Just another example of why Swiss system is bullshit. Don’t take the hate out on csn, focus it on Swiss. I’ll probably do another dumb spreadsheet breaking down swiss system or something like that, if I have the time. Same thing happened with bodybuilding.com and oWn a couple of seasons ago.

No offense to Crit Sandvich, I think they’re a surprisingly decent team, and you can only beat who you’re scheduled to play against, but their schedule was much easier than Flow’s.

Hopefully we’re able to do Round Robin next season.

really cool features, thanks for putting in the time to do these
however, at least for the stats search, i think you forgot to remove a test print statement or something, because my names always end with cum

So I’m in the process of trying to salvage a diet oWn team for next season, but if that falls through I’d like to play next season regardless. I want to prove myself as a top advanced or even low invite (stretch, i know, lmao) sniper without having oWn around me. I’d also be happy to sub in invite on sniper.

Otherwise, I’d be alright with trying a season on spy or soldier in advanced or high main, preferably with a friend and/or legacy team.

I watch demos religiously, I can secondary call, and I’ll push myself out of my comfort zone to do whatever the team needs me to do to win.

So nurkz and I are sticking together from oWn, with Joey Lemons as team mentor/cheerleader, along with some old oWn players subbing. Looking to be a fun mid adv/playoff contender team with cool dudes who don’t suck. Demo tryouts are our biggest priority, but solly, pyro, med, and engi tryouts would be nice to have too, but please have some decent advanced+ experience. Message me on discord for tryouts: tua#6935

Scout
patches

Soldier
wubs

Pyro
klowwd? raptoir? despy? lumiti? gabiduo?

Heavy
Nurkz

Demo
dt

Engineer
High Impact Dolphin

Medic
rona

Sniper
tua

Spy
zokie0

Subs
Stardust, tlar, raptoir, patrick

@Alto This. Just because something is harder to push doesn’t mean it’s inherently a worse map, imo it makes things much more skillful if you can consistently pull off quick times, you get a much bigger reward for being better at the map than the other team if you can cap 3-4 minutes faster than them consistently, rather than like 1-2 minutes on vigil or something.

Take old Nuke from csgo for example, or just a lot of the maps in the pool ~3+ years ago. Getting 5 rounds on T-side was good, but if you were skilled enough that you could win like 10 rounds T side, then you played so well that you were able to give yourself a significant advantage on the CT side. Maybe you weren’t a fan of nuke, but what I’m trying to say is that making things harder increases the skill ceiling, something we shouldn’t shy away from.

Obviously having a map be nearly impossible to push is dumb (I don’t wanna play some shit like Dustbowl last for example), but longer map times does not mean the map is inherently worse playwise at all, it only affects scrim times, but 12+ minute average time is still enough time finish scrims on time even with some added highlander time.

tl;dr Harder to push points (within reason) can raise the skill ceiling of the game

joey lemons for not cutting me

unironically make prolander the default competitive mode
smaller than HL so easier queues, can swap classes
still essentially the same game as what is played in casual, 6s to me feels as if i’m playing a completely different game that’s been awkwardly incorporated into the game

Hey so I have a bunch of irl commitments this summer I’d like to prioritize over HL, but I should be good to sub in s9. I think I’ve grown a lot since oWn, I’ve been grinding my aim harder than I ever have before, and I’m happy that I’ve learned how to play multiple styles of sniper.

I can obviously play sniper, but I feel fairly confident I can hang on engi, spy, scout, and solly. I can also do heavy if needed.

Invite would obviously be nice, but I’d be perfectly happy subbing on a challenger team.

don’t feel like writing a full essay right now, but swiftwater is the most tactically dense map in the game. The points are all so diverse and there are so many different ways to push them, unlike every other stopwatch map. People just don’t like it because 2nd is bad (every other point is awesome tho) and because they think long map = bad. That’s like saying a map is bad in csgo because it’s CT sided; harder to push means your tactical prowess/skill make a bigger difference and you get rewarded more for it.

@dlphn I agree with dolphin here

i started hl with rgl, I never played UGC. I would at least like to try the old maps that everyone says were meh and make up my own opinion rather than have someone with their head up their ass try to lecture me on why i shouldn’t even consider trying a map.

Maybe they’re not quite as bad as we remember, perhaps metas have shifted since then, especially with different weapon bans. At the very least let the zoomers who’ve never had the opportunity to try these maps see how bad they are so we can end this discussion and not have to debate on whether or not we should include borneo or whatever in the map pool. Many of the maps listed in end of season polls as potential swap ins haven’t been played in years, how can me and a huge chunk of the rgl playerbase who have never played them properly vote on whether or not they should be played?

Maps can still progress via testco and other map testing groups, map development isn’t going to grind to a screeching halt without this cup. Obviously getting an entire cup or even season would be ideal, but I also seriously doubt this is gonna be the last experimental cup ever.

Also i’m speaking about this as a player, not as a staff member, I didn’t take any part in the decision for this experimental cup.

@rj well i’m not really saying that either, here’s my line of thought: the winner of advanced this past season (17th place overall) won the right to play with teams 9-16 in terms of ranking. Teams 9-16 are what advanced would be if it were RR.

The winner of Main last season (29th overall) won the right to play with teams 17-28.

The breakdown of divs this season:
1-8 Invite
9-22 Advanced
23-43 Main

Based on those numbers, I’d say the Main winner fits better in with Advanced than Main, and as I said, I think they should be rewarded for their achievement of winning main. At the very least, they’re right halfway between the two divs and I think winning main is a good tiebreaker for that.

If we’re talking about an 8 team Advanced with no Challenger, then yeah that’s a harder thing to argue, and that’s not what I was really arguing for in the first place. If we’re talking about an ideal situation, then we should have 8 teams each for Invite, Challenger, and Advanced.

You could argue that you could put the Main winners in the Advanced qualifier if it was RR, but the breakdown of teams would be:

1-8 Invite
9-16 Advanced
17-32? Main

And based on my reasoning above, you can see that essentially main at that point would become all of S9 Advanced, plus some playoff main teams, which in terms of field of opponents is an undeniable upgrade from playing teams 29-42 like they did in S9 Main.

edit: guess i didn’t really explain myself well the first time around lmao. But yeah, in my mind getting moved up a div is more about the quality of opposition you play vs. the name of the div.

@Constantly imo a team should be moved up if they beat every challenge put in front of them. We shouldn’t essentially penalize a team for getting unlucky enough to win main the “wrong season,” I think that hurts the spirit of competition. If you win a div, you should be rewarded for it, it’s a really big accomplishment, and many teams live based on the assumed knowledge that they will be moved up at the end of the season because they won the div.

@ckrow well the complaints at the time was regarding Advanced qualifiers. There were about 6 teams that could’ve been in qualifiers but I had to pick 4, so a few teams got cucked. Eventually, qualifiers were done away with (not getting into that) and all teams that could have potentially been in qualifiers were put into advanced.

@ckrow @Jason tbf that happened last season too, adv was supposed to be rr but two or three teams complained and advanced was opened to pretty much anyone who wanted to play in advanced. I won’t go into details on the whole affair, but not everyone on the staff agreed on whether or not adv should have quals or not or be rr or swiss.

@berryy Good luck! Just remember that if you don’t get this, it’s not the end of the world, there are plenty of other FAANGs and other big tech companies out there with excellent pay and a high rep, like IBM for example.

Wasn’t this on the survey too? Could we please see the results? I assume RGL made this decision with the community’s support, so it’d make much more sense to explain the change with the poll results rather than not even mention them in the article explaining why challenger is now gone.

I think if there weren’t gonna be many good teams, or teams in general, in the div below invite (like there was last season) then I can see the rationale behind killing challenger, though I’m not sure if I would agree with it.

But deciding to kill challenger even before the staff had a good idea of what teams were gonna sign up? That just doesn’t seem like the decision was very well thought out.

I can see where harris0n is coming from in his changes, I think they probably make the map a little better (though we’ll see how much meds like getting dropped from new angles from snipers due to the fixed clipping on things), but I personally feel that I was a bit misled by the survey.

I can’t find the exact wording (honestly I don’t remember how I voted) for the cp_steel refresh question, but I remember it being very much along the lines of “no gameplay changes, only small quality of life things.”

The patchnote for the removal of the default B sniper angle:

Removed the pixel sniper angle through the window

Maybe I’m a bit dumb, but considering the changelog also lists removing little angles I’d never even heard of, like this one at wishbone, “Prevented shooting through the small hole in the window”, I thought maybe it was some little pixel peek through the window on the sniper perch overlooking B.

Removing the meta sniper angle changes pushing B almost completely, it’s the default spot and teams have whole zany strategies devoted to getting the sniper off that angle, and it’s arguably the only angle in competitive where it isn’t a throw to not run the vanilla sniper rifle; I thought it made for an interesting dynamic that is now gone (though I’m obviously biased as a sniper main).

Obviously, people should try to know what they’re getting into before voting for it, I think that’s a takeaway here, but I think the way the survey presented the question (at least how I remember it), it came across as to me as “oh well if it’s just small little things here and there, I trust that it’s just changing clipping and stuff, no biggie.” I think I might’ve even voted no lol

I don’t remember what the discussions were had (if there even were any) about the map in the HL staff channels when I was a staff member, though I almost certainly wouldn’t share staff discussions like that publicly. But enough rambling, I think that:

1. Either HL staff (myself included) didn’t take a close look enough at the map before putting out the poll

OR

2. The question on the poll was worded fucking terribly, assuming I remembered it correctly

Regardless, it seems I’m not the only one who was misled by the question as I remember it.

It would be SOOOOO much easier to have this discussion if all poll results were released publicly, then I wouldn’t have to spend half an hour typing up rants about hypothetical poll questions, rather than keeping them hidden from the public. You don’t have to write an exa-style article, just take some screenshots or post a link.

@RGL-Forum-Bot said in TF2 Update 9-16-21:

Fixed the Heavy being able to crouch and jump while stunned

any idea what this is? seems like the only change that might affect hl

go get that dosh bruv
hope you’ve been no-lifing that leetcode

I definitely like the production quality of RGL, but honestly I don’t think I’ll be watching the qualifiers if rj + watterson (or other interesting invite players) aren’t casting them. It’s not everyday that you get to hear players as decorated and experienced as them talk about the game. I’m not all that interested on which of the teams wins the matches, i’m much more interested in hearing what rj and watterson have to say.