There is a line here though. I agree playing against better players makes you better faster but when you get obliterated by a large skill gap there is too much to digest/learn. One side stomps are never good for competitive value in ANY div not just Invite. Moving up the WRONG teams kills motivation and puts stress on TL's to make hard cuts to their teams to be competitive at a level they didn't expect to be at.

I think improving to the point of being able to have someone else cut their main rostered player for you is insane.

But it happens.

Like yes? This is a survivorship bias answer though. MOST people will not be able to convince a TL of a winning team to cut their main rostered players unless there is some amount of drama with that main rostered player.

Ok but these teams who were forced to move up into invite have already gotten wins. They are playing a lot of the same teams they already would have since multiple teams got moved up.

To your first point, you are misunderstanding. Mathematically there is always a team that is on the bottom of the leaderboard. It is impossible for a division to only have a high end and mid end. There is always a loser, that's how competition works. Not everyone gets to be the best in their division. Like yogrrt has said, it's important that each div has a viable playoff structure, and that necessitates a certain number of teams per div, even if that includes moveups. And teams on the bottom of the leaderboard still improve way faster than the team in the division below that wins the division. That's valuable, and any player in the higher divs will tell you so.

And your second, I would prefer that moveup teams scrim teams in their division, but I understand that not every team is mentally strong enough to lose a lot of their scrims, and it isn't that valuable if they lose 90% of their scrims, because then they don't get as much practice for close games with time pressure. But not for one second would I believe that a team genuinely trying to improve would always lose on match day against a team just 1 div higher than what they believed their skill level was weeks ago when they got their placement. Especially when, frankly, advanced and main is not as large of a gap as advanced and invite, and advanced moveups usually get a win or at least a few really close games in invite. There are plenty of invite players willing to do team map reviews and occasionally watch demos, and their insight (if actually actively listened to) is super valuable.

For your last point, you are again misunderstanding, I am not saying that a player should expect to improve to the point that another team cuts their player for them. Rather, after the season is over, you get more exposure to other players in that division, and if new teams form, you'll get the call up. That's how it's worked for more than a decade, and I can give you plenty of examples of solid Invite players having that exact trajectory. And also, as timeless said, there are also times that players get poached because they get really good. Happens sometimes.

I just want to run it back in 4s with some friends

the game is 20 years old and dying, and this scene has been stagnant for what feels like 10 years of that time. this thread feels like a critique of the band playing on the Titanic while the ship goes down. actually what are we doing here? ofc this shit is going to turn into petty reddit mod type dudes (gender neutral) turning whatever corner of the league they get their grubby mitts on into their personal fiefdom, that's just what happens when nothing matters anymore and everyone who cares about anything or knows how to do anything moved on 10 years ago when OW came out and offered them a paycheck to do what they're passionate about. it's honestly insane to me that the scene is around at all at this point. there are like 5 or 6 guys (gender neutral) who give enough of a shit and do enough shit to keep the ball rolling and best case they're just taken for granted, and worst case people complain that they don't work enough miracles. like, stfu, honestly. it's delusional. the fact is that there are no selling points for tf2 as an esport, and we are no longer in an era where a 'grassroots community' matters for esports because anybody who is capable of doing any of the actual things that make the scene go round could go make money doing it for a game that will actually, yknow, PAY THEM. and yeah it'd be awesome if we could crowdfund 100 grand a year to pay a couple of people's salaries to really get shit poppin again but if we're dreaming why not just dream about daddy valve coming home from the store and loving us again.

idk. like, it's been the same thread for 10 years man. at this point what is 'admin transparency' supposed to do? like what, do you just need to know absolutely for a fact that the bad decisions that the admins make are because they're being made by petulant morons? ofc they are, those are the only people stupid enough to still want the job. there are still some good people trying to do good and #notalladmins or w/ever. but like, seriously, any good admin in tf2 is doing, at this point, A LOT of charity work, and they don't even get to write it off on their taxes. for the most part tho, anybody with any drive or ambition or passion or determination or literally any positive quality is going to either move on from tf2 as soon as they get the chance or not even bother starting here because tf2 is a dead fucking end.

and it's not all valve's fault either, by the way. the culture around the game blows chunks for literally too many reasons to enumerate rn. but suffice it to say that that's gonna push away pretty much the rest of the people who are capable and give a shit.

anyways shout outs to siyo, antlers, underscore, lacy, bethnicz, all the rest of the fireside dudes (gender neutral), arcadia, comanglia, eXtine, nonoe, everyone from TF.TV and kritzkast, TRI!, whatever literal angel is keeping logs.tf running, arie, lange, ENIGMA! everyone at tempus, steph, all the mge.tf people, everyone else i'm forgetting right now, and everyone who's ever run or worked on a project or done anything for the community because you actually gave a shit. you're all braver, stronger, and more determined than I could ever be. ur all my personal heroes.

In other words, we are pushing teams up to be the punching bag for upper division teams. How does this bring competitive value to the league?
Yes and no. You are bringing up teams that will absolutely get "shit on" by the top teams, for example in invite almost every team that is not seeds 1 and 2 will be getting rolled by seeds 1 and 2. And in the case that you bring up MULTIPLE teams, that now becomes the bottom of the division where they will compete against each other. Do you think that losing to the same 10 or so players who have won advanced every season in advanced would be competitive for the rest of the people in that division?

Are you saying if you got moved up to Advance from Main, you can just scrim main teams and just take the loss on match day? I'm sorry, but if your team can only compete in the division below then maybe you should be in that div? Call me crazy.
Yeah you could absolutely just scrim main teams if you get moved up to advanced, hell even an invite team could scrim exclusively newcomer teams. You should talk to the rest of your division about whether or not those scrims provide any value to you, and if not, cancel them. Not a soul is forcing you to scrim them. This point doesn't really make sense at all. And because I was talking about the invite moveups please look at the league table right now as of week 4:
https://imgur.com/a/PQ7DUAF
DZCreatures is definitely a mid invite team, and the [REDACTED] is at the very least competitive with BigBrainComp? which is going on playing their 3rd season of invite.

I think improving to the point of being able to have someone else cut their main rostered player for you is insane. Teams are not always worried about having who is "best" cause that is always subjective. I imagine that these players that out-improve their team will just end up as subs on better teams.
As someone who has been on the receiving end of both sides of that statement, yes, they absolutely are worried about who has the best players. Yeah some people might get the call-up to a team just to be a sub, but they use that opportunity to get their foot in the door, and potentially get playtime or even a main spot on a different team using that experience that they acquired. This is a competitive league, and you can ask almost every team leader whether or not they try to get the best players available to them, and I would bet that they would say yes.

I see your points, but my question is what is the point of divisions at all? If everyone should just have the mentality of "Focus on growth instead of winning" mindset then why bother with division structures at all? Wouldn't a structure like Open, Intermediate and Invite be better?

because there wouldn't be as many close matches if each division was that large. i think you aren't wrapping your head around the idea that there will always be, no matter how the divisions are structured, a team on the bottom of the standings.

Hi all, the HL staff got together and talked about the responses left so far. We wanted to thank you for your feedback, and remind those who want to comment in a less public setting that the survey has an open response portion at the end. That survey won't open for a little bit, but something to keep in mind.

Turnover and lack of interest are both major parts to this. Ideally, we would be able to afford putting 1-2 people per division as needed, with HA being responsible for seeing that the tasks delegated are being performed adequately and according to the overall mission. With the turnover/interest issue, this responsibility has shifted with more of the formerly delegated tasks flowing up towards HAs. I hate the super corporate lingo of "vision", but the staff at the HA level do all agree with each other on what needs to be done in order for the league to function and improve. The focus right now is more on the function part for HL, though, since HAs are handling some of the tasks that are slipping through due to the staffing issue. The reasoning for the issue gets explained further down in my response to Kat's post.

We want to do all of the above! The main hold back we have on doing more on discord/TFTV is a mix of ping-fatigue and audience. With discord, it's fairly easy for us to implement since HL has historically revolved around discord. TFTV is a new thing for us, since there's a pretty established audience of mostly 6s players, and in the past we've been told that TFTV doesn't care much for HL, let alone NA HL. Disregarding that, we agree that it's a good, public platform for players and staff to converse and get a good understanding of what's going on, coming up, or other questions that need answering.

I understand not liking someone based on personal experiences with them, or seeing an action that you don't agree with and vocalizing that. I do want to contextualize, though, that HA's are not the micromanager types and aren't hovering over the shoulders of the regular division staff. Under the 5 different HA's I've worked under at this point, I can confidently say that my interaction with them was minimal. Not to say they didn't check in, make sure things were going okay, asking for opinions/help, but they weren't always in my DMs asking about why a decision was made, why I did something the way I did, etc. I understand that Jercer gets a bad rep for decisions made, but a lot of the time those decisions weren't even made by her. They were made by other staff, and communicated by her so that the admin making the decision doesn't take the hit. Both Jercer and consta are/were very adamant about making sure that the division staff are able to make decisions for themselves, especially since HAs aren't able to keep up with every division's details at any point in time.

As for the "staff blacklist" that players talk about - though it does technically exist, it's a lot smaller than people think. We have recruitment standards that we uphold, one of them being having a clean discipline history in terms of interactions with other players. It's hard to put trust in someone who themselves cannot overcome their personal urge to type slurs at someone else, especially in the relatively short time frame RGL has existed. Otherwise, there's a very select few who are not allowed to return to staff due to their actions while on staff or shortly after leaving staff. They have nothing in their discipline history about these actions, but if someone has done something that would warrant removal, we generally don't let them return.

These are great introspective questions that we went over in a meeting with HL staff. I think a lot of these boiled down to most information being passed down experientially, and not having enough time to learn when being new.

When I started on staff (summer of 2020ish) under Klowwd, a lot of what I learned was from how they handled tickets. Aside from that, I had to learn the entire website interface (scheduling, team placements, etc) myself because those weren't really taught to me outside of a super brief rundown. That's not to throw the blame onto Klowwd (or William Automatic, HA at the time), but the system I learned through was okay because there were so many people around that were able to help. Now that the staff has thinned out, that help isn't there, and that puts new staff in a spot where they have nothing to push off from. I've been put in this position to fix that issue, and have documentation tasks so that new staff (and old staff) are able to have something of a quick reference of anything they need. Having a place to easily look back at decisions from the past, their outcomes, and their contexts is something that we need in order to fix the issue of inconsistent decisions.

As for the sandbagging and clarity issues you've brought forward, I believe both will also be helped with that documentation. Having a reference of what players need to know at what time, as well as an easy to access record of previous decisions made on team skill levels will alleviate that pinch point to a degree. It won't solve the issue by itself, and it won't be an instant fix, but it's something that will be useful to have for admins to keep ourselves consistent.

I won't spend too many words on this since you already agree but I want to address what was said in that paragraph.

Ping fatigue is not that big of a deal, RGL does not ping very often already. Especially considering that most pings are opt in (which you could also do for this). You could also simply just post without pinging in your community channel, which you guys already do for other interests in RGL's radar.

Secondly, TFTV is a website, not a monolith of people. And it's evident from this very thread that HL players do indeed have accounts! Even if the current demographic is relatively uncaring, at worst that just means the 6's players will stay out of the HL threads, which I imagine you would arguably want anyways. So long as you post the thread its self somewhere HL players currently use frequently (as you mentioned Discord is currently popular) then they can still use the thread to respond. Over time as HL players become more accustomed to using the site, then you could start saving effort by not needing to post in Discord at all.

im a loser who cant help himself from arguing on the internet. I just love it sososo much.

corporate non-answer. if there were a vision and good, motivated leadership, turnover and lack of interest would not be a problem. meaning either leadership is bad, there's no vision, or both (my money is on both).

so just do it lol. If You Build It, They Will Come type shit man. if u guys have useful discussions then people will engage. if it's a bunch of horseshit then nobody is going to bother.

not gonna sugarcoat it either man, u guys have a HUUUUGE bad will debt that u need to pay ur way out of. engaging meaningfully and honestly with the community is a good start, but it's just straight up not going to be enough for most people. that doesn't mean don't do it, that means keep doing it over and over and over until it sticks. even, and especially, if it sucks.

bragging that ur boss is hands off and lets u run ur div however u want isn't exactly confidence inspiring when the whole problem is admins just doing whatever they want lmfao. u should not have 'minimal contact' with the person signing off on every decision u make unless ur really good at making those decisions. if ur just an awesome admin then bully for u i guess, but if they're being hands off with the bad admins too then like, that's the literal problem dude.

????? are u stupid? that means she signed off on them. she's responsible for the decisions. she's the head admin. if they're the wrong decision, she's the one responsible because she's the one in charge and she's the one putting her name on it. if she disagrees, she should nut up and make the right decision. if she agrees, then it's her decision, and holding her responsible is actually correct. insane deflection and cope. just a wild guess, but maybe the fact that she's unwilling to take responsibility behind the scenes is part of why people don't want to work with her.

this right here, this is the type of shit that people remember forever, man. this is the type of shit that digs ur bad will hole deeper. this is the actual problem.

by all means improve ur onboarding process but that is NOT going to fix a single problem, fyi. because the problem isn't actually about onboarding or documentation or sandbagging or w/ever. straight up man, the problem is nobody likes any of u people. in no small part I bet because u do shit like this where u corporate word-salad ur way around these kinds of conversations instead of shooting straight.

I'm not saying u need to be as disrespectful and retarded as me (because nobody likes me either so that'd be really retarded), but like dude; we're 20 years in here and we have fuck all to show for it, and u guys are all STILL playing politics like ur gonna go on to bigger and brighter things, and ur worried that one not-very-professional-sounding forum post is going to sink ur gubernatorial campaign in 30 years. like, SHUT UP ALREADY!!!!!!!! fucking do something good for the scene or stop getting in between people and their hobby. this game is going nowhere, so just get out of the way and let people play. ffs.

and since i guess the main thing u guys are worried about here is 'sandbagging' here's my personal thoughts on the matter:

--

tl/dr is basically get ur head out of ur asses, all of you. I love this game A LOT and I really really wanna see it grow just as much as anyone, but we need to be real here. we aren’t running a front-line hospital in ww3, we’re facilitating a hobby. we can either be the obnoxious rules-lawyers who make up busywork for ourselves that makes people give up on the hobby, or we can be reasonable, responsible adults and operate like we all trust eachother to have some fun and not take the bullshit parts of all of this too seriously.

--

And I don’t mean to seem super pessimistic about all of this. I would love nothing more than for TF2 to be the biggest esport in the world, but if the plan for getting there is ‘make sure that the number of team signups is bigger than last season’ we are going to get nowhere fast. do SOMETHING. reach out to potential sponsors like you’re eddie fucking jordan. try and find b and c-tier tourneys for other games that we can piggyback for more LANs AND show off the game to other potential gamers. get the community involved, and support the people who step up and actually do shit. clean up the fucking pedos and rapists that still won’t fuck off. like, do anything man, I’m begging. Or shut up and get out of the way if none of that sounds appealing to you.

thanks for reading. this will not be my final words on the matter.

@ghadilli to be fair, yogrrt as the invite div admin was probably the most liked div admin HL had so I dont have a problem with the HA being hands off his div. I (and a lot of other inv players) have wanted yogrrt to be the head admin for a long time but afaik he doesnt have the time or desire to do so.

and in regards to sandbagging, it's been a problem in advanced because that is supposed to be the "feeder" div to invite, because invite always functions best with 8 teams. the teams that move up from advanced get a free entry to invite, so when the same group of like 5-8 people win the div or get 2nd over and over and just rotate through 2-3 classes they are good at rather than playing invite for once, it means the teams that get moved up to invite aren't always teams that can compete as well as the sandbag teams would have.

Unfortunate truth is the game is on its death bed and we're still bickering about how a gamemode is run. If you want things to be better, actually do something to fix said issues instead of complaining on the competitive tf2 version of reddit.

esea solved sandbagging div-below-invite teams. if everybody wants to be a crybaby about moving up, fine then, no invite and all the invite teams get dropped into your div anyway. i dont think there was a single season of esea that didn't run invite, but that was the conversation every single offseason. ya some of those last-minute-team-9s died, but invite ran, and a lot of those players ended up playing on 'real' invite teams not that long after anyway.

sandbagging is NOT A REAL PROBLEM SHUT UPPPPPPPPPP

(not u specifically @pajaro, just in general)

Trying to nail down where the issues lie in RGL feels like playing a fucking shell game man. The issue is always under a different shell no matter what you pick. To say that Jercer takes the hit for ANYONE on HL staff is hilarious when I've almost never seen her defend one of her decisions, only lower level staff getting yelled at by hoards of people on discord or typing long threads on tftv in her defense. The only time I've ever seen her type about one of her decisions in the RGL discord was after double A/D was attempted to be forced and she literally said that she used seasons old survey data to answer questions that were not asked to make the decision. You guys are either lying to us or yourselves saying that the Head Admins take responsibility or heat for any decision that gets made, it's very clear that it's the opposite. Maybe they're all as incompetent and out of touch as Arcadia showed himself to be in the RGL discord the other night and it is better that they don't speak publicly, who knows. Also, as the previous message said, decisions communicated by Jercer are signed off on by Jercer and become her responsibility as the HEAD ADMIN. You are literally blaming vague lower level admins in your post to take heat off Jercer lmfao.

https://i.redd.it/brnoa169gpqd1.gif

After playing this gamemode on and off for the better part of 12 years, I'm old and tired. I still love it; I've been chilling with fellow oldheads until the league gives me enough of a reason to not pay them. After watching the league's decision making since inception and especially recently, no confidence is instilled that said time will be long in the future. The aimless bureaucracy everybody is dealing with only to play a 19 year old game just doesn't seem worth it anymore.

being on a terrible tf2 team is a blast. if you can't have fun while you're losing, you're playing with the wrong people.

just playing in a higher div at all makes you so much better at the game, each jump to the next div requires learning a new layer of skills that you couldn't grasp even from playing 100 seasons in the division you're currently in. that's why the teams that scrim against better teams become better teams.

and so what if you're the punching bag for a season? unless you are one of the perennial low invite teams who refuse to innovate or change how they play in any meaningful way, you'll get better and then have even more fun.

even then, playing on those bad invite teams are infinitely more fun than stomping advanced, and if you want more than just going 1-6 every season, those teams are a great platform to get your name out there and get some low-stress experience.

i thought competitive tf2 being incredibly hard was why we all played it instead of just pubbing?

also can we please stop pretending that RGL is a law firm, the sponsors don't exist, just talk to us like you're human beings.

This thread has honestly shifted my perspective on RGLs professionalism. I’ve never been bothered by the professionalism in the past, and in fact expected it, but im stating to feel that the behavior policing is hurting more than it’s helping.

In particular this part of what ghadili said resonated with me

Perhaps if RGL restricted its policing to dangerous behavior like grooming or violent threats, or violations of competitive integrity like ddossing and cheating, but allowed the community to govern itself in terms of other behavior (sandbagging, toxicity, slurs, racism) we might have a stronger/larger community? I know this is a baseless claim, it just feels like what we have been doing has not been working. I also admit I’ve never been the target of discrimination, in game or out and if people currently playing feel that the pc culture RGL enforces has made a crucial positive difference for you then im all ears.

It's been ten years and HL players are still traumatized by enigma. Pretty sure NA hl drama diffs random etf2l shitfest by a mile.

Ok also let me nip something in the bud though really quick for the primarily 6s players on this forum or (newer RGL only highlander players): the NA highlander culture used to be rancid. To the point where any of the 6s players who played a decent amount of HL always talk like this about HL players , and it's not like 6s players in like 2014 or whatever were exactly PC (500$ jeopardy question what did Platinum shout at LAN with a sponsor right behind him?). RGL admins talking like the anne hathaway HR lady meme and the student council larp is always impressive in how ineffectual it all is but it is just true that the general culture shift has much improved the scene and almost assuredly increased the number of players old and new. Some of it is just changes in internet culture at large but it is undeniable that RGL actually clamping down on that type of behavior had a large impact.

While I think some changes that have a similar spirit have gone too far (sandbagging policy like other ppl have mentioned, insofar as it seems to take WAY too much admin time and also tries to invent a solution for a problem that doesn't have one by design), I think the concept of having admins who don't talk like drones whose IPO is in 2 days while also creating rules against like binding slurs to WASD shouldn't be some unachievable mystical ideal.

just go ahead and take a look at log names from the UGC era and you'll know that this idea is bad

I think RGL has made a LOT of horrible decisions and changes but their policing on slurs and such has been an improvement over UGC

wait what'd i do i don't remember

FUCK U ENAGMAA

What the fuck why are u reading this thread out of all of them LOL.

Iirc it was some highlander cup thread that devolved into something about HL impact on comp as a whole or something idk all i remember was the hl players getting owned. I think u dropped a truth nuke that got ppl riled up.