Source 2 is a drastically more modern engine designed with modern hardware and techniques in mind. In 2007, game engines were designed for machines with one or a couple threads and modest gpus. Even your basic gaming computer in 2021 has 4+ threads and the gpu is an order of magnitude (or several) more powerful than 2007 hardware*, but a large portion of that goes to waste since current tf2 isn't designed to use it. A source 2 tf2 port is likely to blow the current tf2's performance out of the water for the same graphical fidelity, or largely improve the graphical fidelity while also improving perf.

Of course, a lot depends on what level of access this team has to the tools (i.e. a mod will never be as fast as having native access), but the potential's there. I'd personally love to see stv support so that games played in TF2 could be casted/produced in TF:S2.

* I looked into this for fun - some gpu benchmarks
639 - GeForce 8800 Ultra (arguably the best card on the market in 2007)
1503 (2.35x) - the Vega integrated graphics in the first $500 gaming laptop I could find
19509 (30x) - the RTX 2080 Super I have
benchmarks are definitely not everything, of course - there have been substantial architectural improvements to GPUs as well

https://push.dubthink.com/2021/08/e56.jpg

Finally got around to taking photos of the board I built last winter:

https://push.dubthink.com/2021/07/denseboard_mk1_top.jpg

I wanted the most compact 104-key I could get, couldn't find any good options, so I made my own. Lefthand numpad is objectively superior for RH mouse users and I will die on that hill - not sure why there aren't more options for it out there.

Laser cut aluminum frame with SS standoffs, kailh speed bronze switches, hand wired matrix, teensy++ 2.0 controller, MT3 Susuwatari keycaps. Finding a sculpted keycap set that fit this layout was honestly the hardest part.

https://push.dubthink.com/2021/07/denseboard_mk1_front.jpg

https://push.dubthink.com/2021/07/denseboard_solder.jpg

Hey, quick post to clarify a couple points here:
- ire was uninvolved in this (other than being the leader of antlers' team, who jemond contacted about the demo request). Ire was not involved in any way with the ban, which was entirely procedural.
- antlers did not record his demo for his Week 8A match. We will (obviously) not penalize people for not recording pug or scrim demos.

To illuminate why we took action here even though antlers' last failure was 16 months ago:

From Aad, our head AC admin:

At the end of the day, there's a few major points for why we enforce demo recording this way:
- We don't want to give any potential cheater or suspect any leeway - we did this in the past before hard demo requesting rules existed, and we have 1000000% missed out on some extremely good evidence. Anyone who has a hard stance on cheating should almost always make sure they also have a hard stance on demos. Otherwise in a game where VAC is straight up useless, having an AC team in any league would also be useless w/o ability to have pov demos when desperately needed.
- The community expects us to be consistent - I've been extremely consistent with making sure we apply demo failures correctly, and it should be expected at this point because it hasn't changed. We also are consistent with other cheating related topics of "cheating anywhere = cheating @ RGL, if VAC doesn't catch you cheating, doesn't mean we can't"
- We're going as far as developing a plugin to ensure no one has an excuse to accidentally not record by spitting out in chat anyone not recording when a game goes live - literally no other league has explored this option, even though pieces have been out there for at min 5yrs now.
- We're also being consistent with the other major TF2 leagues:
Ozfortress just says see ya for 4 games, no decay

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/580467385119801367/864304880318283776/unknown.png

UGC similarly bans for first miss, and have no decay.

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/580467385119801367/864304827014053918/unknown.png

ETF2L's ruleset has 0 decay for demo requests for many many years now without issue.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/580467385119801367/864304940980502548/unknown.png

tl;dr In the past, some of the cases we've had to let go due to missing demos pisses me off and no one has a reason to disable recording once the season has started.

https://media1.tenor.com/images/d66420dd8a94136a3bda9d976b15ca3f/tenor.gif?itemid=16972880

https://push.dubthink.com/2021/05/6Ui6XtSJIC0HMPQe8Xt9648xds74nK90hgNFNQindf0.jpg

PSA: The deadline to have 5 paid up on your roster is TOMORROW, Saturday at 11:59 pm est. If you aren't able to, please go ahead and reach out now by creating a support ticket in the main discord and we can figure something out. The deadline for 6 paid is before your first match, which start next week.

If you have questions or requests regarding team placement or class restrictions, please reach out via support ticket in the main discord so that we can assist.

PSA: The deadline to have 5 paid up on your roster is TOMORROW, Saturday at 11:59 pm est. If you aren't able to, please go ahead and reach out now by creating a support ticket in the main discord and we can figure something out. The deadline for 6 paid is before your first match, which start next week.

If you have questions or requests regarding team placement or class restrictions, please reach out via support ticket in the main discord so that we can assist.

PSA: The deadline to have 5 paid up on your roster is TOMORROW, Saturday at 11:59 pm est. If you aren't able to, please go ahead and reach out now by creating a support ticket in the main discord and we can figure something out. The deadline for 6 paid is before your first match, which start next week.

If you have questions or requests regarding team placement or class restrictions, please reach out via support ticket in the main discord so that we can assist.

PSA: The deadline to have 5 paid up on your roster is TOMORROW, Saturday at 11:59 pm est. If you aren't able to, please go ahead and reach out now by creating a support ticket in the main discord and we can figure something out. The deadline for 6 paid is before your first match, which start next week.

If you have questions or requests regarding team placement or class restrictions, please reach out via support ticket in the main discord so that we can assist.

Hey all,

We haven't been done much to communicate our reasoning around the map pool and map cup choices, so I wanted to share some of that here:

One of our current goals at RGL is to continue to improve the map pool, and supporting new maps is critical to that. This is a worthwhile goal which has already had success:

• koth_clearcut, which was introduced in S1 instead of granary/badlands, is now well liked and rated within a few percentage points of the staple map koth_product. koth_bagel is rated similarly (although the sample size is smaller).
  
• cp_villa was less disliked this season than granary was when it was played in S2, and has the chance to continue to improve, unlike cp_granary.

We haven't included older maps in recent surveys because the spot in the map pool isn't open to them - we'd much rather have a map with mixed opinions that's in development and will improve than one that has similarly mixed opinions and will never improve (i.e. granary/badlands). Maps like reckoner and logjam have been discussed for inclusion in map cups, but are generally pretty static in their current states and have had lukewarm receptions in other regions, so we focused more on maps that have seen less exposure and are newer for this cup.

With all that being said, there are definitely parts of our approach that can be approved. We hear you that the time between this map cup and the start of the season is too short (we would have liked to hold the cup earlier, but didn't want to conflict with Dreamhack). Because of the short time between the cup and the season, we will only include the cup-winning map in S6 if it is received very well and feels definitively season-ready. Otherwise, it will be on-deck to be played in S7 as several of you have suggested, and cp_villa will remain for S6. For future seasons, we will aim to have the map pool determined a season in advance to provide teams ample time to learn maps and avoid the scheduling issue we had this season.

While we're on the topic of the map pool, one of the ideas that's been floated is to include all three koth maps this season rather than including villa, and bring in the map cup map next season. While bagel and clearcut are both liked better than villa, a significant portion of the community is against 3 koth at the moment:

https://push.dubthink.com/2021/05/chrome_2021-05-09_16-55-22.png

Generally we'd like to see a larger percentage of people in support of 3 koth before testing it, so we aren't considering that option for this season.

At some point in the coming weeks, I'm hoping to get out an article with details from the post season survey which will include more detailed statistics on map opinions this season.

tl;dr

• Improving the map pool is part of our mission at RGL, and promising new maps are critical to that
  
• Old maps aren't included on the survey because we only have one open spot in the pool, which is currently for new and actively developed maps
  
• The cup is this late to not conflict with dreamhack
  
• Our methods of introducing new maps can definitely be improved, and we're listening to your feedback:
  
• Because of the short time between the cup and the season, we will only include the winning map in S6 if it is received very well and season ready. Otherwise, it will be played in S7 and villa will remain for S6

This post doesn't exhaustively cover every detail of why we've made all of the above decisions, so please reach out to me at DubThink#3877 if you have any further questions or constructive feedback - I'm happy to chat!

A few things I regularly bring up for meds when coaching newbiemixes:
1) Try not to position against walls (when you aren't concerned about spy, so 6s or if the spy's dead in HL) Positioning against a wall effectively cuts your movement options in half and makes you more likely to take splash damage, making it significantly easier for bombing soldiers to kill you.
2) When an enemy is aggressing you, it's usually better to put a teammate between you and the enemy than it is to run away, which isolates you. It's sometimes counterintuitive, but I'd rather move to my scout and beam them so they can play between me and the enemy even if it involves getting closer to the enemy. (Mr Slin or someone has an excellent video on this showing how to effectively keep your scout between you and the threat which was one of the best things I watched when getting started. I can't find it :( but it was on badlands 2nd near pride if anyone knows the video I'm talking about.)
3) I know the post-uber positioning thing has been said already, but I want to second it. It's easily the number one mistake I see newer medics and teams make, and having good post-fights is one of the most valuable things. Also, call where you're ending the uber so that the rest of your team can play around that. (Honestly this is my #1 piece of generic advice for any team IM or below. Fix your posts and you'll do so much better)
4) Call who's in an uber early. This doesn't always need to be a med's job, but unless I get forced, my team should always know who's getting ubered before the uber starts. Players who aren't called as in should stay tf out if they can (It's still ok to flash people to save them if they need it though)
5) The entire "you don't need to look at your heal target" is super important.
6) Don't be afraid to yell at firmly communicate with your scout(s).
7) When in doubt, arrow less. I know no one listens to this (including me), but still. Beam.

Mr Slin's content for medic is fire, and Marxist's Precepts are a staple as people have said.

Two pieces of meta-advice:
1) Plenty of players will focus on advanced stuff before they have the basics down. It's definitely fine to mess around with the advanced stuff (it's often a good motivator to get better), but you shouldn't be spending effort getting good at prefiring crossbows at teammates using the radar if you don't have your heal order and positioning on point, etc.
2) What works against low level players will not work against better ones. I can't even count the number of times I said to my newbie drive team "Ok that worked, but that should not have worked and won't work against good players". If you're looking to improve, practice what you should do, not just anything that works.

Like half the reason it takes so long for some "blatantly obvious" cheaters to get banned is because y'all never report them. I just checked with Aad, the head AC admin, and there have been 0 reports on kevito and/or brummies641. Back when feno was "widely known" to be cheating, there were 0 reports on him. Literally none. Still aren't any. It was only when one of the 6s admins brought it up during the elijah case that AC even learned about it. If you want cheaters to be banned, take the little bit of time it takes to find the ticks that make you think they're cheating and fucking report them.

(this isn't specifically directed at dippidy, who I think is going to report it soon, just putting it out there so the community's aware)

These bans do come from reports. The MAL player ban came from a report. In my 5 seasons working at RGL, I've seen a single staff member (not even a 6s admin) comb through logs, and they were removed from the organization over a year ago for that and similar problems. We've even warned league players for combing specific players' and teams' logs for infractions, which is a form of witch-hunting and prohibited. If you actually read any of RGL's articles, you'd see that in almost every single article related to bans, we put in brightly colored text that we only ban off reports. The most recent article, which you should go read because clearly you haven't, mentions it. If a player is banned, it is because they were reported.

In many hundreds of reports we've handled with logs, this is the first time anything like this has occurred. Logs.tf does not display timestamps, and we have no good reason to assume chat messages in the log did not happen during pregame or the scrim, as you can see in the log here. When the rare odd edge cases like this happen, we have an appeals process to handle it, which worked as it should and the players were unbanned (due to the high-profile nature of the MAL case, we took a bit more time to figure out our response internally before rolling back the bans).

It bothers me how this is branded as "fix[ing] the issues with map geometry as well as minor aesthetic and performance improvements" when it's much more than that. Heaven knows steel is a good candidate for fixes and/or a pro version, but branding this as a set of completely uncontroversial fixes rather than a full on pro version of the map feels inaccurate and possibly disingenuous.

(I think the same can be said about all of the Refresh: maps to a lesser extent. I generally support efforts to improve the map pool, but feel that Refresh: misrepresents itself as focusing on purely clipping/bug/perf fixes while doing much more than that)