Thoughts on RGL's Future (by me :D)
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@Mothership I would say that the nr6s format is almost good. For lower divs it could probably stay mostly as is, but we would also try a weapon and/or class pick/ban system for the higher divs. I think that would be a lot of fun for them to experiment with not just using the meta.
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Because I’m a spreadsheet freak, I took the time yesterday to go through all of the players from the cup who were brand new to RGL, where this was the first/only RGL competition they’ve played in. These are the total newbies that we’ve been dying to get our hands on. I wanted to see if they’ve been playing any competitive games since the cup, to see if it seemed to have gotten them interested.
The answer seems like a firm no. I found 82 ‘true newcomers’ as I’ll call them (at least one guy new to RGL was actually a euro with some experience, so I didn’t count him) and as of yesterday, only 5 of the 82 true newcomers have played in any logs since the end of the cup.
Of those, only 2 seem to have played competitive for more than one night, and only one of those has played a log in the month of July.
Obviously it’s only been like 3 weeks, so maybe some people could be waiting for the next HL/6s season to start in the fall, or maybe people don’t know about where to play pugs or how to ring in scrims, but uh, the numbers look really, really bad.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DpHAQI0G092ei4_XC1p5IUGp_nATrWI1ARFVdpaxNwQ/edit?usp=sharing
tl;dr - Only 5 players whose first RGL competition was the chucklenuts cup have played any logs since the end of the cup. That’s 6%. Only one has played any logs in July.
edit: Might be worth pointing out that if you don’t count the players on teams who didn’t play a single match and just forfeited/died, there were only 69 true newcomers, not 82.
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games dead unless yall fix anything
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tua said in Thoughts on RGL’s Future (by me :D):
tl;dr - Only 5 players whose first RGL competition was the chucklenuts cup have played any logs since the end of the cup. That’s 6%. Only one has played any logs in July.
edit: Might be worth pointing out that if you don’t count the players on teams who didn’t play a single match and just forfeited/died, there were only 69 true newcomers, not 82.
arcadia said in Thoughts on RGL’s Future (by me :D):
everything camp3r and DolphiN said are 100% facts.
not sure what you’re trying to say here BBL. I think any number of players joining is a success. simple as
the absolute state of north american team fortress 2
something has to change on how we onboard players because we are not retaining shit
this starts with infrastructure for new players, such as pugs (which i know are being worked on and thats okay), video guides explaining the basics of gamemodes, and maybe deleting the shitty 8k res sfm picture on the home page that takes 20 seconds to load if its uncached.
as a matter of fact, just change the rgl.gg domain to the r24 page, the homepage serves no purpose but to kill rgl in search results, and the r24 page is better anyways. just highlight the gamemode switcher with a different color and be done.
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SIDENOTE: Something that I originally forgot to put in the essay is the caster tool that Dolphin uses which allows him to have a kill feed of events prior to them happening in the cast, allowing for him to find out which players to spectate in the cast so high impact moments are seen more often by the viewer. If this was allowed to be used by other casters it would greatly increase the quality of casts like Fireside, which now work with RGL. This is less important than the PUG system, but I wanted to still note it as being a great way to help improve the community if we just collaborated together as a whole.
We have cheatfeed but some of us just don’t use cheatfeed; i’m a pure 6s observer but I have observed HL, though i’m not sure how important it is for HL casts. I’d assume it’s more important but then again I’m not an HL guy so can’t say my knowledge is expert on it . while we do have the luxury of STV delay if you’re trying to emulate an actual esports cast there is no such thing as an stv delay. that being said, given that it is tf2, i do agree cheatfeed is nice and should be a must have for ANY newer producer as cheatfeed makes the newer/casual audience experience WAY more exciting. It does suck though people hate our skybox/static cameras (it seems a lot of viewers hate static cameras, which is a shame in my honest opinion having talked to EU/OCE producers).
you might be misplacing your words in quality of a cast in lieu of:
- a tool that allows a caster to see what an observer is viewing (which we do have but only one producer uses)
- the amount of legitimately experienced casters/producers we have in the scene. i can count only on two hands the amount of casters we have that pander to a newer/casual audience + experienced audience (tcmano/trad/zagron/alto/godfather/jemond/jarrett/sgc)
- the skeleton bones broadcast crew we have for tf2, which is 1 producer who not only acts as the producer but also acts as the observer and cast coordinator all in one + the two casters.
words can’t describe the amount of burden placed on a producer. not only does a producer have to coordinate scheduling, figure out what casters/manpower we have on time, and what matches to cast. but also during showtime, we have to work on what is displayed on stream while also focusing on observing + listening to what casters are saying in order to follow cues we can’t see because we don’t have a second observer/camera to look at other perspectives. cheatfeed helps a lot in that regard but some of our guys observe and rely on caster cues + understanding of the flow of the game
i’m also of the firm belief that all divs should be covered; if you want to cater to the newbies then shed some light and show them what it’s like to play against players of their own level. you can see that reflected in the tf2cc cup and the amount of participation newcomer has had in the last 2 seasons. but then the caster/producer pool grows smaller (and no fault of theirs, you would want to make your time for a cast worthwhile anyways) for that which is why fireside hasn’t been doing much of trial by fireside as of recent
cheers
(taking this opportunity to also footnote an advertisement post: FIRESIDE IS LOOKING FOR PRODUCERS/CASTERS. SPECIFICALLY!!! for highlander. We want to make our highlander casts just as good as our 6s. please hit me up in discord!! siyo_.)
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siyo said in Thoughts on RGL’s Future (by me :D):
It does suck though people hate our skybox/static cameras (it seems a lot of viewers hate static cameras, which is a shame in my honest opinion having talked to EU/OCE producers).
may i ask why is that tho? I wonder because you can see a lot more that way and help easily understand what’s going on a lot more especially when it comes to the mid fights. sure you can potentially miss a play but you might see a bigger play with it, cappingtv did a good job with their cams when it was needed, then again that was joystick cams but my point still stands, it was nice to see that every once in awhile or even during rollouts. (and i know this is not part of the conversation but i just wanted to know)
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Bethnicz To not derail in the thread it’s as simple as people wanting to see actual shooting/first person povs.
But I actually disagree of that opinion as in the chaos of a fight like a mid fight or a last push on uber advantage there’s multiple fights going on that you all want to catch and it would be disorienting to switch POVs rapidly even if you know who’s getting the kill because of cheatfeed.
DolphiN and mitch (CappingTV producer who you can credit for those freecams) are REALLY good at using the cameras without being intrusive of an actual frag thats occurring, and static cameras are even more important in HL because there’s so many minifights going on and timings such as spy saps on the sentry that may initiate a push that I just find the community opinion to be a bit disappointing
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BBL Staff replies to this post were idiotic (apart from yogrrt love u buddy) but anyways, you’re right BBL, cup would’ve actually brought in players if Youtubers had advertised it, if the cup was a REAL format, and if competitive was easier to access in general, seeing a lot of cases of people in charge acting immature and defending their bad decisions instead of owning up and accepting criticism or at least thinking about how things could be improved rather than just saying “you’re wrong you’re wrong, ermm actually i wrote an article so im right” very bad look for RGL, very bad look on the part of the Staff. Now I know it’s easier to point out problems than solve them, so here’s some solutions:
- Try again with a new cup, actually get youtubers (of any size) to make videos advertising the cup, lean into the aspects that make competitive cool (the reasons pubbers will tune into a b4nny stream more often than an RGL one), this involves using real formats like 6s and HL, making them look fun and appealing, and making signing up look easy and welcoming (can be easier said than done but TF2 has a good enough community we can make it happen).
- As cayorne said the website can use some help, I search up "Tf2 Competitive and get 2 wiki articles, a youtube video, TF2CENTER, and REDDIT before RGL comes up, as well as that the homepage takes forever to load, is laid out kinda strange and prolander is front and center if you scroll down which is laughable but thats all opinion stuff anyways and I know nothing about web design so I couldn’t do any better.
- I feel like RGL could be pushed way harder, ofc TF2 devs kinda suck with helping with this, but as far as social media, youtube, etc I don’t feel like you hear about RGL enough outside of ppl who already play it and RGL themselves. This is a harder thing to really solve but when I was getting into comp and when some others were too, we heard about UGC and ESEA before we heard about RGL, and like I said I’m not sure how to solve this but overall our mission should be to push RGL into the public conscious of any TF2 player that cares about competitive.
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random off topic note (but probably still relates to the main topic anyways) but I think the hugest accessibility issue for 6s is the start time past amateur. I swear if 9:30 PM EST start times become the norm (not being a pacific/west coast guy, I would assume this is enough time for them to get home from school/work/practice or whatever) just like in HL we would have a much easier time in newer player retention. One hour makes a huge difference people!
(And in regards to pregames: normalize 1 half pregames or sub usage!)
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To talk of point 2 is exactly arcadia’s goal with RGL as the new owner. It’s really not SEO optimized and from what I understand the website’s current build wasn’t built for scalability but more of as a way to get things running during its first year of inception. Having heard of the wonders arcadia/Aad are working there are huge things to come in the future. I promise that and I can only hope that with that, RGL also becomes the HLTV of TF2 where we can, as a broadcasting org, post matches that are to be casted on an RGL tab.
On point 3:
One of the huge problems was when the mods of /r/truetf2 actually moderated the subreddit, they were very stringent on advertising RGL/ESEA/UGC/whatsoever matches. We have used /r/truetf2 on Fireside to advertise and Steam forums but it doesn’t really translate to viewers. Also, advertising comp tf2 on the steam forums almost got me banned HAHA. Having talked on Mothership with this before we plan to up our marketing efforts though trust!
You could probably ping the TF2CC guys for more information on communicating with Valve, as you can see on the TF2CC cups that TF2 blog post announcement actually was the reason we had a steady 100-150 viewers during the entire weekend cup (HUGE PROPS to the marketing team on TF2CC for their initiative on this)
(preface this post that I’m not affiliated with RGL I’m just the fireside casts head)
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siyo good to hear, of course it can’t be done overnight but hopefully RGL can avoid borderline failures like the Chucklenuts cup in the future.
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I’ll expand on this later, but please reconsider BBL for a significant staff position.
His love and passion for the competitive TF2 scene is on fire, and seeing his former attempts to revitalize the competitive scene get rejected by staff is not cool.
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This is something I would like to talk about as someone who produced tf2 casts for tftv, fireside, etf, a couple of charity events, and 3 lans. The tool that lets us see server events in real time. Which is called cheat feed hasn’t really been a secret in the production community for years. One of the reasons we don’t discuss it in the open is because it could easily be abused since all you need to use it is a server’s rcon info. somewhere in my discord history is a message from b4nny asking for the string to link the feed because he knows giving out rcon is a one way ticket for problems.
TFTV, Fireside, RGL, CappingTV, ETF, KritzKast all have their own server running it. The original version was written years ago and it’s source code is up on github. TFTV still has a server running this version somewhere.
As a matter of fact, with the exception of a single suite of tools that was taken down for reasons I will not discuss here and some stuff in the works that I won’t discuss out of respect to a colleague, every piece of software used for tf2 production is available and open source in some version.
Most orgs use NodeCG, which in one form or another predates all current casting orgs. for overlays with the exception of the Fireside who has been creating their own software suite as of late. Or the Broadcast.gg tools. Or whenever I produce for fireside using the node package I wrote for fireside, a version of which I have published for free use.
The main thing that’s proprietary to the casting orgs are their huds which are designed to work with Casting Essentials, the plugin used to make casting a lot easier(which is open source).
The occasional fancy drone shots? HLAE running on an stv connection which is a bit difficult to set up which explains why it isn’t used that much and only a few producers use it.
But I’ve digressed, i used cheat feed, but if you rely on it too much you can easily tell which casts are using it.
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You guys should try paying moderators. Maybe this will lead to some competition for the position and increased quality of moderation. Giving the job to the only power hungry terminally online individual that’s willing to take it or a friend inevitably leads to unfair and corrupt moderation. New players and even people that love comp tf2 immediately lose interest and never come back after getting 6 month indefinite bans for saying bad words or having their team steamrolled in amateur by teams that have gone 2nd place main and happen to be friends with the moderator of the division. There’s obvious corruption in the moderation of the community. It just leads to a very unappealing experience. You guys should focus on improving the quality of your product in general instead of attracting new players to a bad quality product.
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For a league that describes itself with a “passionate community”, I feel like some of the staff have been lacking in that department (hence why I think BBL would be a great staff candidate).Starting off with pug running. When I signed up for pug runner, there stated an expectation to run pugs at least once a week. The current reality is that not being run often at all with all the pug runners that have the role. Kind of sucks to see as well, with all the people who want to play pugs.
I might post again later who knows???
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I know I have been pretty quiet on this post, that is because I have wanted to let other people say their piece and let the thread do its thing while watching from the sidelines. I fully agree that I should have been more detailed in my post so it would have come off as less blunt, I do regret that. I still fully believe in what I said and more that I didn’t even talk about, but I just want to make it clear that anything that I said was based on wanting to help out the community. It’s honestly disheartening the response I’ve gotten on this post. As well as from other sources that the staffing community, let’s just say, isn’t a huge fan of me at the current moment. I know that there are bigger issues going on within RGL (look at this thread to get an understanding of the dumpster fire that has happened within the 6s community https://www.teamfortress.tv/63358/announcing-the-ggl-advanced-playoffs)
but I truly do hope that there can be more communication from admins toward the community. To put aside how this comes off, the RGL community deserves better than what we have been getting recently, I want to highlight these instances where I can to try and draw some attention to those areas, for us as a whole to become better than what we were before.
I would recommend people to fill out this forum that recently was posted by RGL, which is something I will be doing within the next couple of days as well as post about how you feel about the state of RGL here.
TLDR; I wish I phrased my post better, but I still hope I at least got the point across. Thank you to tua and others for going more in-depth into my points and giving them better context, I really do appreciate it. -
BBL said in Thoughts on RGL's Future (by me :D):
…but I just want to make it clear that anything that I said was based on wanting to help out the community.
…but I truly do hope that there can be more communication from admins toward the community.
… I want to highlight these instances where I can to try and draw some attention to those areas, for us as a whole to become better than what we were before.
These are important things which I value, and apart of the reason these forums exist. In that I appreciate your feedback and willing to speak on it.
I personally can’t speak to any of the feedback given towards the cup. As far as I understand, there was only two RGL admins involved, of which I was neither.
But what I can speak to is things that I have been doing to which I have great hope to the future of RGL. I have recently stepped up to become RGL’s new Marketing Director and have been spending the past month on improving our internal coordination, communication, and planning. You can see some of the work I have done be reflected in the promotions we have been doing on our casts including the RGL Boat promotion involving the RGL Head Admins. I also have a ton of plans that should reach fruition within the next six months, including something exciting for our Invite teams. We have also seen some exponential growth in regards to our partnerships with different organizations which I hope will Increase growth in RGL as a whole.
I won’t promise that you guys will be seeing any of the work I do publicly, nor soon due to the timescales I am currently working at, but I am hopeful towards the impact I can make internally for the league.