The original idea of the Challenge Cup was to find if we could create a format which allowed class viablity, while still having a fast paced, dynamic game. When Prolander worked so incredibly well at that, it as hard not to continue with it.

I have plans to host some experimental cups with different rules to see how they play. I'm not stuck on the seven players being the best number and anything less is wrong. What I am stuck on, is believing that having all classes be viable in comp. I believe that makes the game more interesting. And whatever player count that comes to, that's fine with me. If it's 4,5,6 or 7. If it works, then great.

I believe when they talk about the "dynamic"-ness of it, they're more referencing that class selection is more dynamic in Prolander than sixes. In sixes you see only a subset of classes in the game for a majority of the game. Whereas in Prolander all classes virtually are genuinely viable at all times.

When it comes to to actual dynamic-ness of strategy (how to push, what routes, how to break stalemates, etc...) I don't think you could say sixes (or any format really) isn't dynamic in that way. Of course it is.

Fair point, though this was a one day cup. Meant as a way to to try out the format, so a majority of people who played/responded to this survey have not played prolander in our team setting prior. After the NA one day cup, our NA league size doubled the next season.

So it's definitely fair that we're going to appeal to people who enjoy all classes in tf2 and enjoy the most popular map types, but this was also the first time people had a go at it and they liked it. They easily could of thought negatively or neutral about it, but they didn't, they overwhelmingly enjoy it.

EU.RGL.gg Season 1 Registration is live

The league is completely FREE.

After seeing the size and success of our EU Prolander One Day Cup, we decided to open up our new league to be free to everyone. We even provide your team with a match server to play on.

Prizepool: $1,000

If you have some competitive experience under your belt, I suggest jumping into: RGL-Invite, Div-1 or Div-2. If you're newer to competitive TF2 player or just someone who's a bit lower leveled. Jump into our recreational division.

What people have to say about Prolander

We hosted a One Day Cup earlier this month with 62 teams registered! We had a survey for our first cup in NA and I was astounded by the results. Over 90% of the people who filled out survey said they enjoyed playing Prolander. Here are some of the responses:

• "Yes! 7s is my favorite format. More dynamic than 6s, Less clunky/congested than HL."
  
• "Yeah, it was fun to play competitive for the first time, and I liked that you could class switch."
  
• "Prolander is my favorite format to watch competitive TF2, and it was also fun to play."
  
• "it was a an interesting take on highlander that really mixes it up. there was a lot of discussion on my team on what maps we needed certain classes on for strategy purposes."

Finding a team

If you're looking for a team. Make a post in our looking for team section of the RGL website. Also make sure to check back occasionally and see what teams are posting in the teams looking for players section of the RGL website.

Register now!

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If you haven't seen Prolander before, I suggest you check out some of our best matches:

• Season 3 - Coalplant - (Mo' Money) Faint Gaming vs Froyotech
  
• Season 3 - Badwater - (Mo' Money) Faint Gaming vs Velocity Esports
  
• Season 2 - Quarter-Finals - Faint Gaming vs Ascent
  
• Season 1 - Viaduct - Cat Noises vs Froyotech

Thanks!

idontevenknow

It had many obvious big issues? Lets talk about this. I did talk to several of the players after the challenge cup. Most of the primarily sixes players thought that it wasn't better than sixes, but liked it more than highlander. Most of the highlander players really enjoyed it thought it was better than HL as well.

The biggest complaints I got were around the pick/ban system. That it was cumbersome and slow. Which is completely fair we were using an almost entirely manual process for that. And the site I'm working on right now will have time limits and a more intuitive interface to help take care of those issues.

The other main complaint was around snipers. In particular the weapons DDS and Razorback. Because there was only 4 total bans at the start, teams were kind of put up against a wall. Do they ban the broken weapon or do they ban something strategically and hope the other team bans the broken weapon for them. So rather than using strategy to make decision, both teams wanted to ban the same thing, but wanted the other team to waste their ban on it.

On top of this, I have data to back this up: 95% of the time, In the first 4 bans during the challenge cup, one of those two weapons was banned. After getting this feedback and looking at the data, I decided to make the DDS and Razorback banned by default during the P/B process.

Looking at the format, the biggest weakness I saw was when it was being played on 5cp. It just was sluggish and didn't really play well. Which isn't the most surprising given that, that map type rewards fast classes. So with that in mind, I do not have any 5cp in season 1.

When it comes to the prolander format, I didn't get any other real feedback from what I recall of what should be changed to make it better. Even looking at the thread after the challenge cup: http://www.teamfortress.tv/post/672566/sigafoo-cup-hype.

No one is giving feedback on how the format could be improved.

Pretty much everyone who commented in that thread after the cup actually happened, basically said. It was actually okay, even if it wasn't their cup of tea.

And to the people who for some reason keep saying this was tried many years ago and decided was awful. Here is a list of major updates that happened in between the last time a variation on this format was attempted and the challenge cup.

The Manniversary Update October 13, 2011
Very Scary Halloween Special October 27, 2011
Australian Christmas 2011 December 15, 2011
Pyromania June 27, 2012
Mann vs. Machine August 15, 2012
Scream Fortress IV Update October 26, 2012
The Second Annual Saxxy Awards November 30, 2012
The Mecha Update December 20, 2012
100% Community-Created Update Robotic Boogaloo May 17, 2013
Scream Fortress V Update October 29, 2013
The Two Cities Update November 21, 2013
The Third Annual Saxxy Awards November 26, 2013
Smissmas 2013 December 20, 2013
Love & War June 18, 2014
The Fourth Annual Saxxy Awards October 1, 2014
Scream Fortress VI Update October 29, 2014
End Of The Line Update December 8, 2014
Smissmas 2014 December 22, 2014
Gun Mettle Update July 2, 2015
Invasion Community Update October 6, 2015
Scream Fortress VII Update October 28, 2015
The Fifth Annual Saxxy Awards November 18, 2015
Tough Break Update December 17, 2015
The Meet Your Match Update July 7, 2016

To say that something was tried before this game was even F2P is definitive proof that it doesn't work is a bit confusing to me. Especially given that we have a cup from 6 months ago which showed that it did work well.

Either way, if you can point me to this "detailed feedback" as you call it, that I did not find nor was brought up when talking directly with the players. Definitely pass that along to me, as I'm open to feedback on this stuff. I've actually already changed a couple minor things already on the site/rules after talking to people.

Also just real quick since people seem to be taking my words out of context around the meta. If you watch the video, I never call anything a stale meta or anything close to it. My point was more that, people often (in most games) get wrapped up thinking there's only one way to play something. And that I don't want RGL's community to stifle someone attemping to run pyro in the rec league, just because froyo doesn't do that. There's more to it then that, but I explain most of it in the video as well as in the mission statement of my site.

This is definitely not true. The cheat feed is incredibly easy to set up. You just need the server ip, and rcon or sv_logsecret. EVL and I both used cheat feeds on all NA UGC matches. Now whether or not you can get rcon/sv_logsecret info from ESEA, I'm not sure, but it has nothing to do with europe, logs.tf or is tough to set up if you have the correct data.

To my knowledge the status spec plugin is no longer working, but honestly when it was I'm surprised it wasn't used more in production. It's a really easy way not only to tag people up correctly, which makes it easier for casters, but also gives a team cohesion and profession look to the cast. And it only takes maybe 10-20 minutes to set up, one time, for a team.

Here's an example of the difference it can make.

http://i.imgur.com/Vwb4Jev.png

On the left you can see we force aliased everyone and also added team tags to the cast to make our cast more professional and easier to follow. On the right you can see they didn't do anything to try to fix them / left them as is.

I agree though, the best option would be to have players actually tag up properly.

It's not a ton of work though it depends on the league. UGC is actually pretty easy to get peoples steamIds from. This is what the config looks like once it's set up. Once you set up the team one time, you're good. Only thing is if they have a sub/ringer, but then it's literally just adding in one more person. Which should only take a minute or two.

I'm not sure what about my demeanor has given off that I got mad. Switching this to sevens is something I originally wanted to do. If you look at my original video release before anyone even knew about the challenge cup "I was thinking really hard of doing sevens, honest to god, I'm very tempted to go to sevens." This wasn't something I just pulled out after reading through the responses. And I did listen to the opinions of people. I changed my koth maps, added in bagel. Also took out vanguard and put in something more conventional of metal works. As well as increase the number of bans.

What happened was, I changed (my original idea) to fit closer to what we have currently in the community (sixes). Once this was released, I saw the push back against the idea and realized that no matter what I release. If it's not traditional sixes, it'll get push back. I realized I'd rather stand behind the tournament I originally wanted than to change it to something I wasn't fully behind.

I don't think I advertised this as looking to provide valuable information to the sixes community. If anything that was more of a side effect than my intention. My intention was to create tournament of a non-tradtional format and see what happens. (e.g. change class limits, weapons and maps.) If anything this wouldn't really make a lot of sense, I was changing so many variables from traditional sixes. Who knows if it would of even provided anything truly useful.

I thought nite had a nice post explaining why multiple smaller cups would be better for trying to get info out of the cup(s). Since one big one, probably wouldn't really do that.

I see this more akin to something like Rocket Leagues 10k - Mid-Season Mayhem. Where it's not doing anything serious, but challenging players to new situations.

I plan to stick to this. I'm sorry that I didn't stick to (this) my original idea to begin with. That was shitty of me and I didn't intend to make this a bait and switch like thing.

I did play testing of this format prior to the switch to make sure it didn't play horrible and honestly it was pretty good. Better than I was anticipating. Pretty much everyone who played in it liked it and even from that pug alone, they've formed a team to enter into the cup. I hope this could be fun or maybe it won't. It's an experiment :). Maybe it'll flop and be terrible and stupid, but hey... at least someone got 1.5k for it.

Anyone who is looking for a team or teams looking for players. I just created a discord channel that you can use to link up. discord.gg/SakzBhP. Currently there are about four teams who are close to having full rosters after the first day of registration and I just accepted the first one into the cup.

Hey guys,

massive delusional idiot lolhighlander sigafoo here

Apologies for the switch up, but I'm pressing on. Besides the class / team changes, everything is pretty much the same. I did some play testing of this last night and it actually played fairly smoothly on payload and koth. Obviously it's experimental, but I'm looking forward to it :).

Any of you who don't want to play, that's cool. I expect to be torn apart in this thread as per usual, but people who are interested. Currently the prize pool is at $2,160 and I think it'll get to around 2.5k.

Rules and such can be seen at cup.sigafoo.tv

And you can register your team at register.sigafoo.tv

Thanks <3

Ha, do you want to know the story behind that?

It's pretty simple, prior to the merger of EVL and extv. We were talking in a mumble about ways to help grow the brand of EVL, since frankly it wasn't very highly thought of at the time. One area I thought they could do better was their youtube channel, since to this day it still only has 150 subs. I suggest to them that I could be like their luckyluke + extine combo. I'd create and produce content for their channel on a weekly basis. Since this would go above and beyond... and just be fairly time consuming, plus they'd be making money / growing their brand off of it. In return for this extra work, that I could take a fairly small part of ownership of the brand that I'm helping to grow and also this would incentivize me to help push it further.

We talked it over, and ultimately they decided against it. And I never thought about it again. It was literally like a brain storming sessions where we were throwing around different ideas. Which is why I was really surprised to see this come up in their response. The hilarious part is that EVL paying me for casting came up and I declined it. I've never asked, demanded or been paid for casting. Actually that's not true, one time extv gave me a check and I passed the money along to kip.

I don't think I can say it better than how saam put it.

Hey everyone, haven't posted on here in forever.

To answer some questions. I agree that ashville or coalplant should not be both on there. I didn't communicate effectively like I did with vanguard about that. I mostly did that, because I want at least 3 koth maps. Definitely shout out some interesting koth maps. I saw koth_bagel I'll take a look at that. Same with borneo, of the 3 PL maps that's the one I'm most iffy on.

I know I'm alone in my liking of vanguard (6s and HL), hence why I put that one as potential to change. Since I didn't see a traditional ESEA map that fit the type of 5cp's I wanted. If you guys have suggestions for that, please toss it out as well. Definitely not badlands and snakewater I'm iffy on. Maybe metalworks.

For why I decided to put money into this, it's pretty simple. I wanted to have people actually try it. If I just put this up and there was no prize or a tiny one, it probably wouldn't have gotten a lot of traction. This incentivizes players to actually try it out and maybe even come up with unique strategies just for this format.

Finally I think Critic summed it up well

This thread is needlessly long.

It's pretty simple, I think cczund hit the nail on the head. cbunz is an ambitious person, trying to put together a new team with not a ton of comp experience. I think that shows an eagerness to learn and try. I've played with her several times, and talked with her many more. She clearly is a person who enjoys to play the game has a desire to get better at it.

My personal account with her is when helping guide her with some positioning when playing highlander. She was very receptive and was able to start doing it pretty quickly.

I'm not sure you can ask much more out of a person you want out of a team.

Definitely worth a try out.

Basically this, I probably should of been more social than I was, though I still met a fair number of people. It was a bunch of fun to just play the game around other people and casting for part of the night was a blast too.

Thanks to everyone who set it up, prior to and during. Hopefully I see most of you guys out at GXL :D