Hey can we not let the league die slowly?
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During the course of RGL being an organization, for around 4 years now, we have been extremely stagnant in growth and we are not making our league friendly towards new players. Over the past year we have seen nothing but decline, going back all the way to below levels seen in season 3; and we have absolutely 0 pressure as a community to get ourselves vision within the tf2 community. The rgl video team (marketing) was purely Ryuk for years, and since they have left there hasn’t been a single person to properly replace them. We need to give a bigger push to actually get new people in this scene, yall can fucking scream at each other about bs for only so long until everyone leaves, we have improved the staffing team for HL, we are improving the scene, we DO NOT NEED TO WAIT!!!
New players have 0 clue on how to enter the scene, everyone I know who has tried to get into comp was extremely intimidated by the 15 different hurdles they need to go through to actually start to even LOOK for a team. That’s fucking embarrassing.
We have people, let’s actually grow comp tf2 like RGL is meant to be doing, if this is the last line for the tf2 competitive scene than holy shit is this fucking pathetic. This is a wakeup call, fix your shit now or we’re gonna keep losing more people and the league will shrivel and die.
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Maven (Ryuk) carried the video team, and if anyone currently on the video team (that isn’t DolphiN, who single-handedly carries pretty much all of production, love you bro) put even a quarter of the effort they put in, there would be more than just the vod uploads in the past 4 months on the youtube channel.
Demo reviews with invite players run by Maven was a really good addition for current comp players. The funny pugs also were great for viewers and the casual audience. Even “1 hour of nothing randomly interrupted by the spy decloak sound” got more views than pretty much anything else aside from 6s grands. It even beat out HL grands in terms of viewcounts.
RGL Dispatch was pretty mid as far as content goes, but it also just went radio silent for 9 months, so that one is just dead.
QueeQuey said in another thread:
I agree with working with other content creators, and I’ve tried/have. It’s just that either projects fall through or the individual players don’t want to work with us yet, mostly citing lack of competitive knowledge to me (or reservations about our current modes). I actually have a google doc of a list of YouTubers that I wanted to work with and reached out to, but all of them said no except for After Breakfast which did voiceover for a promotional NR6s video that never came out, and Octo for a bot tournament that didn’t happen after the main contact left the video team. I do think outreach is something we need to do, but we can’t expect the YouTubers to meet us on our terms, we have to try to give them what they want from us. Like I don’t think someone like Big Joey is going to have a great time if we stick him into a normal 6s or Highlander match, there has to be a content/fun reason to join up.
A cup that I wanted to run was a “Clan Wars” cup, where we’d get different YouTubers in a tournament and their subscribers would play 12v12 matches against each other to see who has the strongest subscriber base (honestly a lot of these guys have big enough discords that they could just have their mods fight each other). We can do variations on that like offering a specific division of just YouTuber teams that play against each other week to week. But from the talks I’ve had we’re going to need to start being progressive again if we want to grab the YouTuber audience.
I personally don’t see why we need casual content creators. Just make the content ourselves. Maven did it really well, integrating competitive players and formats with casual rulesets or maps, and those were done really well. Casual content creators won’t make videos on competitive because it isn’t their market. The current biggest competitive content creators only play 6s for their main competitive format (which, has been booming afaik)
@thud said in Hey can we not let the league die slowly?:
youtube would be huge for rgl marketing. random tf2 videos are what got me to play tf2, and actually are what got me to play rgl. the rgl echo chamber needs to break! (for my sanity)
Echo chamber? rgl didn’t stop making youtube videos because they decided it wasn’t worth the effort. rgl stopped because they lost the person who actually made them
@BBL said in Hey can we not let the league die slowly?:
New players have 0 clue on how to enter the scene, everyone I know who has tried to get into comp was extremely intimidated by the 15 different hurdles they need to go through to actually start to even LOOK for a team. That’s fucking embarrassing.
RGL has/had a guide department, and they did release a good video on how to record POV demos. It has around 18k views, so it wasn’t a waste of effort either. People just sign up to do stuff inside RGL, they get the position, and then they don’t actually do anything. A big problem RGL had for a while is that they never pushed deadlines or pushed consequences on departments like gfx, guides, video, etc. “It’s all a volunteer effort! Why should we put pressure?” because then nothing gets done, and RGL has a shell of a department and doesn’t hire because they have people but the people don’t do anything. There are plenty of departments inside of RGL that do really well, but the ones that do poorly do absolutely nothing.
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@BBL Is the problem lack of growth, or is the problem poor user retention? Those two problems have very different solutions. Based on your graph, it looks like the league lost 30% of its teams between season 9 and season 12. That looks like a user retention issue to me. Even if RGL has fantastic marketing, they will have issues if they lose 30% of their teams each year.
The question is: why do people leave comp?
One reason I can think of is administrative overhead. It’s tough for team captains to manage scrims, games, get subs and do demo reviews. Comp is also a commitment. If you don’t practice, you are letting your team down. I think part of the reason there is so much offclassing and sandbagging is because there are a lot of people who want a laid back comp alternative.
However, I don’t know how a good semi-competitive system would be implemented. I think pugging servers are one way to fill in that gap. I actually liked faceit TBH. It got a lot of flack for its funky meta with non-comp maps, but it scratched that semi-comp itch for me.
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Over the past year we have seen nothing but decline, going back all the way to below levels seen in season 3
I want to mention that we still have higher player numbers compared to Season 4 or Season 5. Season 3 was so long ago and I was not an admin at the time so forgive me if I cannot remember what specifically caused the player spike for the season.
The reason why Season 6(Summer 2020) had such a huge spike had a lot to do with the COVID-19 pandemic. I firmly believe that Season 5 would have also been much higher in player count if registration didn’t close before COVID became the pandemic we currently regard it as. This is significant because people had a lot more time online since lockdowns were in place globally and remote learning and workspaces were increasingly used. One year later (Season 10) and restrictions are gradually being lifted and people are returning to work and classes in person.
Also due to the shorter off-seasons this year, players had around three weeks to register their team for this summer season which gave those teams much less time to prepare, which especially affects the lower levels.
There are definitely other factors that contribute, and I’m not trying to dismiss the overarching idea, I just want to put into perspective a significant contribution to the boost in player numbers across 2020 and 2021 as well as the decline in 2022.
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some attempts to create content for the game have been shut down or discouraged https://forums.rgl.gg/topic/1420/rgl-conduct-survey-4-results-global-rule-edits-2021-march-april-bans
