these arguments are always such a pain in the ass tbh because the inherent moral high ground in “stop saying slurs” automatically makes anyone arguing against it look like a mouthbreather

The root problem, as I see it, comes from the fact that many tf2 players conflate their “RGL experience” (which is a professional/public setting and should be held to a certain standard of conduct) with their own private social lives (private setting held to a lower standard). it’s RGL’s job to ensure that all experiences necessary to reasonably partake in their league are held to that aforementioned “certain standard of conduct.” Currently, these “experiences” are defined as pretty much everything RGL-sponsored (including but not limited to RGL pugs, forums, matches, and discord servers), as well as “optional” scrims.

I think the move to punish players for offenses in scrims is a very good move, because realistically scrims are necessary for meaningful participation in RGL and thus should be held under the same rules as everything else. It’s worth noting that including scrims as an essential part of the RGL experience differs vastly from other leagues and was met with understandable backlash, but again, I personally think it’s for the better.

However, privately-run PUG groups are not essential to the RGL experience. I think RGL’s reluctance to definitively rule private pug groups as “not in our jurisdiction” makes this problem a lot worse than it could be, but that’s an off topic gripe. Private PUG groups, from RGL’s perspective, exist for social purposes first and game-related purposes second. No arguments. Regardless of the stated aims of the creators or players of these groups, they are secondary to the things already under the “RGL Umbrella”, as it were. You are willingly choosing to enter these private spaces on your own, and demanding those inside be held accountable feels like a vast, vast overreach of what a TF2 league should be doing.

If an individual is concerned about experiencing slurs/hate/etc, all experiences deemed essential and necessary to participate in RGL are (reasonably) safe spaces. Anyone can safely experience RGL, or at least have the knowledge anyone violating that safety will be punished.

If I solo Q a game of CSGO or LoL and my teammates invite me to their discord afterwards for some inhouse games and they immediately start shrieking the n-word, is it reasonable for me to expect Valve/Riot to ban them for those actions? I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who’d legitimately think it’d be a wise use of resources or judgment. Why is this? Because the size of those companies and those games make the distance between end-user and producer/admin clear. Regardless of your personal feelings on those actions, crying to Riot/Valve would be stupid at worst and nobly futile at best.

So why do we expect RGL to do the opposite? I honestly think it’s just an issue of size and the peculiarity of the tf2 community in regards to how much more tight-knit and “full-time” it is compared to other games. The playerbase is small enough that you can make meaningful friendships and form strong communities that are meaningful in the large-scale of the scene’s fabric. I think that’s wonderful, but I also think it’s not RGL’s responsibility. Are there meaningful differences between Riot and RGL? Of course. But as “providers of an entertainment service”, I think the standard applied to both should be the same.

I’m trying to read into the motivations of this post, @Ampy, and here’s what I’m getting:
-You aren’t doing this solely out of selfless concern for the league
-You couldn’t have thought this would get you clout considering the make up of the community
-You’re clearly passionate about this issue
So my guess is that you (or someone you care about) was hurt by certain malicious things said by others. I think that’s honorable and this conversation is a good one to have. So I apologize for coming off a little crass, but,

Why should RGL have (or even want) to watchdog your optional, private, social interactions?

everyone in this thread who’s name doesn’t rhyme with Ballin Lord or Limeless is officially in the Dumb As Fuck Zone (excluding OP)

NAHL item bans/exploit bans are literally just a cringe comp of people saying ‘this isn’t good just play around it lmfao’ until someone with more brain cells than them finds a way to implement it effectively and public opinion begrudgingly shifts the other way after 3 seasons of it contaminating comp play

“it’s cheese” and “high plat players don’t rely on it” didn’t stop ugc from realizing that storing a gunslinger crit was just stupid and didn’t belong in the league, i don’t see why people are trying to defend a clear exploit of game mechanics

borneo’s pretty solidly the 4th best map in the pool, but i m o i don’t think it’s such a step back that the downside of ‘having to play long map :(((’ is bigger than the downside of a permanently stagnant pl pool. polls have shown time and time again that a large part of the community is in favor of new/different maps, and borneo is 100% playable in it’s current state. A map being more difficult to push isn’t inherently worse, it means that there are more stringent conditions to get advantages and that working/using those advantages is a skill rewarded more than ‘let’s just pop in 9v9 and hope we can out dm them lul’.

without major prize pools in the HL there’s very little reason to take a hardline stance of ‘only play the best 7 maps every season no question’, and if rotating in borneo means we don’t have to play upward for one fucking season out of the past 30+ then honestly i’m all for it. it doesn’t have to be in semi-constant rotation like cascade, just put it in once every 3 seasons for a little bit of variety and to force players to learn something new. Considering some newer advancements in PL technology (enforcer) and vigil’s seemingly-increasing average cap time (completely anecdotal, waiting for sand’s spreadsheet to update after this week for more hard data), i see very little reason to not put it in for a season.

also, only person in this thread who’s legitimately qualified to talk about borneo as a map and not just likes/dislike is @TheS4rr

It really comes down to theory. I absolutely fucking despise the toys, they’re so fucking rancid and degenerate gameplay to this insane degree without even labbing for them like asher said. Long range is something that scout does not need given it’s current strength.

That being said, despite how fucking badly I want them gone, I don’t think they’re strictly overpowered in the traditional sense, with the exception of product. Given the prominence of the map I think a lot of people conflate “the cleaver is broken and a straight upgrade all the time” with “the cleaver is better than the pistol on product.” I’ve watched syath 1-clip enough scouts with the pistol to know that the weapon is insane, but only a handful of players are good enough to warrant it. If you’re taking a top-down approach on balance, though, that’s enough to keep it unbanned following “the traditional sense”.

Which is why these bans come down to the theory of what a whitelist should be. There’s been a prevailing school of thought that “comp should be kept as similar to pubs as possible to encourage new players to join.” I understand the reasoning for it well enough, but I really don’t know if it’s been effective and how players in NC/AM/Open feel about having certain weapons allowed. I bring this up because under this principle, the I don’t think the cleaver is bannable.

Under the ideal that “a whitelist should exist to enforce competitive integrity and balance,” the cleaver should absolutely be banned, as should the wrap assassin. I, for whatever it’s worth, think this is a better system to move towards. I honestly doubt there’s a meaningful amount of pub players that are interested in comp, who still haven’t played it, that would cite the cleaver of all things as the breaking point for why they don’t play comp. That entire argument is based on the old 6s whitelist policy of ‘ban everything that doesn’t actively enhance gameplay’ instead of ‘only ban the things actively disrupting gameplay’, and applying it to HL as a reason to keep dogshit like the sandman back when it stunned in the game always felt like a misuse of argument.

Under the traditional system, you could actually make the argument that the wrap assassin is better than the cleaver because the pistol has a ton of uses whereas the basher (tradeoff for the WA) is a lot less necessary in HL than in 6s, and I think that’s dumb. Although if you banned the cleaver, I think there’s a decent amount of other weapons that’d be worth looking into banning under the same principle (starting with, but not limited to sniper secondaries).

I made this exact thread a season or two ago and nothing came of it. If you really want to see the cleaver removed, you need to make an argument for a different ban policy that marks the cleaver as banworthy, because the current framework doesn’t.

i’ve got some nuanced thoughts on the SS that i’m going to try and delineate here

1. does the scorch shot meet the criteria for being banned under a whitelist that aims to ban weapons that degrade competitive integrity? yes

2. does the scorch shot meet the criteria for being banned under a whitelist that aims to be as open as possible and only ban weapons that are legitimately overpowered and straight upgrades in almost every situation (our current framework)? yes

3. has the reasoning for why 2 was yes been brought up yet? no

let me explain a bit here. under our current whitelist guidelines, “it’s easy to use”, “it’s annoying to play against”, “pyro is a bad a class”, and bliztank’s theory of pyro development (as much as I deeply agree with his reasoning) are all invalid arguments to the current system. important to note that an invalid argument is not necessarily a bad one; it means that it’s inapplicable to the current situation. If you want to get the scorch shot banned, you need to do one of two things-

a) prove that the scorch shot is just objectively better than all other pyro secondaries AND that it contributes to poor gameplay (a bit of a grey area here, but it’s the difference between the crossbow being “overpowered” and still allowed vs. the machina being banned)
b) argue for a different system that the one we currently have, similar to what i mentioned in 1)

Personally, I think there are ban cases in both systems, but the problem is that current teams aren’t good enough to really reach the level where the scorch shot is an obvious ban in the current system. Imagine the perfect highlander team. Hitscan classes that are basically aimbotting, a spy with mind control, and projectile classes running 80 different instances of the source engine on a giga-array to calculate the best projectile angles in real-time. On that team, pyro does not need to kill anything. Anything a pyro can do in terms of damage, another class can do better at god-like levels of aim.

You can argue this may have been different before the nerfs, but currently, 70% of pyro’s value is derived solely from airblast and the other 20% is to light spies on fire, with the most of the remaining 10% being a deterrent to people running into your combo. In a world where pyro does not need to kill anything, any additional damage the pyro can do to other classes in downtime without putting itself at risk is gravy; thus, the shotgun is useless and the flares are much better options. And of the flares, I’d argue the best one for doing chip damage is the scorch because of the ease, safety, and total damage output. Something that often gets ignored is how just how actionable scorch shot damage can be. When we played froyo in 7s, arekk would run scorch shot and just spam it at flank and the second he got a hit b4nny and blaze would push off of it, because those 20-30+ hp margins the scorch shot can essentially give you for free is enough for top-level players to take a fight that’s 60-40 or even 50-50 and flip it into an 85-15 or a 90-10. I freely admit that I’m not very familiar with how the det compares to the scorch in terms of harassment, but I’m working under the assumption that the det is more dangerous to use and less effective at getting the first hit due to the necessity to sometimes blind det it and with the projectile disappearing faster vs. the scorch remaining.

Obviously, the big asterisk on this is that there are no teams, nor have there ever been, that are good enough to warrant relegating pyro to such a small role, because players are human and make mistakes that a class like pyro is perfectly designed to clean up for. It’s the reason why shotgun is a still an option and is often the better choice depending on the team. But if you want confirmation for effectiveness of scorch shot scaling exponentially with team skill, look back to S1 of RGL highlander when IRENE had billysaurus run full time scorch shot - they relied on him for airblast denial and spychecking and anything a shotgun could contribute would just be done better by a different class. At the time people almost thought it was a meme and it was the team telling their pyro to troll as some kind of flex on other teams, like ‘we don’t need a shotgun pyro or flare pyro to win’, but I think they were just ahead of the curve.

So, back to the question at hand. Is there an argument to ban the scorch shot under the current system? I think definitely. Follow-up question: is it necessary to ban the scorch shot under the current system given the state of the top teams in HL? I don’t think the ban’s necessary in the same way something like machina or diamondback are necessary, as the true “broken” qualities of the SS (at least as I believe the current system would define it as) haven’t really been unlocked yet, and I think we’re straying further from the peak of HL skill where it would’ve been possible.

But because I think the current system is outdated as fuck, tl;dr it doesn’t matter what it is under the current system because we should move to a system that cares more about game integrity than an open whitelist. Fuck the scorch.

entire situation is fucked because only a microscopically small percentage of the tf2 community actually wants to maptest
sure people are always down to ‘pug new maps’ if its a map that’s 80% done and has some degree of playability so that they can give minor feedback and get hipster cred
no one wants iterate through 17 quick compiles of dogshit maps without textures or decals to form it into an actual workable map
regardless of the fact that the majority of people in this community wouldn’t know what a good map actually is if it crawled out of their monitor and slapped them in the face, most people don’t even have standards for what constitutes a good map other than if they have fun in the moment, and regardless of whether or not those standards are good or not, it’s a step above what normally happens
there are also cases like warmtic/millstone/ramjam where the mapmaker refuses/is unable to fix the glaring problems on the map (eat my ass ics)

If you want new maps to potentially be added, look to techie with cp_rapids, pieman with synthetic, and defcon with cascade because they’re all skilled mapmakers who are extremely receptive to feedback. But at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if techie was just done with the HL community after invite players refused to test rapids because it didn’t have fucking decals on it. I know I would be.

@Markers said in [pl_borneo:

Where my millstone bois at, can we sub out upward for millstone?

@Bliztank said in pl_borneo: The Dark Horse of the Highlander map pool:

millstone enthusiast reporting for duty

if only u knew my struggle
that map was destined for greatness but the mapmaker is too much of a headass who’s completely unwilling to make any meaningful changes to the map despite being given a LITERAL ENCYCLOPEDIA of potential changes that could make the map playable, all because he’s too afraid of ‘alienating the pub community that likes the halloween version’

i wanted that map to be good so badly but it’s not gonna happen

@scaredy-bat said in [pl_borneo:

Damn… the Swiftwater snub is real

swift >> upward >= vigil > borneo >> badwater > barnblitz

if a single one of u mouthbreathers complains about ‘sniper op’ tomorrow i will personally wage righteous jihad against your bloodline until the end of time, the work defcon put in to making sniper manageable on this latest version is herculean

some things you should keep in mind instead:

1. does the raised point help (by limiting sightlines) or hurt (by giving defenders potential height advantage) the gameplay flow of the map?
   subpoint: what’s the strength vs. difficulty for holding on the point vs. holding behind it? traditional HL logic suggests that holding on the point is stronger but more difficult to pull off. how does that dynamic play here?
2. related: does the increased tunnel height (as a result of the point increase) make forcing a defensive soldier out of your own tunnel unreasonably difficult due to having height disad?
3. do the geometry changes to concrete that make backing out more difficult have any major repercussions on kiting ubers?
4. how do the new catwalks (on left outside of tunnel) affect gameplay? is it viable option for a fast combo push?
5. i can’t believe i’m typing this, but after running around on the map and ringing in a scrim on it the idea ran through my head: do the nerfed sightlines + raised height of mid make it too difficult to push point? have we finally reached the point where we need to buff a map’s sightlines?
6. how does the redesigned first floor feel? does it give attackers viable options to reach point and rotate safely?

haha hey guys what if we took established koth map design theory where ‘the point is the highest risk highest reward area on the map’ and flipped it on its head??? so now the point is the highest risk, lowest reward area on the map and you’re rewarded for playing as far away from it as possible?

haha nah fuck having objective standards one time i flanked behind them and got a 3k (it was epic)

on the real talk though if you want to play a koth map that encourages flanking and also punishes you for being in the same zip code as the point leading to degenerative gameplay of 2 teams either mexican standoff-ing each other from opposite sides of the map or complete whirlpool theory chaos, synthetic does everything ramjam does and better while also not having dogshit fps and a map maker that would rather make a christmas version with exploding presents instead of fixing the actual issues on the map

i know most main engis barely qualify as single celled organisms but yall need to stop putting your teles on the window on 2nd i got 3 telefrags this week and i wasn’t even trying for them

gg to mentally challenger, close as h*ck

edit: I just re-read the OP, and I missed the point with what you were going for in terms of the fast cap time, fast respawns and large amount of packs. That being said, everything just seems too much. I might’ve been a little too conservative with some of my suggestions, but the instant cap on low ground/9 packs per side/4 second respawns aren’t going to lead to healthy gameplay, imo. It’d be worth testing some timings different than traditional maps, for sure, but even as someone who likes to buck the system I think it’s a little too extreme.

Just took a look at it, it’s pretty rough but I’d be interested in seeing how some of it plays with some touchups.

1. For the love of god, raise the spawn floor. I get the map is small and you can artificially increase spawn timers by increasing the time taken to walk out of spawn, but why am I taking fall damage to leave spawn?

2. If I leave the main spawn door, there should be a way to quickly make it onto batts without having to do a prop jump on the barrel on the right. The raised pathway on the left side of the spawn, and the need to go down, jump up, and then take a spiral up to the batts on left side is also somewhat tedious.
   2a. The jump into vent should probably be a little easier. I might just be ass, but it feels needlessly difficult.

3. On the topic of the vent, it can’t stay as it is. A direct dropdown into the center of point with no way to see anyone inside of it other than by camping the bottom of it leads to poor gameplay. If you really want to keep it, I’d recommend getting rid of the 90 degree turn at the end and maybe putting some kind of transparent shutter on it? Feels really wonky, all things considered.

4. The point caps ludicrously fast. Three seconds at x1? It’s basically unplayable. Combine that with the lower cap zone (which can’t even be shot at??) and you’re basically asking for control to flip every 10 seconds. Increase the cap time to like 10 seconds minimum, increase the size of the point, and remove the lower capture zones.

5. I can’t speak to 6s, but something needs to be done about this sightline if you want the map to even get tested in HL. You can’t rush a sniper, you realistically can’t bomb him, and there’s such massive runups for spy that they can’t get on him either. I don’t know what you could do without drastically changing the entire map, but it’s a problem.

6. There’s way, way, way, way, way, waaaaaaay too much health. Each side has 3 smalls (on mid too, so there are 6 small packs on mid?), 3 mediums, and 3 fulls?? Product has 4 mediums and 1 small on both sides, and you’ve got almost 4x that. The only full kit on a koth is on lakeside, and that’s in contested ground. My suggestion? Get rid of the smalls on mid other than the one by the crate, turn the medium in the left shutter into a small, turn the full kit on right side into a medium, delete the other fulls, and delete the medium on left batts. That leaves you with 2 mediums and 2 small for each side, which feels far more reasonable.

7. Get rid of the window above vent. It’s cute, but it gives defense a laughable amount of power.

8. The raised ground that the ramps on the point lead to strike me as potential pain points with how difficult they might be to clear out, considering that other than batts every single approach to point puts you on low ground. Difficult to say anything without playing it, though.

9. General mapping advice, watch your walls. Places where you can get caught on when strafing along a wall add nothing but frustration to a player’s experience. There’s not too many of them, but places like here and both sides of the shutter here stand out a little.

It might seem like I’m just shittalking it, but I think the smallness of the map and the wideness of the point could, at best case, play like a better of version of product. Interested to see where you take it.

upward was played for the first time in HL on Jan 7, 2011 and excepting ugc s7 (which was a no-playoffs joke summer season filled with meme maps) it has not missed a single season in a fucking decade

the poll can eat my ass, no map where dealing with a dispenser block is a crucial part of pushing is good enough to warrant a decade of continuous play

haha hey guys what if we took established koth map design theory where ‘the point is the highest risk highest reward area on the map’ and flipped it on its head??? so now the point is the highest risk, lowest reward area on the map and you’re rewarded for playing as far away from it as possible?

haha nah fuck having objective standards one time i flanked behind them and got a 3k (it was epic)

on the real talk though if you want to play a koth map that encourages flanking and also punishes you for being in the same zip code as the point leading to degenerative gameplay of 2 teams either mexican standoff-ing each other from opposite sides of the map or complete whirlpool theory chaos, synthetic does everything ramjam does and better while also not having dogshit fps and a map maker that would rather make a christmas version with exploding presents instead of fixing the actual issues on the map

if a single one of u mouthbreathers complains about ‘sniper op’ tomorrow i will personally wage righteous jihad against your bloodline until the end of time, the work defcon put in to making sniper manageable on this latest version is herculean

some things you should keep in mind instead:

1. does the raised point help (by limiting sightlines) or hurt (by giving defenders potential height advantage) the gameplay flow of the map?
   subpoint: what’s the strength vs. difficulty for holding on the point vs. holding behind it? traditional HL logic suggests that holding on the point is stronger but more difficult to pull off. how does that dynamic play here?
2. related: does the increased tunnel height (as a result of the point increase) make forcing a defensive soldier out of your own tunnel unreasonably difficult due to having height disad?
3. do the geometry changes to concrete that make backing out more difficult have any major repercussions on kiting ubers?
4. how do the new catwalks (on left outside of tunnel) affect gameplay? is it viable option for a fast combo push?
5. i can’t believe i’m typing this, but after running around on the map and ringing in a scrim on it the idea ran through my head: do the nerfed sightlines + raised height of mid make it too difficult to push point? have we finally reached the point where we need to buff a map’s sightlines?
6. how does the redesigned first floor feel? does it give attackers viable options to reach point and rotate safely?

@firepow said in The RGL Expiremental Map Cup is Being Wasted.:

In My Opinion For An Ideal Payload:

• No throwaway points. Each point can defended to some degree.
• No single point is dominated by one class.
• Average Time is around 7-8 minutes long. The average time on Upward is 7:57, and Vigil’s is 7:01 from sand’s spreadsheet.

Points 1 and 3 are in direct competition with each other. Vhalin and sean, the guys who made borneo, had a shitton of testing on rushingriver as a map where ‘every point could be held’ and people were really supportive of that until every point was “defended to some degree” and someone capped in 22 minutes. The only way I could see all three of these being upheld is with a map shorter than 4 points, which isn’t necessarily a problem (we tested a 3 point PL map one time, daybreak or eclipse was the name?) but it breaks with conventional logic.

@Jackawa said in The RGL Expiremental Map Cup is Being Wasted.:

jesus christ flare stop

outside of his opinion on borneo everything @Flare’s said in this thread is objectively correct and literally cannot be argued
the lack of consistent standards for what defines a good map has plagued this community for years
there’s no reason real reason for him to stop and no one here can give him one

@firepow said in The RGL Expiremental Map Cup is Being Wasted.:

@Alto MegaPieManHD is the creator of Synthetic and is currently on working on Midwest. Both Berryville and Midwest are textured. So the idea of having testing actual experimental maps is still not out of the question.

I didn’t realize pieman did midwest (hadn’t heard of it before this thread, definitely gonna check it out), but for you to even conceive of berryville being played in HL requires a lobotomy as the bare minimum. like, it’s beyond square peg-round hole to even consider that map. I played it in a 5am 4s pug which is normally my favorite time to play tf2 and I couldn’t even enjoy myself without constantly getting visions of the apocalypse that would occur if there 18 players on it.

@Flare said in The RGL Expiremental Map Cup is Being Wasted.:

And as regards both points above: can anyone here even formulate what exactly makes a good map? Why is fucking Product still held up as the gold standard, the KOTH map singlehandedly responsible for the entire Highlander community’s Stockholm syndrome towards their Demos and Snipers, for everyone somehow thinking it’s normal for 7/9 classes to simply not play the game and for KOTH to be braindead W-fests? There’s basically not a single argument here backed by any understanding of game design, everyone just yaps on about how “idk we’ve just always done it like this” and “oh no I don’t want to spend more than 10 minutes pushing :(”. Maybe you’re right or maybe you’re wrong, but I know damn well none of you would actually be able to figure out why.

@Flare said in The RGL Expiremental Map Cup is Being Wasted.:

The real point I’m pushing is that this “fun only” attitude is exactly why new maps just cannot happen in our format. There’s no understanding or discussion of what makes a map good, so no feedback can occur, because the only mechanism people are using to make judgments starts with d and ends with opamine. It’s completely unsustainable and results in a sea of open-mouthed Highlander players waiting for a map maker to drop a perfect map with no usable feedback and no one willing to take the time to understand the underlying patterns to replicate past successes.

You want a good new map? Getting it won’t be fun. You want fun? You won’t get good new maps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF3Hg6FBBSU

entire situation is fucked because only a microscopically small percentage of the tf2 community actually wants to maptest
sure people are always down to ‘pug new maps’ if its a map that’s 80% done and has some degree of playability so that they can give minor feedback and get hipster cred
no one wants iterate through 17 quick compiles of dogshit maps without textures or decals to form it into an actual workable map
regardless of the fact that the majority of people in this community wouldn’t know what a good map actually is if it crawled out of their monitor and slapped them in the face, most people don’t even have standards for what constitutes a good map other than if they have fun in the moment, and regardless of whether or not those standards are good or not, it’s a step above what normally happens
there are also cases like warmtic/millstone/ramjam where the mapmaker refuses/is unable to fix the glaring problems on the map (eat my ass ics)

If you want new maps to potentially be added, look to techie with cp_rapids, pieman with synthetic, and defcon with cascade because they’re all skilled mapmakers who are extremely receptive to feedback. But at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if techie was just done with the HL community after invite players refused to test rapids because it didn’t have fucking decals on it. I know I would be.