Replacing NR 6s with 4v4
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Ok, before you go ahead and attack me, think about this.
The current gamemodes for RGL are:
9v9
7v7
Trad. 6v6
NR 6v6 (not played right now)In my opinion, there is no real reason to have basically the same gamemode again. The whole “no restriction” thing isn’t something to brag about, as it’s just the same 6v6 but a whole lot worse. There is a sole reason it has only been played in 2 season’s worth.
Now, let’s talk about replacing it with a longer, surviving gamemode with a better standing.
4s, only supported by UGC currently, has lasted a full 21 seasons and still proves itself to be a fun gamemode. In reality, 4s would make a whole lot more sense and would bring more players from the UGC league (I know, complain all you want), and would actually last itself, perhaps bringing it’s own cups and it’s own metas.Edit: This is a growing edit because I’d like to add a bunch of argument points before we make a bunch of useless posts that already say what I’m about to.
- No restriction format belongs in it’s own meta. It provides no benefit to Trad. Sixes or any other gamemode (besides possibly prolander)
- Prolander already exists. Literally just 1 more player added and you can still play what you want.
Personally I think this would be a step in the right direction, however some people have some much different opinions. What do you think about this?
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I’ve never played 4s in UGC. Are there any things that the 4s community would like that UGC doesn’t do for them?
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@tua Overall better support. The main thing I cannot find is players, support, and pugs for 4s of any type. Few people play it because only 1 league does. On top of that, there’s so many non-NA teams playing in NA that makes it unfun and garbage.
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That is the exact problem. You say that 4s has been around for forever, so why mess with a new unique mode, just to replace it with a stale one like 4s? I get that a lot of people like it, but UGC has done a fine job supporting it, so why would you lower the number of modes available and make things arguably worse for both leagues?
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What does NR 6s bring to the table? Just to prove what can’t be done in actual trad. sixes? Nobody wants to play NR if it has no benefit and no real meta to learn about. It’s just “pick these classes and go”, it has it’s own category because nothing works outside of it. I’d rather do a more combo based gamemode than one that’s just valve comp on a league. On top of that, NR has only been played in 2 seasons worth over 2019-20. 4s makes so much more sense.
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@tuxedo the fact that 4s is already run is not a good thing for your argument to switch it. It has a home for the small number of players that like 4s. There is no need to kill a new league mode of NR just so 4s gets like 2 more teams.
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No one likes NR 6s and I think that they won’t be running it again
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Yeah nr6s lost a lot of steam after the first season, in the second season I recall seeing an invite division with zero matches played from the teams and then they just removed it from the s2 league chart eventually.
It ended up coming down to cheese comps/strats rather than skilled counterplay and innovation (IE double vaccinator meds, not enjoyable nor involving whatsoever to play versus). It was cool for a first season where people were trying new things, but it doesn’t have any staying power.
Those sorts of things tend to only be enjoyable for a limited span of time before things devolve. See certain overwatch metas/overwatch as a whole.
This was seen with nr6s season two, and will have an increasingly amplified affect on any future play of it.
So thus, this can not be seen as killing off nr6s or any other rgl format, as nr6s has done that work for itself.Given the unviability of nr6s long term, fours would make a fine addition to the lineup to round it out to four formats.
As to if it’s a good idea for rgl to run it, I have mixed thoughts.Ugc 6s has been a joke for a long time now, and it makes sense for there to be a more serious and refined league for it. rgl, and esea before that fulfilled this role. The same can not be said for 4s, it’s been a goofy fun side thing that people don’t take very seriously. Rgl adopting the mode is not going to fix it, as it’s an inherently non serious mode.
That being said, rgl tends to have a better atmosphere with their policies, and that may make all the difference in making the experience more enjoyable for players/to entice them to play. It’s a nice side thing that people can just make small friend teams for and play once a week, ie on friday. It’s a superior casual format to nr6s, and it’s nice to have a format to fulfill that niche.But I’m not sure if adopting it could be seen as anything but directly trying to compete with and kill off ugc’s 4s format given the niche appeal and nature of the mode. To frame it better, imagine if ugc started running nr6s when rgl did.
I know that a lot of my friends don’t like playing fours due to the nature of the mode, but I also know that some of them dislike it due to it being ran by ugc.If rgl ran it at a time such as friday 8:30 or so, it’d be avoiding direct competition with ugc 4s, and could potentially synergize without directly encroaching upon ugc’s territory as much. I find myself not having much to do on fridays outside of ringing for lower div highlander teams due to myself not playing sixes, and having something casual to do on the side for 8:30/9:30 on friday would be super cool.
I can’t speak for others, but I’d enjoy playing fours for rgl if they ran it, and would likely do it for ugc as well if rgl drew more interest to the format by hosting it. I just wouldn’t expect rgl to be able to specifically bring much to the table in regards to the running of the mode.Sidenote: Current inter-regional policies
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4s is so poggers!!! we need 4s please. i would play it all the time every week it was available.
ugc is racists and scumbags, played the first match of last 4s season and it was vs edgy racists. quit the season after. rgl is so much better, 4s deserves better than ugc. PLEASE!!!
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I don’t really buy into the idea that NR6s devolves into cheese comps and strats. Everyone who played that gamemode was mentally checked out, refused to make any attempts at improving, and didn’t give a single shit at any point of the formats lifespan.
The problem with the gamemode has nothing to do with the gamemode itself, and is more of a meta reason- Nobody wants to put in effort for NR6s given that the format has 0 translatability to bigger scenes. It is more time efficient to call the format bad, and only show up for matches to get the badge/prize$/league history. Is the format actually bad? That’s subjective, but saying that its unbalanced and cheesy is a pretty bold claim given how nobody is good enough at the format to speak with any real credibility.
The idea that certain strats that were found early by a few teams (mine included) were the definitive ‘cheesy’ way to play the format is just flat out wrong. The format had plenty of room for innovation, but nobody actually wanting to innovate whatsoever.
The vaccinator makes a great example to show off how little people actually thought about the game. Everyone thought this weapon was the bees knees and grossly overpowered. Notably, many NR6s teams ran double medic comps featuring 1 to 2 vaccinator medics. By the end of season 2 I heard staff debating about whether the weapon deserved to be banned.
How many people actually spent more than 2 seconds thinking about what could possibly counter the vaccinator though? Double medic strategies have a large variety of pros and cons. It takes more words than what I am willing to type right now to do a full dive into that. The relevant result of running a double medic composition is that single player picks become much stronger against your team.
The vaccinator seems like an intelligent choice knowing that. Bubbles are more flexible and can be used to bail out players or enable aggression frequently enough at the small scale that you can win the long game based on having more heals/ubers. Luckily, there are non mirror-matchup tools that have a lot of potential against the vaccinator.
- Stock Ubers provide Invincibility, which is stronger than damage type resistance. You can have access to more stock ubers than the opposing team.
- Diversified damage types and tankier team compositions. Equipping shotguns on soldier, heavies in combo, etc.
- The forgotten mechanic of fire damage and the the pyro class as a whole.
- The battalions backup charging as if doing full damage against vaccinator bubbles.
- Market Gardener + Quick Fix ubers smile
If against 2 vaccinators, you also gain the advantage of knowing your buffs are stronger than the enemy buffs, so you can pressure flanks exceptionally hard.
How many people actually used these things? Probably nobody.
I don’t think using my matches on Cat Noises presents a good example of what the format should have ever looked like. My team had some big noobs (myself) and had 0 scout mains, while b4nny’s team was carrying uncle dane. If vaccinator was truly problematic in lower divs (which is likely), you also need to check if any true counterplay was ever attempted (which is much less likely). Maybe things in NR6s are cheesy and awful, but I don’t think anybody is truly in a credible position to say that given how awful the ‘testing’ of the 2 seasons were. -
@nabla I can agree with that sentiment. There’s little value in having so many options if people refuse to test the waters and utilize the options in response to whatever the dominant play is.
From what I played and saw (my own team included), the typical response to vaccinator was to tilt like crazy and to run spy/a limited amount of different classes as damage sources at most; without all that much variance in loadouts to gain additional sources of damage. Or to run the same vaccinator comp yourself to try and outdo them at it.
I suppose no matter the nature of the mode, the end result is the same if people refuse to put the effort into it. Might’ve latched on a bit to hard to the overwatch analogy in my post. I suppose that most people’s opinions, myself included, ended up being defined by weapons/strats that we disliked but didn’t attempt to legitimately counter; and we wrote it off as a result.
I will say that I personally enjoyed it, though the time I spent ended up mostly turning into goofy class stacking and memes rather than an attempt to find the best plays/strats/counterplay with all the available options. Saw rather limited loadout agency in general.
Good points overall, doesn’t seem like the community is in a spot to benefit from the running of NR6s currently.
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@tua in addition to what tuxedo said, it feels like UGC treats the format like a joke which just makes it easier for people to call it a joke. They recently had a massive overhaul of the whitelist, but for years the whitelist consisted of oddities such as bazaar bargain being the only sniper weapon in all slots that was banned etc. You actually could have run jarate and mad milk at the same time only a few seasons ago. The current whitelist is in a really good state, but the point being made is that up until now, they haven’t really had much respect for a format they are the exclusive hosts of.
The maps they run tend to just be rejected sixes maps, and they’ve had some pretty memey trade server-level maps in the past (koth_stallone)It would just be nice to see what happens if a league that is more respectful of their projects were to pick up 4v4. It’s a really diverse game mode, plus it’s easy to get into for people that struggle to find enough committed players to even play 6v6 or prolander.
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@Trouser-Snivy You’re 100% correct. UGC does not do any maintenance on any gamemode except Highlander and Ultiduo. The current state of it (as from season 21) is as follows…
- Hugely unbalanced teams
- Casual toxicity/racism (as stated by el crumpo earlier)
- Non-NA players, playing in NA (upwards of 100 ping)
- Lack of players
- Steel/Gold are the only played divisions. Silver is abandoned for some reason.
- Garbage map pool with unfinished/unplaytested versions
- Lack of overall support and attention.
I want to talk about the map pool for a bit, so bear with me.
The map pool for season 21 was full of (and to Snivy’s words) rejected 6s/HL maps.
On top of that, almost every map in the pool was KOTH due to no 3cp maps created recently/were fun to play.
koth_harter_rc1 is a gold standard in bad map design having almost the space for a Highlander map. It was played as an official map, and surprise surprise! It sucked. Bad. The map in it’s reality is just wayyy too big for only a total of 8 players on the field. It looks like dustbowl and highpass combined, yet combined with some kind of metal-deteriorating acid.Now I want to talk about highpass.
Highpass is literally just a Valve casual map they’ve imported, and that is why I still call it “product 2” because of how similar they are. Zero variety when it comes to any map pool of 4s.Stallone is actually a good map, just way too bright and memey (like Snivy said).
koth_stallone focused much more on design and lighting as opposed to gameplay, which made it a bad pick from UGC to actually play it as an official map.Some honorable mentions include koth_airfield and koth_badlands, with the ladder being so overplayed and big that I’m just sick of it. Same with airfield, literally has been unchanged since 2013.
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I’ve been interested in making a 4s team recently but didn’t want to go back to UGC.
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From my experience playing, the teams that did take 4v4 seriously were usually just groups of friends that couldn’t bother finding 2 other people to play 6s, so they would play 4s.
I do agree some of the maps in the gamemode are really awful and unbalanced, but at the same time everyone kind of does whatever, so there isn’t really a “meta” (though most people will run scout - soldier - medic - demo).
To me 4s was always the gamemode I would just hop on every friday to get a medal and just fuck around with friends. Some maps do feel a bit more competitive than other, especially the cp maps, but those maps you usually just lose the round if you lose the mid. As for koth, all you have to do is cap the point once then make the other team waste as much time as possible and you will just win, lol.
In my opinion I don’t think it should be hosted since it would take resources away, and it doesn’t really serve any purpose besides to farm medals and attract casual players who can’t bother finding enough people to play 6s or 4s.