I think our article explains our position well:

To expand on this...
The way that it works is that we look at the quality of a roster, separate from the claims of off classing and place you on that. So if you make a high level Invite roster, but everyone is "off-classing" then we'd say you can off class in Invite all you want. If you are an Invite player and you have a roster with a mix of skill level. Then it'd make more sense for us to place them down a div into Advance.

And if your team of off-classing players can perform at a mid-level in that same div that they're playing in. Why should they be dropped down a div just so they can win it? If off-classing is truly just a fun season, then winning shouldn't be as important and a mid-table finish can still get you into playoffs.

Because when it comes to off-classing/sand bagging, if you fuck up and allow someone in too low of a div. You've fucked over an entire division. If you placed a player too high, you fucked over one person/team and you can always adjust for them next season. And given how much sandbagging has been accepted and prevalent in NA leagues prior to us. I think taking a more cautious approach in favor of the many, not the few, is the better way to go.

I think all of your points are fair and I think our goal should be to come to some universal standard. I just got done chatting for a little while with you on discord, as I wanted to understand your position better and explain mine as well. And I appreciate you taking the time at 5am to chat with me <3.

I think it's just a difference of mindset. What's more important, being able to be nimble and adaptive to your community and league. Or be more structure and plotting.

I would argue that RGL's success is in part because we've are very open-minded to our own community. Listen to concerns, criticisms, and ideas with an open ear and go from there. We aren't afraid to try new ideas and push them forward or pivot and change if they're not working.

What we want, is what you want, which is what everyone wants. Growth in TF2. And I think it's just a balance of what will get us there and we think part of what will get us there is having a nimble and adaptive mindset.

So a couple of different things, we have always lowered the price of playing as a rostered player throughout the season. So come playoffs is 50% of the starting price.

We haven't got it set in stone, but our plan is to create a new system where players can purchase a small block of passes. (e.g. you pay to play in 3 matches, rather than a full season.) Then every match you play in it removes from your stock. Whether that's with your team or with another ringing.

Matches are going to be streamed on our RGL channels either RGLgg or RGLgg2, we'd cover 1 to 3 matches per week. One thing that was mentioned is that we'd like to try to work with Invite teams to purposefully stack their matches so we can do double match coverage on the same night, but that'll depend on how willing the invite teams are to do that. What times for the matches? I'm not sure, as many teams reschedule their matches.

Hopefully, though we'll have one night which is a consistent night with a match that we cover. Probably Wednesday.

EDI: I also reached out to Marmaloo directly and clarify on the first part. He was asking how are we going to cast 4 formats at once. We aren't. The plan is to have only two formats per "season." We have the main season which is 10 weeks for our most popular formats. And then an 8-week "offseason" for the other formats.

I have about 6 admins right now who are actively slotted to be working with us. We didn't do any voting, not sure how that'd work, but they applied. I talked to them 1 on 1 and went from there. Currently, our admin staff for sixes is light on experience, which is not great, but fortunately, I've had several people reach out who are higher level who are interested.

So we might be adding in 2-3 more higher level players who are more familiar with the community and can help rank players better for placements and such. At the very least, we might "contract" some players in the pre-season to help with rankings.

We will be making our staff public in our next public release about the season, once we have it 100% sorted with who's doing what divisions, etc....

See above

We don't let players change their name lightly. They need to have it, keep and sustain it. The other thing to is that we don't enforce aliases outside of casted matches. Mostly the aliases policy is for the viewer to be able to easily track players season over season. Also also not get confused when someone get's called garbugio over and over again, despite the stream name listed as purpleshirt. I don't think that experience is good for viewers who are not in depth in the scene.

We have changed names for players on the site a few times, so we are willing to do it.

No

As it would stand now Home team would have to choose a server where both teams get a reasonable ping. If a server cannot be found, admins can help them obtain one which works well enough for the situation.

That's a really tough call, generally it just really depends on the context. Like if they were in Advance, they'd likely stomp advance, then we'd push them into Invite. If Advance was really strong with some pseudo-Invite teams, then we'd be more likely to let them stay. Also depends on the health of Invite and who these players are. Are they trying to dodge Invite for an easy win? Are they just some up and coming players with a strong roster? etc...

We also would talk and work with the team and keep them updated with what we're doing and try to get their perspective as to what they believe is correct.

For that situation a lot of things to take into account for making the final decision. So I cannot give you a black and white answer, as it's a gray area and context is everything, but that's some of our thought processes when looking at it.

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Also thanks to everyone who's signed up, we've already had a staggering 35 teams started already!

We are planning to merge all discord into one eventually. Eventually, we'll also add in roles to help with the issues you talk about.

For the log in issue, that's because each of the websites is on its own subdomain and the cookie that saves you login does not handle cross sub domain support. I've looked into it a bit with asp.net auth, but haven't found a great answer yet. Definitely something on my to-do list for QOL thing.

If you're taking my words to mean that "anyone who disagrees with me is a bad person and a stain on the community" then you taken my words GREATLY out of context.

Even the VERY FIRST page of this document, I talk about how we changed our scoring system after we took criticism and made a change from it. You don't get to where we are if you cast aside every negative thing being said about you.

Obviously, you have to take negative words, even toxic filled ones. You have to understand who's saying them and why are they saying it? We've literally changed something every season in every single format because we actively listen to our player base and their complaints or praise.

So clearly your mischaracterization and misunderstanding of the statement is not correct.

Because you don't take money out of a growing company. The only way I ever find a payday with this company is if we really knock it out of the park.

If we'd become profitable, it wouldn't be for at least a few more years. Right now we're focused on sustainable and finding growth at the same time. Create an experience that the existing players enjoy, to keep them around and bring new players in.

Like how our HL league has grown every season.

We then want to focus on creating accessibility to through a PUG platform which is very easy to pick up and get involved in. And then we would focus on really going for big growth.

Worst case, we end up with a league that's not profitable but has a core good player base with good, sustainable prize pools and consistent LANs. Which isn't that big of a worst case :).

No anyone would be get the STV demos from an Invite match. We automatically upload those and make them publicly available.

STV / Stream Rules below

whoops wrong thread

When people call you

when you've done nothing to them. It definitely doesn't make me like them.

Anti-sigafoo people: He's a fucking retard idiot who makes terrible decisions
Also Anti-sigafoo people: Look at how much he hates us, FoR nO ReAsOn!!! He JuSt HaTeS SiXeS PlAyErs!!!!

Personally, I think most people sixes players are chill. In my time over the last couple years in particular, when I've had interactions with people they've been positive. It feels like there's a small, but very vocal minority who likes to stir shit, insult me and run with narratives that are either half-truths or just outright slander.

You can talk to ANY of the 6 Invite leaders that I've worked with in starting up this league and coming together on this rule set. Not only did we have a couple meetings that went for 2-3 hours, I also personally talked with each of them 1 on 1 for about an hour or more, each. They were fantastic and easy to work with and I'd be shocked if they didn't say the same about me.

You can try to twist a false narrative all you want, but the truth is simple. I care about TF2. Do you think that running a league that you built from the ground up is fun? Do the website, admining, production, everything I stay in touch with. Interacting with the players, etc... This isn't fun, I don't do this because of ego. If I wanted to do something for ego I'd go back to streaming. That shit is 10x easier and I actually make money and would have free time again.

I do ALL OF THIS because I love this game and want to see it at it's best. And I have the resources, energy and perseverance to deal with people like you who needlessly try to insult, spin half-truths and undermine anything I do. Because there's a clear difference between someone who's actually trying to raise concerns about our ideas, which we appreciate and take into account, and what you try to do it. But fortunately, you are a blip, a dot, a stain on what is a fantastic community else wise.

My goal is to create the league that I WISH I had when I was playing. One which is has an active and involved admin staff. One that is focused on not just sustaining but finding growth. One that is not afraid of trying new ideas and pivoting as an organization to find that growth.

And so if that's not an organization you want to be a part of. It's simple don't sign up with us. We're not forcing anyone to join the league. All of the Invite teams signed up after spending hours working with me and going through the weeds of running the league, but if you don't trust me because you never have and never will. That's okay, we've grown into the largest league in NA with an awesome community behind it and it's okay if you want to be part of that.

Teams cannot deny a reschedule, they have to either accept or offer a new time.

If the 30 minute difference is a clear and large issue, we're not dead set on it.

Also to be clear since people are getting confused. All matches are defaulted for 930. The only exception to this is Open on Wednesdays at 9pm.

Respectfully, given that RGL has been consistently been growing, now getting around 150-200 viewers on our streams. Hitting 1,000 viewers during the Grand Finals (multiple times this year alone.) I do not think we're doing anything close to killing spectating if anything we help grow it.

We've gotten a ton of compliments for progressing the quality of viewership experience. Using more angles to make team fights easier to follow. Having good casters who good microphones (e.g. not picking up key presses) and having casters who've played at the top level and understand the game. Or even the very basics of having players aliased up with their actual alias casters call them + their team tag.

Our goal is to cast games which pass the test of the Invite level players. That you don't have casters who you groan at for saying things that don't make sense. While also focusing on making the cast inclusive to newer viewers as well. Making it so matches, seasons, players are easy to follow even if you're not the most up to date.

We also have already started expanding our casting team behind the scenes to bring in more sixes players to give us the expertise in that area for color commentary. And we are definitely very open to bringing in tf.tv folks who want to join our growing casting org.

This is a rule that we've had in place since 2017 and has yet to cause any major issue. We've yet to step in and stop a mid-season transaction from going through.

And we lay out cases of where we step in. It's not as if we're just saying here's a rule. We list the rule and then give context and examples of how we would enforce it if we are made to. The thing you need to remember is this isn't going to be just admin makes a ruling. If we were concerned, we talk with teams, leaders, players, get context to understand the situation and create a conversation so we can come to the best decision.

The example you gave of one team that was going to die joining with another team to keep alive. I don't see why that would be an issue.

You have to remember this rule only affects roster -> roster of Mains. This does not stop a sub from being picked up for a main on another team. This does not stop offseason transactions. This does not stop new players from being picked up.

Default time is current 9:30 for Tuesdays and Thursdays. We wanted to have Open start a little earlier so we could help the viewership on the broadcasts for the Invite matches. Since having a good portion of your player base playing at the same time as your match is not a great idea.

Don't forget teams can reschedule to change the match time to 930 if they want, we're not stopping that.

The idea of changing the Grand Finals for a double elim bracket was actually not one that I had. In the meetings where we had 6 different leaders from various ESEA-Invite teams, the only real division which this rule will be put into place. Since outside of Invite (or Advance), it's unlikely that the other divisions will be small enough for Double Elim.

The point was brought up of changing the structure of the Grand Finals so that the match actually has weight. Since right the first Bo3 only allows one team to win. So there was a discussion about what other e-sports do. For instance, Dota 2 also does double elim, without having a 2 bo3 finals. In the International or Majors the Grand Finals is just a Bo5 match up.

We bounced around ideas and ultimately came out the other side with this one.

I'm personally not sold on it 100% yet, but I'm very intrigued by the idea of having a Grand Finals where everything is on the line. Where the UB team does come in with clear advantages.

We'll see and talk with teams who this actually affects after the season and go on from there.

No worries, we didn't make a big deal out of the change. Your criticism was one that we heard before and at RGL we do try to pivot/change when it makes sense. And this was turning into a bigger issue. We then used the Main div from Season 2 of HL, because of how crazy close it was and used different point models to see what would work and came out the other side with this one looking the best.

I'm excited to see how it works with two matches a week and with 5cp in general.