If you mean using this data to train the model, this is easy with a little manual work. Just go to the RGL profiles of e.g. invite players, and then look through their logs for games where they're playing with their teammates (also listed on RGL). You could easily collect 500 invite-level "sample" logs in like a couple hours of doing this. Tedious but not that bad.

I think you could do this by grading players on a curve. Like, in both slow and fast games, someone still does the highest damage in the server. That's really what should count rather than the raw number, that is, a player's performance relative to his role counterpart on the other team. Fitting performance to a curve like this mostly solves the problem of people having worse-looking stats because the game was slow.

There are a lot of interrelated variables when assessing performance. For example:

• Higher DPM is usually better, but the ratio between DPM and DTM also matters. For example, a 300dpm/300dtm damage spread would likely not help your team win as much as a 250dpm/200dtm damage spread.
  
• Different roles have different performance expectations. The best roamers in the world still often go damage negative (while winning) because their role requires taking negative damage trades during sacs.
  
• The pace of the game affects everyone's performance. Doing 300dpm in a 5-4, fast-paced game is arguably less impressive than doing 300dpm in a game with a lot of stalemates (high average time between e.g. capping 2nd and capping last)
  
• The ratio between the "good stats" and heal% also matters. Doing 300dpm while taking 30% heals is less impressive than doing 300dpm while taking 5% heals.
  
• There are many more relationships like these examples.

My suggestion, if you're trying to get a single metric to measure player performance, would be to measure performance against a sample of known top-level games. For instance, you could gather a sample of 500 invite scrims and matches and compare player stats (dpm, k/d, etc.) on the winning team and the losing team, measuring the difference between the winners and losers. The key here is not the actual numbers, but the difference between the winners and the losers, e.g., what % more damage did the winners do compared to the losers? What % difference in ubers dropped? and so on for many different stats.

Then you would compare the difference in non-sample games to the difference in the sample. For example, if winning invite Demo players do 10% more damage on average than their demo counterparts (on the losing team), then a 10% damage diff would be the "average" or "difference-adjusted" score for demo players (so, a 5 on a 1-10 scale). Comparing winners and losers in a sample of games would allow you to find which stats directly correlate with winning and losing, even if you don't know why those statistics correlate that way. Doing this for many statistics and then averaging them out (for dpm diff, k/d diff, heal% diff, etc.) would be imperfect but give a pretty good overall measure of performance.

Adjusting for roles would also be necessary since expectations vary widely between them. Comparing med to med or demo to demo would be easy, but you could use heal% to determine which players are on combo/flank scout and pocket/roamer. The scout with the higher heal% will almost always be the pocket scout, and same with the pocket soldier. Using a sample of high-level games to train the model would also allow you to handpick who's playing what role, so there wouldn't be mistakes in the data.

Sorry if this isn't exactly what you asked for. I've thought a lot about how to measure performance in sixes and it's honestly pretty difficult. Keep this thread updated with your progress; I'm very interested!

Is there a way to increase the game's tickrate? The 200 tick mge server feels really smooth and cool, but I was wondering if there was a way to do that at the engine level

I think we should consider unbanning bonk. It's not that good outside of tanking a sentry, which would help with attacking last. The original reason it got banned was because people thought it would be too easy to go behind, but I'm pretty sure that's just wrong and it doesn't make going behind way easier.

I agree that we should try this, especially on sultry's left-side door into last from the attacking POV. Someone needs to take over sultry and update it since I'm pretty sure the creator quit

On sultry last there should also be a permanent ledge in the sky on the left side (from the attacking POV), like where soldiers are currently jumping up to spam the gun. If there were a ledge there, it would eliminate the most broken sentry spots without creating a new sniper sightline. I think there should also be something like this for snakewater, but I don't know how you would implement it.

+1 then, hope the benefits of releasing outweigh the costs...

That is crazy, how long has that been around?

If this was already spreading around in cheating circles then it probably makes sense to release, but if not then I agree that releasing it publicly doesn't make a lot of sense.

The Artisan mousepad sponsorship is cool -- how did that happen?

So, after sleeping on it and reading the other posts in this thread, I wanted to ask a few more questions.

1. I don't know how other people feel, but I would rather have 3-4 giant international LANs every year than an entirely new league. If it's truly a part of your mission not to be a direct competitor to RGL, then it makes more sense to do something different. I'm imagining a LAN circuit with weeks-long online qualifiers, etc.; something like this wouldn't interfere with what RGL is doing. Why not do this?
   
   That being said, I don't actually mind if your goal is to overlap/replace RGL, but I'm wondering about this since you keep saying you don't want this new league to be a direct competitor. Given this project's history of going bust, it seems like it would be a lot easier to "test the waters" running a few standalone tournaments, maybe a LAN, before deciding to go all-in on an entire league system. Setting up a league is ambitious -- and in RGL's case requires consistent unpaid work -- so why not host a few tournaments first to build trust in the community, prove that the money exists & that this is real before trying to create an entirely new league system. Hosting a tournament is hard, but creating a new league is, like, at least ten times as hard. Why not do the easy stuff first?
   
   
2. Another question I had, really a request, is whether it's possible for you to be completely transparent on how far along the project is. I don't want to just trust that it will be shipped this year; I think it would really help with people's skepticism if you gave people open access to seeing how much work has actually been done. I want to be able to look at screenshots, videos, or log in to a beta version to see that work is actually being done. I don't want to get in a situation a la Kickstarter where communication goes dark for weeks.
   
   
3. The #1 question I have is about the money. If you had said "I'm wealthy and love TF2 so I'm going to fund it basically out of charity," that would make sense, but this stuff about a business funding everything is confusing. I want to hear directly from the people with the money (you?) the reason why they are throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars away on TF2. And why $40k per season? We'd be grateful with much less, especially if it reduces the chance of the project burning out.

I also wanted to mention that if this ends up working out, I will be a huge supporter, everyone will be grateful and buzzing, and it'll be the best thing to happen to TF2 since I started playing 6 years ago. I'm super excited that this even has a chance to happen. My suggestion right now would be to build trust with the community given your track record of shelved projects.

So the winning invite team will get like $12000? every season? if so that's insane and we should all just play this instead of RGL

also if you have this much money to spend on a league, why not just buy RGL?

Definitely yes. For your situation:

• If you get consistently above 144fps, it's a no-brainer
  
• If you get consistently between 60-144fps, you should still get the 144hz monitor. If you get bad screen tearing (you likely won't but just in case) you can turn g-sync on.

However, like Tob said, 240hz is becoming the new standard for gaming. A lot of 144hz monitors cost <$100 today, and many 1080p 240hz monitors only cost around $150-200 or even less. So you'd only be spending 50 extra dollars (or so) to get a 240hz monitor instead of a 144hz one. IMO if you're planning on upgrading your PC anytime soon, go with a 240hz since they're super cheap right now. If you're not planning on upgrading, go with 144hz.

What's the point of getting so mad ? Like oh no somebody thinks branslam is better than SolidSnake and mackey ... oh the horror ! It's like getting mad that someone has a different favorite color

Really good point. Being at the top in a more competitive era is more impressive than being at the top when you're playing against hunter-gatherers and typewriter repairmen. Saying corsa and duwatna should be ranked over people who literally played in 2008 is like the most mild take ever

it's been like 4 years since the original top 100 list. how do you think the list has changed since then? anyone new in the top 10? top 20?

https://imgur.com/4eSAezu

Btw, I was testing 8k for fun earlier and on an MGE server with 2 players there was 0 noticeable stuttering, but when I switched to a 6s pug it started stuttering. So idk what is up with the engine.

update: i got the op1 8k. 8k hz doesn't work in tf2, but i set it to 4k and don't seem to be having any problems. thanks for the help!