I'll try to talk about this then.

1.) This rule is proven unenforceable. Players have and continue to submit fake demos while getting away with it because RGL requests so many they can't check them all. Considering that players have submitted fake demos even recently I have to assume RGL has not made any progress on developing a tool to automate sending and checking random demo requests. This rule can be considered ineffective at providing benefit to the league because players already can sidestep the intended effect of the rule (i.e. not record demos)

2.) There is also something to be said over not every div admin actually bothering to send demo checks. It has a certain kind of irony that div admins can't be bothered to request demos like they are told to, and then proceed to punish players for not recording like they are told to.

3.) Lets do some math and figure out how burdensome the current rules would be on average players.

A player who plays HL+6s regular seasons would have an average of
[(1/6)*(16) + (1/9)(7)] = ~3.44 demo checks per season, or ~10.33 demo checks per year.
Over 4 years this would come out to an average of 41 demo checks. I can easily believe this number because I have been demo checked 5 times over ~20-30 officials.

This player with a 90% pass rate over 4 years of average demo checks would be permabanned from the league, and with a 92.6% pass rate would incur a season long ban towards the end of that 4 year period.

If somebody responds to this post with some shit like "Imagine If You Ran 10% Of All Red Lights You Encountered" or something similar ill be disappointed and not likely to engage in discussion any farther.

I think a big disconnect for the ETF2L players posting in this thread is that ETF2L likely requests a magnitude less of random checks from them, so failing 3 or 4 demo checks is a noticeably harder ordeal. Given that etf2l still has a handful of players banned from missing demo checks, if you increase the magnitude of checks tenfold, I imagine it would be noticeably more than just a handful. You consider it reasonable for warnings to expire after 4 years, but also probably receive 1/4th of the warnings/checks or less. I'm not an ETF2L player so I might be speaking out of my ass, but I don't really see this being discussed.

4.) As I talked about in earlier posts, anticheat can still do their job effectively even with warnings expiring in, say, a year. Atempts to abuse that system could easily be punished in a multitude of ways, and practically speaking nobody who is going to cheat in this game will wait for the free demo check fail whenever they decide to. Demo check warnings expiring to give leniency for the occasional mistake is never going to be deciding factor on whether AC can determine if a player is cheating anyways.

If you believe that no mistakes should go unpunished except the first over a 4 year period, I think that is absurd given that for the average player missing a demo check is completely benign. The normal player is still incentivized to record demos if they receive 10 demo checks per year, making a failed check expire after 1 year is not going to change much in practice besides making it much easier for players to avoid 3month bans / Permabans.

5.) When considering the impact this rule has on the anticheat team- they have operated with this system of warnings not expiring since the 6s league's inception and have still been completely ineffective in multiple circumstances.

The anticheat team has probably gotten 1 permaban on a suspected cheater for 4 demo infractions and uses that as justification for the rule existing in its current form- as if they need it to be this exact way to accomplish that instead of just idk, requesting multiple demos at once shortly after the first failed check.

Ultimately my opinion basically boils down to:
I do not think a rule being consistent justifies it being absurd. No matter which way you spin it average non-cheating members of the community will make benign mistakes and forget to record demos / setup configs improperly / what have you. I myself missed my 2nd demo check because I had done a reinstallation of the game and discovered that the valve autorecord feature turned off when I did so despite no other option in the advanced option menu doing so to telegraph to me that I needed to check this. Obviously with hindsight I know why this happened, but in the moment its not something you think about. The idea of getting 41 checks and only have 1 miss be free, a second being a stern warning with a 2 week ban, and then major seasonal/permabans after seems like overkill to me personally. This isn't something like driving a car where running 1/10th of your red lights will kill pedestrians, it isn't something like slur bans where you need to make an active decision to say hateful things. This is a rule designed to encourage players to record demos for an anticheat team, that's all. People should be allowed to make infrequent mistakes, and suspected cheaters looking to abuse that avenue can still be gotten at with a bit of brainpower.

None of this post relates to antler's case specifically, so do try to tie any of this to his circumstances thank you.

RGL random checks are 1 player per team in each match (assuming the div admins actually follow through with policy, which not all do)
If you play 6s actively this averages to 8 demo checks per year (16 matches * 3 seasons * 1/6th chance), and the chance also rises slightly if you play HL.

Assuming the normal ETF2L player has a similar experience to you and has provided 3 per demos per 5 years (0.6 per year) this would mean you submit roughly 13x the amount of the demos in RGL than ETF2L.

I personally have been demo checked 5 times since random demo checks started getting enforced (roughly a year ago) and I've played about 20 officials in that time between 6s and HL.

He shouldn't be banned as if it his his third offense when his first warning was 1.5 years ago and most normal people agree should have expired. This should be a 2 week ban.

Failing demo checks is largely something that punishes players innocent of cheating and this is by design so that all players will record demos. Since this is known and acknowledged it should also follow that the rule includes ways for players who are clearly not malicious to have some sort of forgiveness so that a moment of negligence doesn't result in them being banned for an entire season over two warnings they incurred potentially four years ago.

Random checks do not catch people for cheating, they are incentive for players to record all of their matches so AC knows those demos exist when they request them for AC purposes. This isn't controversial, and is freely admitted by all RGL staff I've talked to. I also never claimed that they shouldn't happen- just that missing one should be forgiven after a reasonable length of time (aka: not 4 years).

And yeah, the AC team in RGL is hugely understaffed and ineffective so there really is no point to them making sure people have their demos anyways. Their excuse for not opening cases against known cheaters in the past has been "nobody submitted a formal report". Nobody outside of exa/sigafoo/the AC team knows how many people are actually in it- but my educated guess is no more than 3 active members and its also likely none of them are super active in the community.

Antler's specific case is an example of the rule punishing somebody innocent, but isn't the end all be all of what makes this rule stupid.
The concept of warnings not expiring for 4 years for something this trivial is just silly, and I don't feel like it should be controversial at all.

Hypothetical arguments about abusing a system where warnings expire does not reflect reality- there is no upper limit on the frequency you can request demos or the quantity which you can request at the same time after their first failed check.

If somebody is suspected of being a cheater you will have plenty of chances to catch them in the act or threaten a cheating ban by 4+ unsubmitted demos in a year if you stop obsessing about "We Cant Let Them Know We Suspect Them" (As if there have literally ever been anticheat bans where the community isn't already suspect of players first)

For the cases where players might cheat super rarely or just once- they are either getting away with it because nobody notices it OR they are really blatant because they don't practice keeping cheats hidden. There is practically no in-between for them.

"Over and over again" does not mean once per year. I also feel like a 3 month ban is far from inconsequential. That's an entire season of tf2, and probably unrefunded league fees to make it sting more.

When viewed from a "worst case scenario" this rule is really obviously overkill. You can miss demo checks on October 1st 2020, sometime in the year 2022, and September 30th 2024 and get banned for a full season for in your words "failing at a basic task three times" as if there aren't huge gaps in time between those occurrences and this isn't totally unreasonable.

This is also relevant, the AC team in RGL has not had false positives- but it has also let known cheaters continue to play actively. They are understaffed and ineffective as an extension of that. Rules made to benefit them that largely punish innocent players come off as extremely tone-deaf. Mxr was allowed to play an entire season when every 6s admin knew he was cheating and couldn't do anything about it waiting for AC to eventually get around to his case (or not, because he got banned for showing his cheats on stream rather than any investigative work). Its decidedly uncool to know you got banned for 2 weeks / 3 months because of an overly strict rule imposed by the lads responsible for that situation.

http://puu.sh/IfWLk/4caa411d6c.png

This rule was added sometime around august of this year.

This rule is bad, 4 years for a failed demo check to expire is an obviously stupid idea. This rule was apparently copied from ETF2L and was motivated for anticheat reasons, so this is a callout for ETF2L admins who think this is a good idea as well.

Make failed demo checks expire in a reasonable time.

This system accomplishes nothing productive for anticheat, and largely only results in punishment for innocent players. I do not care how you have rationalized to yourself that anticheat needs this system, they simply do not. I do not care how you have rationalized that "its easy to record demos", 4 years is an absurd length of time to demand only 1 mistake over something this inconsequential. If you failed a demo check on your first match of RGL 6s in S1 it would be barely over half way to expiring as of today.

soldier adv only

i will probably be banned for 2 weeks around october 1st for missing a demo check

i can sub for scrims tho and after that i would enjoy playing/subbing for a chill team

Bo3 grands with no kind of advantage for upper bracket is aids.

Whoever comes from lower bracket has lost a match already because they were in lower bracket. If the upper bracket winner loses a bo3 in grands they would have the same playoffs record as the other team, but would arbitrarily be 2nd instead of playing again to settle the score.

Making halftimes shorter is up to the players. Even if admins put something in the rulebook nobody wants to punish a player for using the restroom or whatever during halftime in grand finals.

Only playing 1 half per map is an option (and would allow for bracket reset to be viable) but its probably not being requested in large by the community or teams in invite playoffs. ESEA played maps out fully for eons so that's what people are used to

it was implemented on popular request of invite players in s1

no team wanted bracket reset grand finals (including froyo, who would benefit from it the most) because they didn't want to potentially have to play a 6+ hour of raw gametime grand finals or split it up over multiple days

nobody in rgl makes money

there are plenty of great arguments to make about why rgl sucks but its a complete and 100% fact that all money paid into league fees goes into prize pots / lan funds and nowhere else.

yeah

why would u want to give a spy that gets a sap/stab even more value tho

those things are already crazy good

also ur just incentivizing a spy to stab a roamer or a similar low value pick if the other team is aware so he can try to cheese with the crits

u can subvert the bonk speed debuff by spamming the movement keys perpendicular to the direction ur trying to go (a/d when going forward and back, w/s when going side to side) for anyone who doesn't know

Tbh the only way to fully stop stalemating is to not let the game have situations where its a viable choice. I have never seen a game pull that off without timer pressure. In our current 5cp time pressure is usually irrelevant, and I don't think forcing more in would necessarily fix the problem so much as introduce other equally degenerate stuff. Koth and Stopwatch have a very clear differentiation between the defending team and offensive team, but in 5cp all time pressure usually ever does is force the team that should be playing defensively to throw and try for a push. I'm pretty much fine with where 5cp stands despite its problems. It feels fun to me.

Koth is probably the only realistic solution if this problem is something you consider a high priority.

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