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

@vibeisveryo Unless we’re seeing teams with their full roster forfeiting because their engi has a headache, if a team forfeited on a given night they were almost guaranteed to lose because of the circumstances of that night. Two seasons ago, my main team (that ended up finishing 3rd) lost to the 2nd worst team in the div because we were missing 4 mains at match time and both of the subs we had arranged to play vanished into thin air. We ended up starting 15 minutes in an 8v9 with like 4 offclassers and an actual pubber on scout so we lost pretty handily. Even though we would’ve rolled that team on any other night, they were able to field the better roster on that night and thus deserved the win. Match night circumstances have always been a part of HL, and will continue to be a part of HL. It ended up not mattering because that team wasn’t close to playoffs, but prorating FFW points is inevitably going to cause a team that got matched against a clown team to miss playoffs and this entire conversation is going to storm back in the other direction.

and even if a team ends up getting a win against a team they would’ve lost to, in most cases (all except week 7), it’s going to even itself out the week after because that team’s been artificially inflated so they’ll eat an 0-3 the following week to even it out. Like, either you get the FFW and then lose 0-3 the next week, or you play out the match and lose, only to likely win the next week. The only difference is that by being on the receiving end of a FFW, you now have points taken away from you by things completely outside of your control.

I’ll say it again, we’ve already had this happen in UGC years ago and if the braindead UGC admins were able to realize that it was an awful system, there’s no reason why it should be touching RGL.

@tua I don’t want to knock the approach of being skeptical about item bans, but it is always the air strike that gets brought up and it always stays banned. it’s never anything else. no one ever wants to get frisky with the crit a cola or thought that perceived weakness of spy post amby nerf could be mitigated with a diamondback unban. it legitimately feels like there is a shadowy organization of soldier illuminati that spread air strike propaganda on a schedule. I’m exasperated at this point more than anything.

and as for sniper, I don’t want to be uncivil but you’re simply categorically wrong?? besides the fact that playing sniper with less players in a server will always be weaker than in HL, and besides the fact that running sniper in 7s is a choice and you are actively making tradeoffs for it (immediate combat strength for pick potential/area denial) and that anything that damages what sniper contributes is going to have a large effect on play/counterplay, besides the fact that HL and 7s are completely different gamemodes and you shouldn’t be drawing parallels, sniper will be weaker when he has less options, ESPECIALLY those that are passive and take no actual input to use. it doesn’t come across as spiteful, its the most centralizing class in the mode, the biggest impediment to fast gameplay, an ever-present problem when designing new maps, and you’re telling me that removing one of the only counterplays in the moment to not insta-die (aim punch) isn’t impactful but instead spiteful?

Also, your basketball example is terrible on like 6 different levels but the main one is that lowering a player’s performance across the board by 5 points is EXACTLY what a nerf should do to something overpowered. Should we lock snipers to the huntsman? Should we make it 8v8? Should we require mandatory amputations at the knee for all 9ft tall basketball players? Should we eradicate the bloodline of every single sniper player?

No, we give this class a light hit that still allows it to maintain its role while removing frustrating edge cases and annoying passive power that requires 0 skill to use and eliminates all counterplay for someone who ends up in a sightline. It’s not a spiteful nerf, it is the ideal nerf.

I consider you a very intelligent person most of the time but that entire paragraph is literally putrid.

The problem with sniper is his primary weapon, not the secondary, and no amount of tweaking to his secondaries will change the meta or player experience in any meaningful way

so then why not just unban jarate if its going to be meaningless and sniper will still be OP? it doesn’t matter right? of course it fucking matters, just because something passes a threshold of strength doesn’t mean that everything over that line is meaningless. if anything, since long range instakill is core to sniper’s design philosophy and hitting it too hard would fundamentally change the character (bad idea for a dev/designer), the optimal answer is to remove excess strength in his kit while keeping the core of his gameplay untouched. a cozy ban is, once again, an ideal way to rein sniper as a class in to slightly more tolerable levels by removing power he doesn’t need while keeping his primary strength the same. that philosophy is the same reason i want the toys banned, and advocated for a scorch ban as well, so i’m not just trying to spite snipers. i’d advocate for the outright removal of sniper’s secondary slot (rifle/melee only) if i could.

@vibeisveryo that’s not my point, all i’m saying is that the notion of discrediting a team with 2 FFWs for “only having one actual win” is almost as ridiculous as saying a team that only has FFLs is “undefeated”. and again, if you dock points from teams who receive a FFW, you are thereby removing points that a team could’ve rightfully earned during the match that was most likely going to be a 3-0 in their favor, simply because they had the bad luck of getting swiss’d against a team that didn’t have their shit together. that’s not something you can rightfully punish a team for.

also @tua counterpoint: just also ban the cozy

bro i stg who are these chucklefucks that keep getting the ‘let’s unban the airstrike!!’ ideas in their head every 2 years like fucking clockwork??? what is it with this weapon in particular?

-ugc banned it when it had 3 rockets
-ugc tested it after it got brought back to 4 rockets and kept it banned
-ugc re-tested it at least once, if not twice, after the initial ban because of mouthbreathers who cannot stand the idea of the air strike not being in comp play and near-unanimously kept it banned

why does this keep happening?? how many times do i have to relive the nightmares?? are we really just programmed to engineer our own destruction? this shit actually feels like the demon king in a fantasy story that awakens every 1000 years

@vibeisveryo @FlipFTW @Micahlele you guys are missing the forest for the trees here really hard

UGC already gave partial points for FFWs way back in the day and it caused so many issues every goddamn season that even the UGC admins realized it was a terrible system. i’ll go really in-depth on this if you want, but it really boils down to good teams getting punished for random matchups with clown teams. and in the same way that people arguing W/L seeding over MP don’t realize that the system is in place because the alternative has already been tried, and the demerits of the current system have been deemed the least damaging of the alternatives.

yes, the situation in AM is strange and unfortunate, but the fact that we only have one of these scenarios, if any, each season is an indicator that the system is working. it’s an extreme outlier and any attempts to standardize the system to account for extreme outliers is, more often than not, going to do far more harm than good. so how do we deal with scenarios like this, then? I see two options.

1. We don’t? Forfeits are, a very large percentage of the time, going to be a 3-0 in favor of the team receiving the FFW. if the 3-4 team had just won both of those matches instead, are we having this discussion? probably not. “but they only went 1-4!!!” no shit, the way swiss works essentially guarantees that a team is going to have “easy matches” or “hard matches”. when you get matched up against a clown team for one of those “easy matches”, and they end up forfeiting, it takes a win that you otherwise likely had coming and “delegitimizes” it in some way, simply because the 90% chance you had of 3-0ing was made 100%. comparison: if shovel forfeited their matches against 3600 and HOOD this season, saying ‘they actually went 5-0 in the matches they played!! maybe they beat hood!!’ is just inane and intellectually dishonest.

2. ironically one of the few places where UGC was ahead of RGL: give admins the ability to force a play-in for extreme outlier situations like this one or the CSn situation a few seasons ago. there’s a ton of scenarios you can pull for this, but kumori did it back in s15(?) plat for a similar scenario and while the team who had gotten then bye week/ffw that caused it was a little miffed, there ultimately weren’t any issues.

I’m gonna restate it, but points from FFWs aren’t an issue, like, at all. if these scenarios were happening more often there might be more of an argument for it, but when it’s such a relatively rare occurrence given the large amount of data in a tf2 season, it ironically serves as proof that the system is fine.

i don’t know the specifics of it but i think it has something to do with the map keeping your downward velocity as you respawn and (presumably) amping it up somehow so that you respawn and immediately crater. idk the specifics of steel’s pit/spawn but i’d imagine you could band-aid the problem by having a thin layer of water in the spawn to prevent fall damage, assuming i’m understanding the interactions correctly

would look weird but function > form

Keep in mind I’m approaching this entirely from an HL PoV. I just realized you said it was designed for 6s after typing most of this up, but I think it’s got a lot of potential for HL as well.

I go into most new maps with a heavy dose of skepticism, but honestly? This looks really well done. I can’t speak to how exactly it’ll play in high-level comp because that’s impossible, but there’s nothing in the geometry that seems eminently unplayable. I’d love to see more testing on this.

Some feedback -

-I’m worried about the amount of healthpacks on the map. Regardless of the actual size in HU, I’m getting product/ashville vibes from this rather than lakeside. Ash/Prod both have two medium kits on each side with a central contested pack, with lakeside having 2 mediums and 1 small pack on each side and a contested full, with the caveat being that only one of the packs is somewhat accessible during point fights. Soot has 3 mediums and a small, with 2 of those mediums in a spot where you could conceivably contest point from them. The concentration behind house is especially ridiculous. The pack outside cave is also concerning imo, as you could reasonably park a medic there and still be in beam range of a demo fighting point on the stairs. My initial thought is something like this, but it’s your call. If it was my map, I’d probably get rid of the small in house and leave the ammo as well, but I can’t say anything for certain without playing it.

-Tying into the prior point, removing a medium somewhere gives you the ability to add a contested pack into cave. It’s really desolate in there atm, and I don’t think there’s currently a lot of incentive to control it, outside of ‘well if I’m here they can’t be’, which is ultimately a mediocre reason to play in a location. Dropping a medium pack or even a small dead center of the structure in there heats it up immediately and makes control of it much more desirable.

-This is more conjecture and I could easily be off the mark, but given the lack of sightlines onto the point, there might be a new-cascade problem where forward holding is too powerful. IMO, a really good principle of koth map design I’ve noticed is “the point should be the best place to hold/be but not the safest” - something clearly shown in why product and lakeside are played, and why maps like warmtic (point is too safe), ramjam (point is the worst spot on the map to be), and synthetic (same as ramjam) aren’t very popular. If you were to hold a medic close on the shed on point and have players orbit him, what’s realistically threatening him? Any bombs would likely be spotted very early, there’s very few sightlines a sniper can manage, and any combo approach outside of a straight headbutt through the one-way glass is going to get called ahead of time. Could be a non-issue, but as a medic player sitting on point has me feeling extremely comfy and that’s usually a bad thing.

@pajaro said in CP_STEEL_REFRESH Discussion & Feedback thread.:

alto stop talking you are wrong

how long has it been since u got a win in invite lol