My solution is to basically have zero sandbagging rules at all, other than like a group of advanced players going down to newcomer to run pyro and heavy and still win 5-0 in 10 minutes. Anything short of that, I think it should basically be a free-for-all. Plus, maybe some aggressive roster lock rules for sandbagging players, so you can't swoop in just for playoffs, or come in only to help a team qualify for a div and then bail to a better team right away. Is that concrete enough?

As Pancake said, this framing is still entirely based on moralizing around the sandbagging team themselves, when I think that's completely irrelevant crybaby shit.

Sidebar: it's also hilarious to me that usually the complaint I see is "it sucks when sandbaggers are barely trying and still winning because they're better." But now it's also a problem if they DO try? It almost seems like, no matter what, people will come up for an excuse for why it's unfair that they're losing to a different team.

You're correct, you can't run a league like this. What an amazing waste of resources to have admins trying to like interrogate team leaders and figure out what's in their mind, all to preserve a status quo that everyone hates anyways! If anything, I'd rather those admins devote their resources to making sure the move-up teams (especially to invite) are good enough, rather than that sandbagging teams are bad enough.

And again, why does it NEED to be balanced? Let's say there's 1 team in main or something that is sandbagging and goes 16-0. Who gives a fuck? It's one season. Everyone else should see it as an opportunity to get better for the next season. Also, how common is it really that one team loses like 0 rounds all season? If anything, I've seen froyo do that to invite teams more than I've seen most of these supposed sandbag teams do it to their opponents.

Again with the moralizing. OK, let's accept that those teams staying in the same div are giant cowards, who would rather disband than move up. Great, who cares? Instead of forcing them to disband and having 1 fewer team in your dying league, they stay in the lower division, and eventually players with more ambition will pass them by anyways.

Like I said, I would draw the line way way way beyond where it is in RGL. Admin discretion is only in play so much because we're operating on faulty assumptions in the first place.

I think it sounds like exactly what I already don't like about this whole framework. Why do I care if some guy who got 3rd twice playing scout is still playing scout in my div? If he was really that amazing he'd probably be out of the div anyways.

I 100% agree with everything here. It's even worse in tf2 though, because at least in your example everyone is in a relatively similar age bracket/some kids hit puberty earlier/etc.

In our game, though, I'd be willing to bit that there are genuinely players who have been playing for longer than some of the 'sandbaggers' who return to their division. Not always, of course, but so much of this has always read to me like people being salty that their rate of improvement is slower than the best players, externalizing their frustration by blaming their league environment, and then the cycle of johns just continuing.

Like, let's really think about it for a second. Let's say you're a player who just gets into advanced for the first time, and there's a team that's still significantly better than you- they 5-0 you or 5-1 you at best every single time you play them. Are they up-and-comers, or lifers who have played 5 seasons in advanced? Do they have ex-invite players? Are those invite players mainclassing or offclassing? Are they running a super tryhard schedule and lineup or are they just dicking around in advanced?

My question is- why does any of that matter? All that matters is they're way better than you and your team clearly has a lot to work on. It's just so obvious to me that people moralize about WHY that other team is way better than them because it's easier to just say 'well they don't really DESERVE to win this division' rather than just trying to beat the teams in front of them.

Especially in 2026, when the game is super declining, and it's not like winning main or advanced gets you much, even dwelling on this shit for a second seems preposterous. Maybe if a team is like constantly trying to ring players from a much higher level or something, but even then we're probably stressing too much about it.

I like to remind myself that high invite teams, who in theory represent where everyone else is trying to get to, do not have the luxury of complaining about how stacked their opponents' team is.

https://www.twitch.tv/yight/clip/GorgeousHorribleMallardCorgiDerp

probably either this or yz50 for na tf2, but yeah honestly no equivalent in a more mature era of the game

this is what makes b4nny so impressive, for all his flaws- usually the 'veteran IGL' type and the 'star player' type are two different people

kaidus is the closest to b4nny in terms of being a team leader for a long-running team, followed by papi I suppose, but kaidus definitely was a role player for most of that time (papi maybe less so, but still probably below Lukas and toemas imo)

why the fuck is red light green light by mightyme on here is this a DISGRACE

My hot take is that this isn't nearly as true as people think, bc a lot of players are a lot more comfortable playing one role- more vs less heals/aggression/comms etc

Was Cranberry his team leader when he missed a match due to being arrested for domestic violence

If so that one is hard to top

when I was on a 6s team with Br0nze he gave me FTP access to his server to host tf2lobbies

like a year later I had a highlander match on gravelpit against bpm who used the same server, so I used the FTP access to watch their scrim demo and figure out exactly where they held B and antistratted them

we capped all 3 points in like 2:18

Dingo comes to mind

The original list was surely not perfect, it reflected the biases and idiosyncrasies of the people who worked on it (for example, I think my input is pretty much the main reason Bdonski is crazy high because I always had a really high opinion of him, whereas I know botmode disagreed even at the time when he went over the list). It also probably had a bias towards any player that had been on the very top, even if it was literally just for a year in 2008. But, as others have said, some of these criticisms are unfair, for three main reasons:

1) People are underestimating just how much has changed in 4 years. The G6 dynasty is obviously the best example of this.

2) As market said, there is a big difference between evaluating the objective skill of players vs. evaluating everyone in the context of their era. I think we're all comfortable giving a boost to players who are the best in the modern era when the skill level is the highest (and I think any reasonable person would agree it's the highest now), but that's still only one facet of evaluating players. Jokic might just be the most skilled center in NBA history, but you won't see many people rank him over Kareem yet, because we're just too early in his career to write the full story.

3) A point that I think has gone unaddressed: I think everyone has a bit of rose-colored glasses for the era when they first started watching competitive, while they were still a giant noob compared to the best of the best. For Tery or SpaceCadet or myself, that era was very early on in the game's lifespan. But for a lot of the naysayers here, that era was like 2015-2018, and I think there's some of that going on here too. For instance, hannah said in her post that she thought corsa being 'only' 41st was egregiously low. We're talking about a player who, results-wise, never won a single season of ESEA/RGL, or made the finals of a major international tournament.

Of course, that's not the whole story; corsa was a highly respected player who was considered one of the most skilled scouts in his time period, and that was probably the period that hannah started watching. If we're talking objective results, for instance, corsa would be clearly behind someone like cyzer or tyrone, who won multiple seasons of ESEA and got 2nd place at i46. Yet, talk to anyone around at the time, and neither of them were considered as elite on their class as corsa. That's why you need a blend of criteria, right? But I think that sort of color is kind of lost when you're talking about the earlier eras of tf2, where old farts might remember, say, how influential a roamer like jaeger was, on top of him being on the most dominant team.

On the flip side, hannah complains that Muma is too low, and points to his accomplishments. But we could just as easily point out that he was on the rebuilt froyo after everyone left, one of the weakest versions of the team, and that he totally imploded at that international LAN to the point that b4nny was literally trying to get WARHURYEAH to replace him at the event. If you go by placements, maybe 95 IS far too low. But would you apply that same standard to a tyrone or a Mackey, who won FAR more but who were probably even more tarred with the 'carried by b4nny' label? It's easy to pick whichever criteria supports a particular player the most, but it gets more complicated when you weigh everything for every player.

Ultimately, you'd run into the same conflict if you did this list today, just with the timelines moved up a couple years. How could anyone compare corsa or duwatna to caps or logan? At that point, it'll be the people who really grew up in that middle period of tf2 who are trying to explain just how good the previous generation was

Mongolian Pro League, ofc

Thr streets are asking for more team photos

Real talk tho, EU won in large part because they had adamantium mental, one of the most tilt-proof teams I've ever seen

we need higher tariffs