Hi all,

Sorry about the RGL site being down temporarily. Our hosting service contacted us to apologize for the situation. They're working on fixing it now.

Thanks for your patience.

Send thanks Aad, Virgil, and Exa's way! The final decision was last second, and they were able to make the logistics work.

We care very much. Because of the emotional complexity of situation like this, it makes sense why--whatever the result--there's persisting issues and frustrations. It can be mentally taxing, and I'm grateful for those that can do it level-headed. We're doing our best to look into it and make good decisions.

Thanks for your patience.

a sniper who actually gets picks. super chill too

Sounds like it. Hopefully that RMA form works out.

I'm sure you've already tried this too, but odd computer settings could cause adaptive brightness:
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/fix-screen-dims-when-playing-games-on-full-screen

That would be my last idea besides what you've already done. Good luck

By "disabling full screen optimizations," did you put the following into launch options:
-w 1920 -h 1080 -windowed -noborder

It could be that your monitor, for some reason, doesn't think it could support your resolution. So, messing around with your resolution might help too. I had this issue with my new monitor, and the launch options I listed above fixed it.

Happy Holidays!

We are making a new website!

But wait, it’s not what you’d initially think. It won’t outright replace the current website. Instead, it will offer opportunities to grow and improve the competitive scene in significant ways. For sake of clarity, it will be called the New Player Experience.

Development Team
Technical Project Manager: Arcadia
Designer: RaosCometh
Developer: Mori (from More.tf)
Resources: Flare and WildRumpus

So, before I dive in, let me set the scene:

Problem Statements
1. TF2’s Millenium Puzzle: the chasm between casual and competitive TF2 is too wide

• No clear funnel or in-game integration that leads players to competitive TF2
  
• RGL’s frontpage UI is confusing and unique visitor retention isn’t strong enough

2. RGL’s Developmental Roadblock: the current website’s stack is great for what we already have, but it prevents us from adding features we’d love to have in the community

• Demo hosting
  
• Centralized resources
  
• Season stats

Solutions
1. New website

• A more modern stack
  
• A landing page that is geared towards new players and “replaces” RGL’s current homepage
  
• A gamified path that motivates the new player to dive deeper
  
• Centralized resources: interactive class and map guides, optimization, customization, community Discords, projects, etc.

2. Funnel

• Improve the Discord onboarding experience
  
• Guide them to Newbie Mixes and TF2 Coaching Central where they can start playing immediately as well as meet friends and coaches
  
• Guide them to RGL PUGs and other PUG platforms

3. RGL Ambassadors

• This new role will fill the spaces in between where the funnel might fail
  
• The label will serve to help newcomers identify trustworthy people to bring them into the community
  
• It is meant for experienced players who want to build/maintain the scene through:
  - Recruiting casual players
  - Identifying team leaders that will learn the RGL website
  - Encouraging those leaders to create a team with their friends and become recruiters themselves
  - Supporting the efforts of other organizations who work to build the community (Newbie Mixes and TF2 Coaching Central)
  
• Anecdotal evidence #1: My path to competitive was convoluted. Luckily, my friend was an early leader. He took it upon himself to learn the RGL website, create a Discord server, and find other new players for our team.
  
• Anecdotal evidence #2: In season 3, I experimented with and recruited a team that played in Amateur. It started from a casual conversation with a Skial pub player. I helped him create a Discord, and he brought in multiple friends.

4. Marketing

• RGL has plans to leverage marketing outreach and target the best demographics through multiple channels as well

For Experienced Players
The current website will continue to exist. Though the new website will be targeted toward guiding new players, there will be features to come that experienced players can enjoy. For those interested in becoming an RGL Ambassador when the role opens up, consider volunteering as a coach in the Newbie Mixes Team Drive.

Conclusion
We aim to have a full release by April 2023. In the meantime, we will continuously post updates and pictures of our progress. This question has undoubtedly been in every passionate TF2 player’s mind at one time or another, so we'd love to hear your ideas below.

TL;DR We’re developing a new website to create solutions to onboard and recruit new players, accelerate their learning, and improve the future population of TF2.

Yuss

Yeah, that'll be possible with the logs integration as well!

We would like to welcome everyone on our new Development team at RGL:

Developer Head: Aad, arcadia
Developers: DubThink, StillKill, Mori, RoGue, Kastaling, DolphiN
Design Head: RaosCosmeth

The above members will contribute to RGL projects, both current and future, and here are some of their upcoming short-term and long-term projects:

Short-term
- Replacing the Prolander structure with Offseason Cups
- Renaming Trad. Sixes to just Sixes everywhere
- RGL Darkmode

Medium-term
- Allowing all divisions to add team pictures
- Allowing all divisions to add team bios
- Logs integration
- Event creation support

Long-term
- Demo hosting
- Season stats

These were popular changes requested by the community, and as more suggestions crop up, we will ensure consistent updates.

We’d love to make more improvements, so please give us your thoughts below!

It will likely continue to slowly decline, but TF2 seems to be a gaming mainstay, and we might even have another pandemic lol. If anything, friend pug servers can fill the void in the absence of TF2C.

I'd be open to RGL and ETF2L working together more closely or even consolidating in the future if worse comes to worse.

This has been a major request from developers around the competitive community for years. RGL has all of this data about players, matches, team history, and so much more, yet there hasn’t been a good way to access it.

Well, with the help of a new team of developers, we are excited to announce that we are finally creating an RGL API.

For those people who don’t know what this is, this service will allow anyone to send requests to RGL programmatically to get information back. For example, say someone wanted to get a player’s real alias given a steamID, this would allow that. Or, another example from the past, the only way to keep track of rosters or matches was to manually look at the site; now, the data can be easily requested through the API.

• For the developer community, this opens up a world of possibilities to build their projects on data that hasn’t been publicly available in the past.
  
• For existing projects, we hope this can bring a breath of new life.
  
• For the wider competitive community, we hope that everyone can enjoy new community projects made possible by this.

Here is a blurb from arcadia who is leading the project:

"Hi everyone. Many of you know me as a middling medic player. But by day, I am a software engineer. Taylor has given me and other community devs a unique and unprecedented channel to make changes, improvements, and additions to the software at RGL.

I was asked to keep this under wraps for far too long - I am extremely excited to share my ideas and thoughts with the community and utilize my skills to seek positive change for everyone.

That being said, software is highly complex, so as we are all doing this pro bono, the changes will come slowly for now. Once we build a development environment and team structure we’re really happy with, I hope that others will be able to join and grow and build on top of what we have done. Excited to share more soon."

- arcadia (Kyle)

For developers who are involved with existing or potential projects that want to get an early look at the API, we have an alpha and are looking for participants. Please contact us at pm.rglgg@gmail.com
For developers looking to get involved with an RGL project, or if you have any ideas or suggestions for RGL services and think you could bring value, submit an application here: https://rgl.gg/Players/Reporting/StaffApplication.aspx

Yeah... this is an ouchy announcement. The announcements to come are much sweeter lol.

When I joined RGL, the first thing I thought was, "Where the fookin' hell were RGL PUGs?" I learned that B4nny was leading it, so I mistakenly thought that B4nny's project was under the RGL umbrella. After being a dick for a bit, I realized that they have taken the time out of their lives to develop a great pug system, and it's attachment to RGL just gets in the way. So, I wish them luck and am excited to play on the pug site when it comes out.

I agree that it's been a bit of a vague mess, and it sucks we don't have shit for you today. But, it's important to me to start on the right foot and accelerate the timeline. I just wanna pug, man

Hey everybody!

Since officially joining RGL two months ago, I’ve neglected my real-life job (<-- this is a joke for legal reasons). I dove head first into learning the ins and outs of the RGL structure as well as RGL’s impact on the history, drama, and perpetual puzzles of the TF2 community. Historically, I’ve been pessimistic about the upside of TF2’s potential as an esport, and ironically, that sentiment has been disproved time and time again: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1056510/team-fortress-2-number-players-steam/

TF2 really is a beautifully diverse game with a strange community and aesthetic so strong that it not only stays alive, it outlives almost every other game. I can’t help but be inspired.

As a long-time forum lurker and TF2 market landscape nerd, I had a sense of what needed to be done regarding RGL, and I set out to push for many changes and new developments.

Fortunately, I’ve met incredibly capable staff members and developers that share the same passion for TF2, and they have raised my vision. We’ve conducted dozens of interviews with players, created new bridges with other TF2 organizations, began collaborating with community developers, parsed the forums for critiques and suggestions, and storyboarded ideas for weeks. Finally, we’ve broken ground on projects that will improve the quality of RGL as a service and potentially invigorate the competitive scene in a significant way. All of this comes from the constructive feedback we’ve read from the community, so thank you!

Anyway, ADVENT CALENDAR. It’s cheesy, but in the spirit of the holidays, we will be announcing a new project every day with the biggest one landing on the 25th!

Some age-old questions will be answered, and some new developments will come as a surprise. We’re excited to include the community along the way!

Tune in tomorrow night to see the first announcement!

Day 1 - An Update on RGL PUGs (Dec. 22nd)
Day 2 - Public API (Dec. 23rd)
Day 3 - Current Website Changes (Dec. 24th)
Day 4 - RGL New Player Experience (Dec. 25th)

I will post the links here as they come out.

Yeah, that has seemed to be the forever issue. There's two camps: players eager to learn new maps and players that only want familiar maps. Reckoner, in particular, has had a hard life in RGL lol. I personally like learning different maps and keeping the map pool fresh and want to support active map developers, but there's so many varying opinions on what the rotating maps should be, so it seems that RGL has based their decisions on the popularity of the maps from survey polls.

Beast, imma watch