i think u should just let them all sandbag, why restrict anyone in game that is dying

i have been interested in starting to play more combo scout. hitting that consistent 55% scatter acc is making it rlly hard to get on a main team, but I'm restricted from playing IM. there are many IM teams looking for combo scouts. Please send your prayers.

my invite highlander soldier danmar33 is apparently too superior for main even though he never even made playoffs when he was in main and proved himself properly

i think moving people up when they have placed top 4 in their division is perfectly fine because theyve already made it to the top and having them play 2 or 3 seasons of main just to be able to win it will hurt their progression even more than by having them move up. Not to mention the fact that moving people up will fix the problem of the upper divisions being unpopulated.

I honestly dont see what you see, 80% of the league is nc-am-im and if theyre allowed to repeat the seasons over and over again until they win then no wonder advanced and invite are underwhelming. If old players quit but no new players come to replace them then the situation we have in front of us is what happens.

Your call to action is a petition to kill the game.

i think the main problem with the approach for restrictions is the hard delineation between for example advanced and invite skill levels. Different teams exist because of different experiences their players want as well as their ambition. Some players want to grind and climb for more perceived prestige, competitive drive, etc. Other players want to play for fun with their friends and, since losing isn't fun, would rather be in the top half of a div; this includes previously ambitious players who want to return after a hiatus but don't care about improving anymore. And of course you can have people with various levels of ambition or tolerance for losing.

If the line between adv and invite is more blended, then the grind teams get more out of playing in their div because competition is stronger and the chiller teams are ironically more likely to move up because the transition is much easier if you can enter invite from top 2 adv and be comfortable rather than dead last permalosing. A less delineated cutoff makes room for the teams that want specific things to actually exist rather than get killed during signups
Advanced and invite are kinda bad examples since invite only being able to get teams from one direction means unwilling adv get vacuumed up, but what I said still applies here and especially does for the middling divs

yes all those friend/offclass teams that wanted to chill in adv and got forced into invite and totally lived is how we get stronger invite seasons. In reality if a team is dominant in a low div it's usually because they grinded for it in which case they are ambitious about tf2 and usually move up voluntarily.
Also in my opinion having circed jerks stay in a div for a long time is a good thing because they 1) bring congruity to the div across time, giving the div a character so that people who played it three of four seasons apart may have some connection or a similar experience and 2) become standards to compete against. It's extremely satisfying to see a gap get closed between your team and the div regulars across multiple seasons

Guys!! If All You Wanna Do Is Beat Up On Main Teams For Three Months You Don't Need To Be In The Div!! You Can Actually Do That For Free!!!! Scrims Are FREE!!!!! You Can Play Them Five Nights A Week And Never Lose If That's What You Wanna Do!!! Why Do You Need To Pay The League To Schedule You Two Scrims A Week If All You Want To Do Is 'Chill'!!

If anything I am on RGL's side with this one. We're running a competition here, right? We're competing? If that's the case then why are we catering to people who have no interest in doing that? Even in other hobbie-level sports its not like the teams of guys that wanna get wasted and fuck around never have to play the teams of guys that wanna win. That's part of the deal here, man. I don't care if you (rhetorical) have a "low tolerance for losing", nobody is forcing you to pay the league fees and play the season. Like I said before, Scrims Are FREEEEEEE!!!! And if you just desperately need to give your money to RGL, how about we run an open 'for fun' div where we don't keep score. And if that's not acceptable, think about why, because, again, why are you (rhetorical) entitled to win a competition against other people without having to try?

-

Honestly, I think this whole thing is a nothingburger reddit struggle session about something good happening, that maybe three people are going to throw tantrums over because they can't handle being told they're too big to play in the kiddie pool. Literally who cares. Is this how'd I'd personally handle these restrictions? Probably not. Do I think that this is actually pretty reasonable though? Probably yeah. Sorry bro, third place doesn't mean you're 'perfectly suited' to play the division, it means you're probably a top three player on your class in the div, which means you'd almost certainly fit in just fine the next div up. I'm sorry your friend is annoyed about something the league did, but acting like this decision is somehow 'killing the game' is just gross. Get a grip.

If anything is killing the game, it's this bizarre malaise that's settled over the scene like a fog that makes anything short of the admins letting players do whatever they want the end of competitive integrity. After thinking about it for a while, I actually think that the league taking this more seriously is actually a sign of moves in the right direction. Like I keep saying, we're COMPETING here, right? So why the hell should the whole scene cater to a bunch of jaded oldheads who lost the fire years ago and entitled kids who just want a trophy. One of those should probably be considered more cringe than the other, but neither of them should be the driving force behind league decisions. Because neither of those groups of people is going to bring anything good to the scene at this point, and honestly, I think catering to them is a lot closer to the thing 'killing the game' than class restrictions in main. Just some food for thought.

This could just as easy be framed in the other way as move-ups thinking they're entitled to playoffs spots right away and trying to get placed better through rule semantics rather than demo reviews and practice, but that's obviously not the point
Speaking as someone who hasn't played on casual teams I think its bad for the game if taking a break after having any kind of placement success means that you'll get gigafucked if you ever try to play again and lowering such subjective barriers for making teams will straightforwardly increase the number of teams.
I really hate to just say "get good" because theres no way to not sound dismissive but for all your emphasis on competing and competition its not very healthy for competition if there are theoretical top teams that get simply voided out of existence because vocal complainers didn't want to compete with them. In fact sandbag teams so historically get caught up with by the end of the season that getting a 16-0 record in adv was considered a bad omen.

I actually can't wrap my head around fearing competing with someone who got third last season, that is like the most textbook example of a difficult and beatable team which is imo the gold standard of competition. Even if a 3rd place player would fit into the next div (which will vary season to season and case by case ofc), why not let the player pick? Wanting another shot at a div seems like a totally normal thing that a competitively minded person would do (and always have done)

double-posting because the more I ruminate on this the less I get it
what main player in their right mind is afraid to play this?

https://i.imgur.com/8hxiy9q.png

https://i.imgur.com/FozAP2U.png

omg ghadilli you are such a baby its not even funny. Do you want your playoff spot handed to you?? Do you want uppies too?? Maybe if you ran a div back you'd win your first playoff match since 2019 WTF?? If you are complaining about a 3rd place player repeating the division, you suck at the game.

Beating the established players of a div serves as a tangible milestone for all teams in a division. To think that these teams somehow always win every time is also not true. People like to think of YAMBO as Advanced gatekeepers when in reality this is what the record looks like:

https://i.imgur.com/xAURn60.png

THESE ARE PERFECT TEAMS TO REPRESENT THE HIGHER END OF THE DIVISION. you are either insane or very bad at the game to see this in your division and not think that you can try to contend with them by the end of the season.

When my entire div2 moveup team played against shining star yumyum and zam, we grinded our asses off to win and made that season such a memorable experience. You need to trust me but beating the favoured team in divs like main/advanced is way more feasible than you give it credit for. By playing against low invite teams in advanced, it actually bridges the gap to invite more than if

• you weren't able to play them in the first place (moved up)
  
• they are a worse team because of class restrictions

By lowering and lowering the ceiling of these divisions you end up with worse and worse teams earning higher placements. You get teams that end up getting to invite that have actually zero chance of beating a higher seeded team. John milter would roll the fuck out of ROME.

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

sandblast is the president and landlord of RGB

While I think there is a benefit to difficult divisions with more skilled competition, I think there is a balance to be struck.

Saying that the kronge realm team history being not straight wins is a bit disingenuous if you take into account that they were facing other teams with other "sandbaggers', for example, in S10 where they got 3rd, the other 2 teams who were above them were also made up of multiple players with invite/adv winning experience on their mains.

The pipeline back in the day used to be get 5th or 4th in adv(ESEA-IM), move up to invite because everyone above you in adv already had invite experience, once you hit the wall in invite and want to take it easier, come back down to adv. Adv was never about actually competing at a high level, it was what invite teams did when they stopped wanting to face the top 4 wall in invite but still wanted to feel some competition. (This is not always the case, I remember Omni-5 w/ fyg hayes cin putting good numbers against the top adv teams before they moved up to invite, but this was a rarity.)

Personally idc where the line is. Ultimately, there are always things you can improve on. But I don't think it's that far-fetched to want the invite caliber teams in invite. and use Adv to develop players/new rosters.

Instead of these top 3 adv teams being in adv, they could literally just play low invite and create more competition in low invite. Instead of 3rd place adv being the bar that people need to reach, why isn't winning adv the prerequisite to facing the teams of low invite? I'd argue that most of those seasons Konge Realm won/placed, the top 3 teams in adv were better than the bottom 2 invite teams, and many of those seasons, the invite division had room to be bigger. (id also imagine low invite not being such a slog if there were 4-5 low invite teams as opposed to 1 or 2)

The rule where they made each team only have 3 restricted players made more sense from an ideological standpoint because it meant that developing rosters could form where 3 invite players developed 3 other players and tried to win adv, but more often than not what you see is admins approve those teams with the 3 new players and 2 of them get cut and rosters rotated onto their mains by the time the playoffs starts. (see Fjord Gaming/Quake these last few seasons). Most of the time, I don't see those other players starting new rosters with budding potential either. Usually, what we tend to see is those newer players who made it to the playoffs stay with that same core who may or may not play (and if they do only want to play adv), and the other players who didn't make it don't play the following seasons either.

Ultimately, incentivizing people to stay playing adv is what rgl is trying to avoid. While I don't agree with all of their restriction changes, I do think it's a good idea to not let teams just take their 6 down from invite to adv or get 3rd and wait 2 seasons and not play invite just to play adv again. and rinse repeat for the next 3 years because theyd rather continue playing their current division than try and make a jump into new territory.

ok but did u know sandblast landlord and president of rgb?

This is just not true, there was a single person who had won advanced, which was nazara, 2 years prior. There were several people who either placed last or second last in invite, but why should they not be allowed to play advanced?
There are plenty last place invite teams that could not have won advanced (as it should be, this exists in every division) and that speaks more to mentality/practice. Plenty of those players returned to play invite seasons and the ones who didn't, don't play seasons at all. There is no core that routinely wins advanced.

I commend teams like Ninjago and ROME for taking the leap into invite but if you can only win a single game in the whole season then it seems like a disservice to both the players and the spectators. Unless certain players can get picked up by more experienced invite cores, the possible foundational improvements to be made in advanced is much more feasible, where you aren't in an environment getting the turbo dih deluxe 24/7. My point being, there are teams who rush into invite without being able to contest in advanced, meaning; not only is there are so many fundamental things missing to begin with, you now have to deal with that issue in invite, resulting in overly worse practice/experience. You can still scrim low invite teams as an advanced team!

And to be clear, I'm all for class restrictions when needed, but there is such a disconnect if you are class banning players who haven't even seen the grand finals of that division.

Thinking about this more, I kinda get what slice is saying where if there are more shitty teams invited, that the player experience is not as bad, because there's now more close matches, but idk. I feel like it just means there are now more shitty rolls for the 1st/2nd/3rd seeds. The disparity of bottom invite to top invite will continue to be gross. Going off of memory but the end race is always the same , where nothing outside of the top 4 remotely matters nor is it ever really contested. If it is ever contested, 4th place basically never upsets anyone, even 3rd.

I feel like a concentrated 4 team invite would work out to be more exciting for all parties, where teams coming from advanced are actually invited and have to prove that they deserve the 4th seed over a different team. This would come with a higher skill ceiling of advanced. Ex. If I think of the last invite season I played, we'd be playing the exile team and sandblast team more, which was by far the best matches for the players and spectators.

The issue with advanced to invite is that it does not adequately prepare you at all lmfao. whereas I think it's safe to say that any of the other jumps in divisions can still net a previously winning team decent placements. if the top teams in advanced have a higher ceiling, itd make that transition less abrasive into a 4 team bracket.

How are adv teams going to develop to an invite level if there are no invite caliber gatekeepers for them to compete against? Rather that just talking in platitudes why not look at the actual reality of how teams actually being prepared for invite means teams move up into invite? Invite caliber and advanced are not nor should they be mutually exclusive terms
Here's an example: season 7 grands was between a sandbagging donovin and a sandbagging gungon. What was the outcome? The 3rd place team dynasty became an extremely successful and exciting invite moveup team two seasons later.
Was this match any less prestigious than if yeti and death cult were culled in the pre-season? Is there any actual discernible loss of competitive integrity by letting people with invite success compete for top 3 adv? So why kill teams like these for the short-sighted goal of making invite stronger for 3 months while making the rest of adv far less capable of actually moving up by the end of the season?

I was actually typing out a more winded response but you responded before i could and I was actually about to suggest the same thing.

If you want teams to reach invite at the capacity of being able to actively contest mid invite, then you should lower the number of teams in invite to 5 or 4, and make taking 1st or 2nd place in adv the required placement to play in a qualifier to take seed 5/4 or 4/3 before the next season.

The other option is to make a Div 1 and a Div 2, with div1 consisting of mid invite low invite top adv teams without restrictions.

The big problem with both of these is what if 2 mid invite teams play Div1/adv, get grands but dont want to be top 4 invite and play top 2 for half the season (or what if 4th or 3rd dies). We pretty much run back into the same issues we have had in the past. (I don't know what our current teams at this caliber think, I'm just presenting a problem that has risen in the past regardless of how we structure the divs)

I think I fully agree with you on this.

maybe this is too optimistic but the whole idea is that the 4th place invite/qualifier/whatever shouldnt be something that has a negative connotation, like the current forced moveups are. The 4th place spot shouldn't come with getting the beating the whole season, it should come with a higher concentration of better tf2 being played. It should be exciting to be able to contest for the 4th seed of invite, which as of right now (7/8th seeds), most certainly isnt. I'm saying this because the vast majority of dead invite teams are teams that get the turbo beating. To me, less turbo beatings and more engaging tf2 means greater player retention. By moving the ceiling higher in the division below the top 4, it means that teams of present day "advanced sandbaggers" arent entitled to nearly as many free placements and could lose hard to some of the moved down teams. A team that proves they can beat a current mid-level invite team (WHICH SHOULD BE POSSIBLE), to me, seems way more deserving of an invite to the top 4.

I think this would lead to the lower ends of most divisions moving down a div, while the skill floor of the division is raised. If a 4 team invite season was to happen tomorrow it'd take some time for the divs to reach their appropriate equilibriums of floor/ceiling. But I think long term, it'd create better competition for everyone involved. Genuine criticism appreciated because to me it sounds like a nobrainer when looking at the current state of invite/advanced.

The beating is good for you, me boy.

I won main in season 10, tried to play adv scout, and my team got forced to play quals. we lost in quals but it didnt matter because all three teams in quals were forced to play invite.

I stuck through the beating season of invite to try and improve, and I did improve, but it wasnt very fun, and many nights were completely unproductive. I stuck thru it because I loved playing 6's, love the game, and wanted to try and improve.
After my season of invite, my team next season died, ostensibly because of my own personal life getting in the way. I stepped away, took an extended break. I rostered on a few silly teams, but genuinely havent played a meaningful game of tf2 since like week 5 in season 12. On top of that, I have no real achievements as a player, other than winning main in season 10. APPROACHING 4 YEARS AGO.

With time away focused on other games and mostly real life, I am really rusty at the game. I need a season, maybe more, to knock of rust and come anywhere close to being as good as i used to be at the game (WHICH WASNT VERY GOOD, MIND YOU). This leaves me in a spot where I am unable to play my main class in the most suitable division for my skill level due to arbitrary restrictions. I don't enjoy projectile classes, so I have no desire to play them. This leaves me with the options of either;
1. Offclass medic in main/adv
2. look for an advanced team to play scout on when the game is so dead that no one is looking, when i am not currently good enough to play advanced scout

I tried to do option one, and my team was killed because we had to many restrictions. All of our players had restrictions that I would consider silly or at least, strict, but the worst BY FAR is tree being unable to play soldier in main. She hasnt played in 3 years, and while yes, she has some advanced soldier experience, she had both of those teams die around halfway thru the season. She is restricted off soldier because she placed 4th in main on soldier , over 3 years ago. FOURTH PLACE. Additionally, in season 10 she was offclassing on doctor, so she did not win main on soldier.

Option two has literally 0 appeal to me. Why would i lft and tryout with randoms, when i can just play cs with my friends, any time I want to ? I am an adult with responsibilities, and the idea of adding a second, required job every night just so i can MAYBE get to play with my friends again ONE DAY in the future after I regrind a game I already dumped 15k hours into isnt appealing.

Despite these things, I still love 6's, follow the league and keep up with things going on, and try to keep up with my friends from the community as much as possible. This game and community had a massive impact on me, and it's really sad to me that I am effectively not able to play this game anymore. I'm sure i am not alone, we need to stop treating tf2 like some serious esport that you have to take seriously like a job and achieve the highest possible level you can as a player or you are like harming competitive integrity.

We play a videogame for fun. None of us make this our living, bar i guess one guy. This game is old, and so is our playerbase. rgl needs to cater to the people who want to play their game, and have for years, not just in lessening restrictions to allow people to actually enjoy playing with their friends, but also to make fundamental changes to the structure of seasons overall.

Had to think about what to post but here goes nothing.

I don't know how many of you remember early rgl, but back then we had makkabeus as the head admin. He was incredibly over reaching with his restrictions and often times would class lock ppl who had simply placed high in the division the season before, failed to find an invite team, and were looking to play the season on their main in advanced.

Now this happened to me multiple times. For over a year I had to play fuckass soldier seasons because I literally could not find an invite team and was not willing to make one. So instead I played soldier, lost a lot since frankly I am not good at all at soldier and didn't bother to practice (whoops.) But it still took my head out of the game and made me heavily resent the admin team and more importantly, heavily resent pretty much everything tf2 related.

My point in this is to say that class restrictions don't just prevent old players from returning, as millie said above, but also lock people off their classes for an extended period of time and, such as in my case, cause players to no longer wish to compete seriously.

Last thing I'll say is as someone who played during the esea era, I can sincerely tell you that the sandbagging was not that bad. Yes! sandbaggers won most seasons. But it didn't change the fact that the divisions were much more competitive and the general parity between mid to top open/intermediate was a lot better. Just removing class restrictions and letting people play their mains (outside of incredibly egregious examples) should be good enough to keep the divisions fun and stable.

rgl should have never put the idea into new players heads that low divs mean fucking anything, win or lose

i'm new to higher divs so maybe i don't know what i'm talking about but

I find it weird that some of yall will say that lower teams in a div need to "git gud" and stop complaining about sandbaggers and gatekeepers... but telling restricted players to "git gud" and play in the div they're moved up to is too much. Or that adv-to-invite moveups shouldn't be restricted because the "transition" is too hard or something. I'm sure there is some gap between advanced and invite but like. are the top advanced teams not scrimming invite teams occasionally? They should know what to expect, no?

HOWEVER from reading this thread i can see where some people are coming from. The most unreasonable restrictions seem to come from those who took a break from the game. Maybe RGL should add a sort of "decay" where your restrictions degrade over time if no seasons are played by the player. But it's still not perfect because there's so much variation in "taking a break." Did you step away from gaming entirely for a few years? Or were you just not playing tf2, and were still grinding other games that kept your fps mechanics sharp? in the same vein, when you register for a div, the admins can't tell whether your intention is to scrim 2 nights/week, or 5. (and even if you told them they have no way of enforcing that.) idk. There's always gonna be some people whose preferred experience doesn't line up with what the league allows, but we have to have some kind of system. Maybe we can dial the restrictions back a bit but it seems like what some are asking for is pretty radical

Also fwiw I think we should consider that a class restriction might actually be on the generous side (as opposed to completely barred from a div). Maybe I'm just unaware but I haven't heard of a basketball league, for example, that lets you play down a div because you're usually a post player but you're playing point guard for this season. I could see it you're a soccer goalie trying to play in the field; I think that's like a medic trying to play combat. But idk. I think the aversion to offclassing is a bit much sometimes, and I say that as a scout player with 70-80 ping (projectiles are hard/i suck)

The reason these aren't equivalent is because a team in a div is facing 90% of the same competition regardless of if sandbaggers are allowed or not and the only change is 1 or 2 hard teams to play, whereas a team being forced up a div are facing a completely different competitive landscape that is nothing like what they wanted to sign up for
You can absolutely still tell sandbaggers to get good and move up but there's obviously a big difference

man I think this is being disingenuous. Div crossover absolutely exists and different divs play each other all the time in scrims. Again I ADMIT that maybe i don't see the whole picture but...

According to RGL docs you can literally win advanced 3 times before you get restricted at all. I don't see how that's too restrictive. But I can see a case for main and IM. If we wanted to change it from top 4 restricts to top 3 or 2 that honestly sounds like a fine change. Add some kind of inactivity decay and I think we'd have a pretty good system; rank decay is a very common thing in other games