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

this is only tangentially related to div size but i didn’t really realize that until i had typed up most of this because it’s been on my mind for a while

i don’t have the knowhow for the methodology to prove this statistically and i wouldn’t really have the drive to do so even if i did, so you’re gonna have to trust me when i say that a significant amount of frustration re: swiss comes from the fact that RGL runs an odd number of matches

anecdotally speaking, six weeks is generally a decent amount of time for the general structure of a division to form given the average size of divisions. further, due to how the bottom of playoffs tends to be around the 4-3 mark in the higher divs, it means the large mass of 3-3 teams swiss helps to guarantee in week 6 have an inordinately large effect on playoff seedings, because of all those 3-3 teams, some of those should be 3-4 and some should 4-3 but 6 weeks isn’t enough time for the stratification of those teams by MP to be accurate (even if the general “shape” of the div is). so the top 3-3 team playing “up” a record gets screwed, the bottom 3-3 team playing “down” gets boosted, and within the inter-3-3 matches you could have two theoretical 4-3 teams playing and two theoretical 3-4 teams playing, leading to some cases where worse teams end up making short term gains over better teams. an 8th week would correct a lot this.

i don’t mean to say that 6 weeks is better than 7 weeks, as each week helps to further align the standings to their “true” form, but if the marginal gain in accuracy from week 6>7 is x, the marginal from week 7 to week 8 would probably be closer to 2x. that would continue further with 8>9 being something like .5x and 9>10 being around x.

more in line with the topic of the thread, increasing div size to the point that the playoff cutoff is less near the middle of the pack and closer to the top (to the point that lower 5-2s miss playoffs) you eliminate a lot of this frustration, but i’d still be in favor of increasing season length to 8 weeks for swiss divs regardless

@pajaro it’s not really that simple

the map files we play on are not the true map files. when a map maker makes a map in Hammer, they save that map on their own computer and it’s the only true version that exists. we can call this the “parent” map. the map files that we put on servers are derivations of that parent map, or a “child” map. you /can/ load up a child map in hammer but there’s going to be a decent amount of weird issues if you try to make any meaningful changes because hammer’s reverse-engineering the parent map off of the child map.

it happened with ashville because the original creator of ashville passed off the original parent map, but mapmakers tend to be very reluctant to hand those out since it’s like handing over control of an intellectual property to someone else.

i’m not 100% on the process because i don’t actually work with maps directly, but i know gobitoe was having a ton of problems related to this when he was working on lakeside_pro. that being said, we have pro badwaters and lakeside_r, so i don’t know exactly how the process works when it comes to valve maps, but i’d imagine doing it on a custom map isn’t that simple.

@Saturation said in seasonal rotate out upward in spite of poll results thread:

the issue with threads like this is that most of the commenters are people who have been playing comp for years and are kinda bored with the map(because theyve been playing it for years)
especially these days, tf2 is made up of a lot more than the few invite players that have been playing for so long, and to have a a koth and a payload that are played every season is a very important thing for lower level players to learn how to play the game better
i know that personally, learning the flow of payload through playing upward repeatedly helped me tremendously, and same thing with product

This is a solid point, but here’s a counterargument: ashville’s been played every RGL season without being swapped out (as it should be IMO), as has swiftwater. No one’s calling out swiftwater out to be rotated despite having been played every season of rgl (although it wasn’t played in ugc s25, the last real ugc season before rgl, or in s22) because of reasons jacob mentioned earlier in the thread: the map is dynamic and still seeing changes even after all these years of being played. Swiftwater and ashville are IMO the maps that should be staples because they teach you more about how to play PL, koth, and HL as a whole due to their fluidity rather than upward and product which teach new players to fear sniper and be hyper-passive because those maps punish aggression unless your team is operating on a high level.

Consistency is good, but to counter @scaredy-bat’s point on when a map should be rotated out: if you’re only playing the same 7/8 maps every season and never have to learn new maps, you don’t actually learn how to play the game mode, you learn how to play the map. UGC would have 2-3 maps rotate every season and while I think that may have been indexing too far in the other direction, going from swift/borneo/steel to badwater/barnblitz/gpit and gully to process every season meant you couldn’t just rely on stock strategies every season and actually had to learn how the “theory” of the game mode applied to each map individually.

I’ve made a similar point in the past, but considering the relatively low stakes of this league, adhering to a ‘best maps at all possible times no questions asked’ policy in spite of poll numbers showing a large amount of players wanting maps to switch out doesn’t make a lot of sense.

also edit @scaredy-bat: i don’t know how meaningful playoff map picks are either way, since upward may have been played 5 times in season 8 main playoffs but it (or ashville, fwiw) wasn’t played a single time in s9 playoffs. playoff map picks tend to be extremely context dependent, like this season we had ashville 1st banned against us all 3 games and we banned upward all of our games, so that alone removes those two maps from half of the 6 total playoff matches. teams being good/bad at certain maps and aware of that doesn’t lend credence to a map being good or bad, necessary or rotatable either way imo.

blease understand i’m not willing to die on the borneo hill here
i just want upward gone and borneo is probably the most realistic way to make that happen next season

some facts:

upward is a good map
upward has considerable flaws as map (every point is ridiculously sniper dominant, last is a shitshow even without the dispenser block, aggressive forward holds on 2nd leave attackers with 0 options unless defenders make a mistake)
upward has been played in:
UGC seasons: 3 4 5 6 8 9 10 11 12 13* 14 15* 16* 17 18 19* 20* 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 (* denotes multiple plays in a season)
RGL seasons: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
upward was first played in rgl s3 on 5/16/11
the current date is 8/21/21
the only time upward was not played was in ugc s7, which was a summer season without playoffs and only had meme maps
it has been more than a decade since the last time upward was not played in a season without playoffs
there has been a growing number of people asking for borneo than in years past

an opinion:

the league would be better off playing a single [one (1)] season without upward in the rotation

another opinion:

dogmatically sticking to poll results until the end of time does not a good league make

another third opinion, this one with feeling:

swapping out swiftwater instead of upward for another PL like has been suggested is beyond fucking stupid

a conclusion:

rotate out upward for borneo
it gives the map a break
it either lets a new meta develop on borneo or silences proponents of the map once and for all
i can stop making these threads

a postscript:

thanks for reading
spu need not respond to this thread

an edit:
i don’t need borneo to win i just need upward to lose
millstone, gully, vanguard, rapids, synthetic, hell even sunnycoast would be tolerable
just give me a season without upward

normal taco bell is extremely solid for the price but taco bell breakfast is beyond goated

anyone who eats burger king should be sterilized

gg garbagemenn, great season!

@Mothership said in Swiss breakdown - S9 Adv vs Challenger:

@Alto Ask and you shall recieve. via windows paint.

excellent, thank you.

@scaredy-bat said in Swiss breakdown - S9 Adv vs Challenger:

Isn’t that still going to be the case in RR, as an inverse of the “top teams will have the easiest schedule because they can’t play themselves” thing that Tua pointed out?

yes, it’ll be the case in RR but it shouldn’t be the case in swiss, as bad teams in swiss will presumably play other bad teams leading to lower opponent MP (OMP), whereas good teams play other good teams and thus accumulate more OMP. there is still some basis for it (if you say there are 6 top teams and 6 bottom teams, a top team has a 6/11 chance to play a bottom team vs a 5/11 top team and vice versa), but it shouldn’t be as pronounced. it’s very difficult to draw any hard data from this because ultimately teams don’t control their schedules and good teams will win regardless of who they play and bad teams will lose regardless of who they play, but you can likely use it as a basis to investigate other trends. I was going to say something about asian being an outlier here, but apparently their match against :3 wasn’t counted and they should have 71.67.

you have to be careful with this stuff though because nothing here is conclusive and it’s very easy to use the data to support an argument that may not be right. that being said, you could choose to interpret the data here (combined with the fact that everyone in adv other than :3 was within a game of each other) to come to the conclusion that since making playoffs or missing it were a matter of one game, the fact that there’s a slightly higher point total to the bottom implies that teams who were “unlucky” (played 4 top teams and 3 bottom teams leading to a higher OMP) missed out on playoffs over the team who were “lucky” (played 3 top teams and 4 bottoms for a lower OMP). that’s a sound argument but not necessarily a correct one; you’d have to go and define top and bottom teams and then actually compare individual team schedules.

and even if you can confirm that, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. the best team in the div could get “lucky” and play 2 top teams/5 bad teams because they happened to catch bad teams when they were relatively over-ranked by swiss, and still end up rolling the div because they were the best team. stuff like this is (really) fun to look and conjecture over but not nearly as indicative of trends as it may seem, with no offense meant to tua for making it.

rr good swiss bad

personally i think this graph becomes more meaningful if you order the teams in seeding order so that you can see where the trends naturally fall with placement rather than needing to mentally reconstruct everything, like the top teams having the least mp against becomes naturally apparent that way and you can actually see outliers

really cool to see this though, thanks!