence is the new intermediate

btw why are we removing upward for steel. it's now 2 pl, 2 a/d, 3 koth. is there something wrong with borneo that makes people not want to play that map

Just an update on this, nidal is now replacing steel, lakeside is back to the refresh version.

Thank you for addressing this quickly.
Hopefully in the future there will be more communication so we don't need to have tftv threads to fix things.

Steel is so much better than upward. If you poll it again (which you should) steel will poll better than upward, again. But even beyond that, it makes me sad that theatretechie's new map is now going to have to compete with steel, as it will probably never poll better than steel. This puts it in a terrible position to succeed, where theatretechie's last map (vigil) became one of the most beloved maps in the pool after many seasons of iteration. I fear nidal will be shelved forever after this season if the precedent of "1 A/D map only" is cemented right now.

what about per division polling can you tell me the statistics of that

The issue isn't that there should only be 1 A/D map forever or that none of these decisions should ever be made, its that RGL did it without even pretending to care about what players wanted. They didn't poll these decisions, they didn't even wait until the post season poll was closed to make them, and the head admin admitted to using old poll data and interpreting player answers to questions that were not asked on that poll. If the admins want to actually poll changes like this and the community supports them then great.