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@shotaway said in RGL Conduct Survey #4 Results, Global Rule Edits, & 2021 March/April Bans:

No response since May? Surely, you must have seen this thread. Are you just ignoring me? Has RGL given any thought to this? It would be pretty cool to have things like the spy cam for playoffs / grands. This rule just needlessly shuts down extra content.

Just because u make a long post doesn’t mean its of substance and admins need to reply. Your posts aren’t new ideas that nobody has ever argued before, and if you -really- cared about getting answers to your questions you would just talk to somebody in production instead of trying to gain traction by baiting outrage on the forums.

@shotaway said in RGL Conduct Survey #4 Results, Global Rule Edits, & 2021 March/April Bans:

It has now been 26 days since my last post on this thread and well over a month since my original post, and I have not received a response from anyone at RGL, except for the one reply near the top that didn’t address the content of my post. It seems like I was correct in my last post.

Here are your justifications for the rule given in this article:

To help mitigate possible DDoS attacks with STV information being leaked
– Anyone who is able to receive leaked STV info could also receive leaked server info, so this point is meaningless. It looks like you added this as the first bullet point for shock value.

How is this meaningless, wtf are you saying? Giving STV info to random community members = a higher chance of somebody giving that to the group of idiots who try to disrupt casted matches. At least when its only shared between production and server ops we know who to hold accountable for leaking. Give it to a bunch of “community content creators” though? not anymore lol

You have enough info to ddos a server with just the STV info, it makes complete sense that its not just out there for people to see. RGL doesn’t have the ESEA budget for ddos prevention measures on their tf2 servers (or the budget to even own servers lmao). Its just not realistic to expect open stv information for the casted RGL games, especially considering the HL community has a decently sized group of people who think its Really Funny to disrupt match casts in whatever way they possibly can.

To avoid the server being affected performance-wise
– You could host matches that are being casted by RGL on servers with resources capable of supporting more viewers. I’m sure that this is unpopular with teams who own their servers and like to play matches on them, but it seems more desirable than banning other players for entering the STV. I’m sure other restrictions exist anyways to enforce that at least RGL can enter if they please, so extending that rule doesn’t seem too bad. Preferably, RGL can provide STV relay servers to third parties, or address the STV relay bug in one of several ways discussed earlier.

These are non-solutions.
Did you watch the video exa linked? STV relays with enough people connected are literally unwatchable. You just move the problem down another step when you make a relay in terms of making the decision about who gets access to it, because clearly not everyone can be in it.

You can’t seriously think saying “just buy a better server lol” or “just fix the bugs in STV relays” is productive in any real way right?

To avoid an STV slot being taken away from the production team
– This is fundamentally the exact same issue as given above, listed a second time.

The problem is that you think making a relay will just fix everything. You seem to think ignoring the problem that STVs and Relay Servers fold under the pressure of enough spectators will just magically make it go away. It doesn’t. Plus it gets even worse because the game server itself can also take a hit, which directly effects the match.

Given that relays aren’t a viable option (pretending they are doesn’t make it true), this is a valid concern.

Secondary considerations:

Promoting coverage of more invite matches happening during the same day and time rather than multiple coverages of the same game
– Different casts provide different experiences and perspectives. For example, I have been casting exclusively from the spy POVs each match, which is entirely different content than a traditional cast of the match itself. The promotion of diverse coverage does not necessitate match exclusivity. There is very often only one interesting game per week, and having different angles of the top matches is a net positive.

The league does not suffer because randoms can’t couch-cast a match. The league does suffer if its official cast is disrupted. There is a small benefit to allowing randoms to couch-cast (arguably the biggest benefit is placating angry forum posts and nothing to do with increased viewership of the matches lmao). Conversely, there is a clear demerit to not enforcing cast exclusivity (considering previous disrupted casts).

RGL is in talks with different sponsors and selling the brand is difficult when the official RGL stream has low viewer counts
– Twitch viewership is not a zero sum game. Given any two streams, a viewer might watch both, one, or neither. A viewer of one stream may choose to not watch at all rather than watch the other stream. Since every other reason given is bogus, this seems like the only real reason for this rule, and it puts the interests of the league above the interests of the community. At what point do the upsides of a sponsorship get outweighed by the downsides it pressures onto the community? Would you drop HL if a potential sponsor would consider a league that only supports 6s? Or if that potential sponsor demanded a certain whitelist, or wanted to put in place some other ridiculous rule banning players for something stupid? If you truly are in talks with a sponsor that refuses to support your brand unless you ban anyone in the same STV as you, then you should drop that sponsor and look elsewhere.

Of the viewerbase who know they want to watch a casted match, the fact that random community member X isn’t allowed to cast it won’t stop them from watching it. Of the potential viewerbase reachable, the official cast provides so much more outreach than our communities independent sources that they border on negligible.

RGL doesn’t really lose anything by restricting other streams, and they prevent a LOT of headache for themselves. It is a willful denial of facts to pretend like open access to STVs hasn’t and doesn’t cause problems.

– Why then are players in the very same match allowed to stream their own POV? Why are other matches allowed to be casted at the same time? Do these things not take viewers away from the official cast? You claim to want coverage of more invite matches, but here claim that you want more viewers, at least somewhat acknowledging that less important matches are less desirable to viewers.

Players streaming their POV doesn’t create an issue for the production team, so its not a problem and not restricted. Similar logic for casts of other matches.

Conversely, community members competing for STV slots with the official production (or other listed reasons) is an issue, so its restricted.

The one response to this was a sentence stating that STV relays in TF2 have a bug. That seems like an RGL problem that should take precedence to be addressed above plenty of other things that RGL is doing, and certainly above banning players for streaming matches or sitting in STV. The way these issues have been presented and feedback has been ignored comes across as extremely scummy. You clearly think that RGL has made the right choice if you will go so far as to ban players over this, but I hope that I have demonstrated by now a certain level of investment in this issue to warrant a good response.

Did you really just say “this is a problem that should take precedence above plenty of other things RGL is doing” as if this specific issue is at all related to what any staff members ACTUALLY DO. Random Staff Members #1-100 don’t know anything about fixing bugs in the source engine. Like seriously wtf are you even trying to get at? That RGL Staff should just freeze other activity until they fix an irrelevant bug of unidentified source?

@shotaway said in RGL Conduct Survey #4 Results, Global Rule Edits, & 2021 March/April Bans:

It’s a bad response because it’s just a deflection of the issue. “Sorry, there is a bug that lowers STV relay quality, so instead we will ban you for casting our matches.” Is this bug well-known? Does it occur 100% of the time, or are there preventative measures that could be taken? Is it possible to build a workaround? Why not have the official casters in the STV while providing the relay server to third parties? Instead of putting any thought into solutions at all, RGL instead decides to offload this problem onto the community and ban anyone entering STV.

If the problem really is about issues that arise with too many people in STV, which never really seemed to be a problem until a few seasons ago (but I’ll believe you), then why not just have a measure for dealing with this when it happens, instead of blanket banning in all cases? Why not host RGL casted matches on servers with more resources? Why are “casting organizations” allowed to broadcast the same match? Why does this rule only exist for the official RGL casted matches if it affects the playability of the server regardless? The DDoS line is asinine, because anyone using STV info for an attack can get the server IP the same way. The first of the secondary considerations is narrow minded, because different streams provide different content regardless of which match is played.

“Official Casting Organizations” are allowed to cast the same matches as RGL because they are trusted to not create massive headaches for the official production team. Staff members use whatever criteria they have for determining who is an “official casting organization” they can trust to not cause headaches, but its not reasonable to extend that trust to the community at large. Call it favoritism if you want (it kinda is if you squint), but it should at least show you that RGL isn’t trying to be scummy and squash “competition” to their stream, they just want official productions to proceed smoothly.

A practical solution for you is:
Have a brand, make your casts something consistent with a high production value and sense of professionalism.
After demonstrating that you are serious by running like this for a while, contact dolphin/current head of production and appeal to be considered an official casting organization.
Done.

If this is an issue that you take a stance on more generally (i.e. you believe community couch casts are important), you should find the solutions yourself (and maybe volunteer to staff to help implement them). Purchase the stronger server for RGL casts, wrangle the angry teams who Refuse To Play On Your Dogshit Server (aka: its not our server so we hate it), bugtest and figure out how (if even possible) to make relays stable for more spectators, and make a system that allows for you to give spectating information out without increasing the chance the resident dumbasses in HL use it to disrupt casts.

Its really easy to just say “do more work” when you aren’t the person who has to do the work, and apparently its also easy to convince yourself that RGL staff are a bunch of powertripping incompetents trying to Silence The Demands Of The Community because they made a decision that you didn’t like. I guarantee you its not that dramatic. All it takes is one disrupted cast for production to be fed up and put a stop to whatever caused it (and thats probably what happened).

(This isn’t a staff response bc im not involved with RGL but its hopefully its better than nothing for you)

I would like to present a simple formula.

Defensive gameplay elements + Sniper = Unfun.

Sniper is only enabled to be such a degenerative influence in highlander because of the overabundance of defensive options teams are forced to run that let them slow the game down into a perpetual state of sniper dominance.

The Wrangler is just one of many examples. It is a weapon that is oppressively strong. Strong enough that it has warped perception of how stopwatch defense should be played massively. The idea of dynamic play on defense is almost entirely absent in highlander at all levels of play. It isn’t the only reason, but certainly one of the largest.

I am of the personal opinion that the wrangler is a toxic influence on the meta, removing counterplay to it seems like a frankly awful idea to me.

The Base Jumper’s problem was always rooted in the design concept of the weapon. When the enemy soldiers jump high and slowly float down on your combo you can’t both stare into the sky to stop them while also dealing with players on the ground. In the small amount of playtesting the item recieved it had a crazy high degenerate effects on teamfights. I honestly feel like this weapon deserves its own category for ban reason: Every other soldier secondary promotes more interesting play. This weapon isn’t worth it.

Mini-crits can do big knockback from far away. Soldier already sucks, please don’t create a reality where soldiers get denied by minicrit hitscan instead of just normal hitscan.

Soda Popper is probably fine because it kinda sucks with the constant reloads. Most people think the infinity jump is obnoxious so its not a popular opinion to want to unban this weapon.

Bonk was supposedly playtested and deemed problematic before I became heavily involved in 6s. The only change it has received since then can be circumvented by spamming movement keys perpendicular to the direction you are trying to go (spam a/d while going forward or back to nullify speed loss). I am willing to believe its a problematic weapon in regards to backcaps according to lore, and I also think giving caught out scouts the ability to possibly retreat with it wouldn’t be a good idea.

Crit-A-Cola should never be allowed into the game while you can circumvent its downsides by ubering the scout. Scouts having on demand access to mini crits during their ubers sounds like hell. Honestly it could still be too good if that wasn’t a thing anyways because of the insane flank playmaking you could get with it.

I don’t really want to play a version of 6s where all 12 players in the server have free high-damage highly spammable weapons so no thank you to the guillotine.

Mad Milk is banned in HL because the throwables are too powerful during teamfights. The same concepts apply to 6s except scouts account for 1/3rd of the players instead of 1/9th.

Pocket pistol can be unbanned. Stock pistol does more damage in a clip so the tradeoff is actually a thing even if people pretend like it doesn’t exist.

Cow Mangler charge shots are degenerate as fuck. The weapon does not deserve another chance at introduction (would be the 3rd time at least) until that mechanic is changed to be less low-risk high-reward and uninteresting.

Disciplinary Action gets a bad rep because of whipping offclasses to mid, but most don’t consider that scouts/medics/soldiers benefit from the whip just as much. I doubt it would make a difference in terms of offclass viability because of that, but I do think it would improve the state of soldier by a lot. Worth testing 100%.

Natascha isn’t even a good weapon. It is just universally considered annoying because of the slowstun mechanic. Unbanning this wouldn’t change a single thing about the game however people would probably bitch a lot.

Buffalo Steak Sandvich is banned because certain rollout lengths result in the effect ending at the exact second you get to your destination. I don’t think it matters, but the dogma of heavy out of last = bad makes everyone hesitant to touch it.

Fists of Steel becomes dumber the less players per team. Hard no.

Rescue Ranger is probably fine. Engineer is honestly a bit too one-dimensional without it in 6s. Buffing last holds is generally a bad thing, but honestly the only time a level 3 gun can impact a last hold heavily is when the attacking team is unaware of its existence (this would also apply with the rescue ranger, but it would let engineers position buildings differently sometimes).

Short Circuit makes demos in uber spend most of their time waiting out the three spirit bombs. This would probably be too beneficial to last holds to ever be unbanned.

Wrangler gives sentries 648 hp. Not fun, same concept as above.

Quick-Fix is probably fine but good luck convincing people to even test it given the PTSD from that one ancient ESEA LAN where it was allowed.

Vaccinator has similar unban argument merits to the rescue ranger- but it 100% makes last holds too strong. Not viable for unbanning if 5cp remains the main gamemode for 6s.

Machina is dumb.

Sydney Sleeper shouldn’t a be a problem but apparently is?

Jarate can impact teamfights too heavily its kinda OP.

Diamondback gives spy the ability to backstab an isolated flank player for a free crit when more valuable targets are aware. Also generally just rewards spies more for a mechanic thats already really high value. A spy who backstabs a medic doesn’t also need the ability to do a pills worth of damage to somebody around them.

@rvn hi i play invite 6s and talked about every banned weapon in my post. I also advocated for testing the whip because I think it could probably be unbanned.

also yerb is a pretty high level player as well.

@LegendaryRQA
Invite 6s players died to charge shots plenty of times and they generally have the best awareness/movement in the game. Everybody gets hit by spam, its just something that happens. Charge shots are just another type of spam. You can influence how much you get hit by spam (and good players obviously do) but nobody goes through an entire game without taking some.

I don’t think it is viable to assume players wont ever get hit by charge shots, so its important to know how strong they actually are. They have a small element of risk involved with use (you lose your entire clip and can’t really move while charging) but it was normal for soldiers to safely use them many times in a match. If hit on the edge of their splash radius they do 61+afterburn. This damage scales to 122+afterburn on a direct hit regardless of distance, or 151+afterburn with ramp-up (Minicrits have ramp-up but not fall-off). They were very strong, and if they clipped a target in their splash they generally did enough damage to follow up on for the pick. Even a lone charge shot from a soldier across the map had the capability to one-shot scouts or force a medic. It wasn’t common for sure, but it was far from unheard of.

In general, charge shots have an imbalanced risk-to-reward ratio. Low-risk high-reward tools will always be favored in competitive games, and they also tend to make for the least interesting gameplay. I don’t think its wise to unban the cow-mangler at all.

If snipers are wasting their time with crouch peeking to win svs duels there is an exceptionally high chance their map presence is low and they aren’t helping their team by pressuring important sightlines.

Punish it with your non-sniper classes via tactical application of the W key. Additionally, your own sniper can shoot other things until their sniper actually plays the game. Taking svs fights isn’t mandatory if the other sniper is being useless.

listing your tryouts every post means nothing, people only care about the mains on your team.

i direct this at every lfp thread on the forum but especially this one because i have gotten like 4 alerts from being @'d in it

@b4nny said in RGL Conduct Survey #4 Results, Global Rule Edits, & 2021 March/April Bans:
on’t involve shutting down community content in a community league.

I am also not an admin responsible for the decisions made on this topic, but it does annoy me when I see this argument so I want to chime in. My understanding is that RGL is a “community league” because it is grassroots, built by players and members of the community, and isn’t owned by a major corporation, NOT because any decision it makes must empower every member of the community or that every decision must be made by community vote. Sometimes catering to the community is good, sometimes it is detrimental. In navigating that, the league admins should make decisions that are in its best interests that will benefit the success of the competitive scene, even if they may be unpopular with some members of the community.

This

If you want to make spy POV only casts of specific matches, just grab the STV demo later and cast from that. Nothing is stopping that in the RGL rulebook.

It isn’t like admins haven’t considered other alternatives. Do you really think they just ignore that people are upset? I doubt it.

1.) Servers struggle with higher spectator counts. In the end, you will always have to resort to favoritism in terms of who gets access because giving it to too many spectators will have a detrimental impact on the gameserver/spectating experience.

2.) Even if you bypass logistical issues, holding people accountable for match servers being ddosed / casts disrupted because of leaked info is always a worse solution than removing opportunities for that to happen in the first place.

That’s literally it.
You also need to understand that this rule exists in such a harsh form purely because its an issue thats not just an isolated case and seems to always happen whenever a ‘popular match’ comes about.

Server ops would give their stv info to Bowl, vryktion, and other randoms who want to cast. Magically that info would then end up in the hands of people who want to disrupt the match. Crazy how that works.

Players have had to move servers because their original started to lag once enough STV clients connected.

Blanket restricting STV is a very simple solution to an annoying set of problems you would otherwise forever play a game of whack-a-mole with, and removes an avenue for admins to abuse their power with favoritism.

I don’t really buy into the idea that NR6s devolves into cheese comps and strats. Everyone who played that gamemode was mentally checked out, refused to make any attempts at improving, and didn’t give a single shit at any point of the formats lifespan.

The problem with the gamemode has nothing to do with the gamemode itself, and is more of a meta reason- Nobody wants to put in effort for NR6s given that the format has 0 translatability to bigger scenes. It is more time efficient to call the format bad, and only show up for matches to get the badge/prize$/league history. Is the format actually bad? That’s subjective, but saying that its unbalanced and cheesy is a pretty bold claim given how nobody is good enough at the format to speak with any real credibility.

The idea that certain strats that were found early by a few teams (mine included) were the definitive ‘cheesy’ way to play the format is just flat out wrong. The format had plenty of room for innovation, but nobody actually wanting to innovate whatsoever.

The vaccinator makes a great example to show off how little people actually thought about the game. Everyone thought this weapon was the bees knees and grossly overpowered. Notably, many NR6s teams ran double medic comps featuring 1 to 2 vaccinator medics. By the end of season 2 I heard staff debating about whether the weapon deserved to be banned.

How many people actually spent more than 2 seconds thinking about what could possibly counter the vaccinator though? Double medic strategies have a large variety of pros and cons. It takes more words than what I am willing to type right now to do a full dive into that. The relevant result of running a double medic composition is that single player picks become much stronger against your team.

The vaccinator seems like an intelligent choice knowing that. Bubbles are more flexible and can be used to bail out players or enable aggression frequently enough at the small scale that you can win the long game based on having more heals/ubers. Luckily, there are non mirror-matchup tools that have a lot of potential against the vaccinator.

Stock Ubers provide Invincibility, which is stronger than damage type resistance. You can have access to more stock ubers than the opposing team.
Diversified damage types and tankier team compositions. Equipping shotguns on soldier, heavies in combo, etc.
The forgotten mechanic of fire damage and the the pyro class as a whole.
The battalions backup charging as if doing full damage against vaccinator bubbles.
Market Gardener + Quick Fix ubers smile

If against 2 vaccinators, you also gain the advantage of knowing your buffs are stronger than the enemy buffs, so you can pressure flanks exceptionally hard.

How many people actually used these things? Probably nobody.
I don’t think using my matches on Cat Noises presents a good example of what the format should have ever looked like. My team had some big noobs (myself) and had 0 scout mains, while b4nny’s team was carrying uncle dane. If vaccinator was truly problematic in lower divs (which is likely), you also need to check if any true counterplay was ever attempted (which is much less likely). Maybe things in NR6s are cheesy and awful, but I don’t think anybody is truly in a credible position to say that given how awful the ‘testing’ of the 2 seasons were.

Proposal:
Permaban players who say slurs or who otherwise try to rulebook about what bigoted behaviors are acceptable or not.

Clearly this community is incapable of growing as people or self-policing their behavior.
Its depressing

we all know if the cap is changed to 18 or 12 it wont matter because when a main is missing on match day 90% of teams are gonna go look for a ringer who is “good” instead of using their crusty washed up rostered subs

Stopwatch maps are largely overrated in terms of strategic depth. Not to say they don’t have any, but its just that the strategies you use on stopwatch are so in-your-face and obvious that its hard to miss.

5cp is a very engaging gamemode with a lot of depth, but stalemating is a real vibe killer and kills a lot more strategic depth than it enables.

Koth gets a huge rep for being the “unga-bunga DM mode” but I really feel like that doesn’t have to be the case at all.

Playing other gamemodes “smart” is a very rigid requirement. Its hard to imagine cp_steel being won by a team that puts no effort into coordination. By contrast, many teams with low coordination but exceptional mechanics have won against traditionally ‘smarter’ teams on koth. I don’t think that implies the maps have less potential for strategic depth though. The reason you can out-dm your way to victory more often on koth is because forcing fights is much more achievable compared to 5cp/stopwatch. It’s very hard to circumvent a mechanical difference on koth in the same way its very hard to circumvent a strategic difference on stopwatch.

That doesn’t necessarily imply that stopwatch/5cp have higher ceilings than koth however, just a higher floor. I would actually argue that the fact that fights can happen more readily on koth actually increases the potential depth of the gamemode. More strategies are open at any given moment, and necessitate responses/adaption. Proactive play is rewarded more, and learning how to strategize on the maps isn’t something you can just iron out with a 15 minute map talk because decision making is so much more variable.