Thanks to everyone who has registered with us so far. We already have 55 teams started in the first three days. Really fantastic and we appreciate the support so far.

How the sixes league came about

In the mission statement for RGL we had three aims:

• Doing our best to create a friendly welcoming community that takes action against toxic players.
• Not being afraid to try new ideas.
• Having responsible, reasonable admins who are not afraid to take chances, but also cannot be afraid to admit mistakes. Who will work with the community to create the best league possible.

This is our aim with the launch of our sixes league. We have put together a council of six different Invite players, most of them leaders of their teams. This council has been put together consisting of a couple of invite leaders we’ve worked with before: b4nny and Lucrative. Daf, who leads Cat Noises in RGL and plays in ESEA-Invite, has also chosen to join it. Following the creation of the group we just went down the list of teams on ESEA Invite until we got to six total players. Shamoo, Sandblast and Ma3la round out the final three members. An offer was made to talk with a leader from Cafe Monsters, but they declined.

From meetings amongst this council, many ideas were made for the basis of the
league. Leaders, with moderation from RGL, went through each topic trying to come to a resolution on how the league should operate and the formats structure.

After the release of the initial decisions it became apparent that the preference of the majority isn’t as clear cut, and we are seeking to listen to more voices to find clarity when it comes to our structure for the first season to best represent what the community wants inside of their sixes league.

What does RGL bring to the table?

In less than two years we went from the smallest league to the largest league in NA and that wasn't by accident. RGL is about one thing, community-based admining. We listen to our community and adjust based on feedback. We're not afraid to try new ideas for a season or a cup, but if it doesn't work? We don't continue it, we change, pivot and we grow.

Our Prolander league grew by about 35% from Season 5 to Season 6. Our Highlander format has grown every season, and our current season is up almost 30% compared to last season. Our No Restriction Sixes league was the largest single Sixes league in NA last spring, with 17 teams made up of new players.

This didn’t happen by chance. People continue to come back to our leagues because of the quality, thoughtfulness and care that we put into them. We are very excited to bring sixes into our line-up as we believe our already large player base can give sixes a significant boost. We are looking forward to making this format as successful as our other formats have been and continue to bring growth to competitive TF2.

Adjustments for the first season

RGL Style of change

Here at RGL we believe in representing our community’s interest, when it comes to things like rulesets and map pools we make decisions that seem best to us at the time. If we make a mistake, or if the community changes, we are not afraid to change. With that in mind, here are some of the changes we will be rolling out after hearing the community’s feedback.

Default Times

This is one that we didn’t foresee, since almost every team reschedules their matches in ESEA and we are using the same rescheduling system as ESEA. We assume that using the default times that ESEA has would not be an issue. However, it’s clear that people took issue with this approach and so we are adjusting the default times.

IM / Main / Advance / Invite - We are moving it from 9:30pm to 10:30pm Eastern
Open - We are moving it from 9pm to 9:30pm Eastern

The difference for these two times is that ESEA players commonly play at 1030pm Eastern and Open players (which remember ARE NOT ESEA-Open but more like UGC-Steel players) are used to playing at 9:30pm in UGC so we will adjust to that time.

To confirm this is what the community prefers, we have added a question to the survey below.

Whitelist

The pitch for this league was that it was going to be similar to ESEA with the whitelist and map rules and we didn’t see a lot of push back from that at the time. Now we are seeing a much more diverse opinion group about whether we should have a smaller whitelist like ESEA or go back to the Global Whitelist.

So inside the survey we have a whole page dedicated to this question of how we should proceed. Which is in one of two ways:

- Use the ESEA as base whitelist and potentially ban/unban some weapons, or keep it as is based on survey results.
- Use the Global Whitelist, currently in use by ETF2L and OzFortress.

Maps

We are decreasing our map list to eight maps, down from nine. The community had very strong opinions in regard to Kalinka, as well as the size of the map pool in general. In response to these opinions, Kalinka has been removed and we are looking into Clearcut.

Whether Clearcut will be played or not will be decided by the survey. Based on this feedback we will decide whether or not the 8th map is clearcut, another existing koth map or an existing 5cp map.

For future seasons we will use experimental map tournaments to decide which maps, if any, should be considered for play in the following seasons.

Map - Matches

This is one that is a bit more controversial as the NA scene has historically been one map per week. This was something that was discussed for a while in the council meeting, about whether or not we should move away from this towards an ETF2L style of two maps per week. But the council opted to maintain the status quo of one map per match.

This topic is one we’d have to discuss further, but we wanted to at least get the community’s opinion before talking about these ideas. So the survey will include a couple questions where you can state which match style you’d prefer and we’ll use that data for future discussions involving this topic.

Reasons Pro / Con going to the ETF2L style

Pro

• The preselected map allows for more map diversity
• Even if one of the maps is your bad map, you still have a second map to make that up on
• Since you only play one half. You could argue that upsets could happen more if a team is caught off guard since they won't have time to adjust.

Con

• You may have to play the best team on your worst map. And the easiest team to beat on your best map, since you do not control which maps are played.
• It's easier to park the bus since taking 10 minutes off the clock means your taking 1/3 of the round off the clock.
• Comebacks could be less likely since teams cannot use half time to adjust to the map they just played.

Sandbagging and off-classing

We were surprised at the amount of talk that this rule generated as we’ve been using it and doing minor tweaks every season to make it stronger and better and it's been well received by our existing communities.

Let’s clarify some things, we do not have any hard and fast rules around the sandbagging and off-classing as it’s all on a "case-by-case" basis or as we like to call it context-based decision making. Having black and white rules allows players to abuse the system, having context-based decisions allows admins to make more thoughtful choices.

The general guideline is that we don’t let players drop more than one division from where they should be.

Let’s say we had a medic main who plays in Invite, but is terrible at every other class. Then that might be a player that we allow to drop down more than one division. Since the context of the situation shows that even though they are an “Invite player” their actual DM skillset is not at that level and it should not be an issue for them to play a couple divisions lower.

The question we ask ourselves is, what is the highest division this team could compete effectively in if they’re offclassing. And by compete, we do not mean win the division. We ask what’s the highest level that they could reasonably finish around mid table in. Since if a team is offclassing, having a fun season, then being in a division where you get around a .500 record should not be an issue.

I think that is something most people can get behind, since if a team is placed too low, you can screw over an entire division and if you place them too high, then one team might have a bad experience and we can learn from that and adjust for the future. RGL has been in favor of using our rules to protect the many over the few, and so far in our many seasons of having this rule, it’s been working well and has been well received by the majority of the playerbase.

Invite only - Mid Season Anti-Poaching Rules

Like the off-class/sandbag rule, this is another RGL context-based rule. The Anti-sandbagging rule has been written and in place since the summer of 2017. We have NEVER stepped in to stop a transaction from happening mid-season, during that time.

The rule is there to protect lower level teams, so that they are able to put together a roster and be more confident that they can play a FULL season and focus on building up their team, rather than have to deal with losing one of their best players mid-season.

To be clear this is what the rule does not affect

• Players who change rosters in the offseason
• Rostered subs being picked up as a main on a new team
• New/Unrostered players who join a team

So the area this rule covers is very small and very specific. Which is why it very rarely comes up and when it does, it’s often two teams of similar skill and one player moving to the other. Which is fine.

And like all of our rules, this isn’t an admin ruling from an ivory tower. It’s context and conversations. If we are concerned about a transaction, we talk to the leaders, to the players and get an understanding of the situation.

But when discussing this, the one thing that we realized is that for the first two seasons of RGL-Sixes, we basically have no offseason. There will be less than a couple weeks from the end of Season 1 to Season 2, which make it a challenge for teams to pick up players or players to leave their teams, etc…

With that, we will be suspending this rule indefinitely for sixes.

Invite only - External Broadcasters

There was a lot of confusion over this rule and we want to clear it up.

Are you denying TFTV from casting matches that you’re covering?

No. External broadcasters just have to request access and set up a relay to accommodate them. The only exception to this is the Grand Finals.

Why the Grand Finals?

One thing that RGL has been doing this year is making the Grand Finals cast a big event that is shown through the RGL twitch channel.

This causes a spike in viewership that is more notable and more likely to get the random person to jump in to check out comp. Seeing two streams at 300-400 isn’t as tempting as one which is over 1,000 viewers.

These statistics are also good when we go to sponsors and are able to show large Grand Finals numbers to make the league more appealing to advertise in and help grow our prize pool.

To put some context behind this, the last ESEA grand finals b4nny had around 500 viewers, TFTV had about 100-150 and habib had around 100. Cumulatively, that's about 700-800 viewers.

Before we implemented we would only get about 400-500 viewers, with another 250-350 through players' POV streams, for a total of around 700-800. After we implemented the rule, the No Restriction Sixes Grand Finals had about 1,100 viewers and the Prolander Grand Finals had over 1,000 viewers. We believe that if there was one stream for those ESEA finals, you would likely see numbers similar to these.

With all this in mind, RGL will continue to make the grand finals a big event through the RGL stream, as having these kinds of numbers makes the stream much more appealing both to your average twitch-browser and potential sponsors.

Survey

Here is a link to the survey. You must be logged to your steam account in order to take the survey. It is 22 questions long and should only take about 3-5 minutes to complete. The survey will be open for 7 days, until the June 21st. We will then review the results and make announce the changes we will make prior to July 1st. This way teams will still have several weeks to understand any changes that are happening before the start of the season.

http://sixes.rgl.gg/Players/My/Survey.aspx?s=5

League Admins

Head Admin: Daffodil

Division Admins: Jetz (Proton), Grape Juice, Pablo, Bulby (patrick), Lumiti (Diavolo), DubThink, Fordo, Yaeng

The Invite and Advance divisions will likely be managed by Jetz or Daffodil, depending on who’s playing in which divs to make sure we don’t have an admin playing in their own division.

The rest of the admins will be placed later on closer to the season.

We also may contract out some help during the pre-season for team placements to help with ranking teams or players if there are knowledge gaps that we cannot fill on our admin team.