Nah you guys are actually ragebaiting the fuck out of me with these replies. I LITERALLY AGREE THAT THERE NEEDS TO BE CHANGE. Yes the current system is killing teams! But the just fully cranking the dial in the other direction is not the answer! The refusal to acknowledge that there have been sandbagging issues in the past shows you're not being good faith!

I disagree with mustard but at least he actually said his opinion on what should be done. 90% of the discussion from yall is just not constructive in any way! But yes just go ahead and add your anecdotal story to the pile and eventually Daddy RGL will fix it smile!!!!!!

That's a funny way to say teams that disbanded because they were too afraid of not getting a podium placement. So what is your solution? Just let them do whatever they want?

Because it's fun?

Is this discussion not about keeping the game alive? Imagine in any other game if a diamond rank player could choose to play in gold lobbies just because they felt like it. People literally quit games over bad matchmaking. I find it insane that you think dissolving all meaning behind divs and letting people self-sort will have no issues and end up being a preferable experience.

I mean, in a way, you're right. Ideally there are no restrictions, because there are no divs. In a perfect world, we would take all ~100 teams, throw them in a giant round-robin pool, and play it out. At the end we'd have a perfect ranking from first to last. But obviously nobody has time for that. You could do a bracket and get a similar result in a fraction of the time, but then FROYO has to play 50+ matches, while the newcomer teams only get to play 2. That doesn't sound fun on either end.

We have divisions as a compromise between time, competitive accuracy, and player experience. Are the divisions completely arbitrary? Yeah, totally. But they're arbitrary in a CONSISTENT way (at least somewhat, that's what we're trying to fix!!!). Even if you find 1st place meaningless, almost everyone enjoys improving. You need some kind of semi-consistent structure that players can measure their growth against.

And yeah, I'm moralizing sandbagging because it's often selfish, at the expense of other players' experience. There's nothing wrong with being a stagnant team that doesn't want to go 100%. But why do these teams always seem to hang out at the top of divisions? Why do they find it unacceptable to "chill" in the lower half of teams? They're optimizing for their own experience with no regard for the rest of the playerbase. Your idea sounds nice, but you realize it will just be a scramble for everyone trying to get their perfect amount of competition, and most people will fail to do so? Everyone can't be a winner, and since there's ego involved from all parties, we need a system to balance things OBJECTIVELY.

Besides, as ghadilli mentioned, there is already a self-sorting system in scrims! People act like being worst in your div is this terrible, miserable slog that you have no control over... Matches take like, 2 hours per week, maximum! Most people spend triple to quadruple that amount of time scrimming! You can just play your matches, get rolled, and spend the rest of the week having fun with your team scrimming down at whatever level you feel comfortable with! For anyone who's butthurt about it, it's quite literally a skill issue!

Yes, the current system is too restrictive, but a free-for-all isn't gonna work either. Yes, TF2 is not some tier-1 super-esport, but it's not full dead either. It's so lame that you guys think we're at some point of no return, where we should just give up any notion of competitive structure and just make RGL a pug league. There are other ways to enjoy sixes for those who don't enjoy the seasonal/divisional format.

I'M NOT AN RGL DICKRIDER AND I THINK THERE SHOULD BE CHANGE. But what is the actionable solution? Many people here complaining without putting forth a concrete suggestion

A huge problem is that there is no systematic way to determine INTENT. Let's say there's a team that's previously won their division, but they want to play that same division again because they want to "chill." They claim it'll be balanced because they won't be giving their all to the game. How do we (we, the rhetorical admins) know if that's true? Honor system? So we let them play, and a few weeks into the season it turns out that they're doing a full scrim schedule 5-6 nights a week. What are we supposed to do now? Restrict them retroactively, or outright remove their team from the season? Do we overturn the matches they've already played? Not to mention, how did we even find out that they broke their promise in the first place? Do we expect admins to keep a running track of certain players' logs just to determine their conditional div placement? Even if the answer is yes, what about MGE, or KovaaK's, or demo reviews? Maaaybe the players could report this kind of stuff, but I seriously doubt that teams would be in cahoots enough with each other to get enough information, or even that players would be aware enough to keep track of who is and isn't under a conditional agreement for the div. It becomes clear pretty quick that you cannot realistically quantify who is "grinding" and who isn't. We can't run a league like this.

Again, I don't see how this applies to the teams trying to climb, instead of the teams that are LITERALLY trying to stay in the same div and play teams THEY KNOW THEY CAN BEAT! You can easily turn the argument on its head and say, "Why are we hindering the development of high-placing players in a div, instead of forcing them out of their comfort zone into the next div up?" And remember, the MAJORITY of players in a season DO NOT get restricted. So I'd argue the improvement conditions are actually slightly better for the lower teams already. I hear what you're saying about gatekeepers being better for div development, but where do we draw the line? Half the people in this thread are complaining about admin decisions, so I don't think leaving it up to admin discretion is going to satisfy many people. Also note that in youth sports, most players just AGE out of their age group, so they're fine with letting a team repeat wins for a year or two until they get moved up that way. We obviously can't do that for tf2 lol

MY IDEA FOR A SOLUTION: (tell me what you think!!!)
-- All the divs adopt the system that advanced has in the current RGL guidelines except change it to 2x repeats instead of 3x (advanced could probably stay 3x).
-- THE PLACEMENT THRESHOLD SHOULD BECOME A PERCENTAGE OF THE DIV SIZE. Should placing 3rd get you restricted? Well, placing 3rd out of 8 teams is very different from placing 3rd out of 24. I propose about top 20-25% (this number could be nudged tho idk) of the div should meet the placement threshold.
-- Get above the placement threshold 2x and you get restricted.
This system with its numbers should be clearly posted for each season so players can know what to expect, and it should be followed much more closely; admin discretion should be used as little as possible. Additionally, something could appear on your RGL profile that shows your restriction status, similar to how restrictions currently appear on team pages. Maybe meeting the placement threshold (regardless of trophy) gets you a "token" that shows anyone viewing your profile your progress toward a restriction. For example, if you place top 20% in main as scout, you get a Main Scout token on your profile. If you get one more Main Scout token, you then have 2, so you'll be restricted from scout in main.

If people want it, you could also add decay to this. So after 2 or 3 seasons (or something i'm not sure on the numbers) that a player is inactive, they lose a token and their restriction is lifted. Get another top placement, and they'll gain their token back and be re-restricted.

This would slow down restrictions without completely removing them, and more importantly, it would make the system transparent for the players. I think right now a lot of people are upset not necessarily out of unfairness, but because they just genuinely don't know what the system is supposed to be. Too much is left up to admin discretion, and the admins have to juggle too many factors (player's historical performance vs recent performance, current div strength, player's teammates and their perceived strength, and more) that there's just no way they can make accurate or fair decisions for everyone.

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

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)

Slides came about because these games want to have “realistic” ADS-style gunplay, which is pretty incompatible with movement. Sprinting, jumping, climbing, pretty much doing anything gives huge accuracy penalties to your gun, and ADS literally slows you down so you can shoot straight. The solution they came up with was sliding so that you can actually move fast AND shoot straight for a short period of time

TF2 and other quake-style games avoid this problem entirely by just letting you truly run and gun

hi, back from hiatus and want to play main s10

prefer combo over flank
maincaller
have "drip"
my schedule is v open
could be conviced to play medic also

thanks :)

https://rgl.gg/Public/PlayerProfile.aspx?p=76561198085007342
Cornsauce#6228