CommunityFortress

The following article will aim to give readers, and especially competitive players, an objective look at the positive and negative aspects of the Xtreme Professional League's Team Fortress 2 league.  XPL is the latest in a relatively long line of leagues to offer TF2 competition, and as such it faces an uphill battle as it seeks to establish itself and win over the invite-level teams, which will obviously be paramount to the league's overall lasting success in this fickle community.

While it is obviously difficult to fully gauge the quality of a league after just one week of play, some issues have clearly already come into light, and it never hurts to take a look at the flaws in the hopes that they will at least be discussed and at best be fixed altogether.

DIVISIONS

As many of you are probably aware, XPL opted by and large to not utilize divisional rankings going into the first season.  Their reasoning is certainly understandable, as it's hard to properly classify teams without seeing them play first, and undoubtedly several new teams cropped up just for this season of XPL.  That said, this is a risky system that may serve to alienate newer teams who have no chance against the vast majority of the better teams enrolled in the league.  This is a similar problem that ESEA seems to have experienced, but fortunately XPL opted not to charge money for entry in their initial season, which minimizes the risk for the new kids.

The teams in XPL are primarily divided into East and Central, which were chosen by the team captains as they signed up their teams.  Teams are further divided into groups of six teams, but exactly which teams are grouped together is currently not public knowledge.  According to Hawkeye, one of the league's admins and an avid poster on the CommFT forums (thanks for that, by the way), teams are divided into those groups of six based loosely on skill.

On the whole, I like this system.  I would prefer that there be more defined divisions (like in TWL), but am willing to forgive that as this is still XPL's rookie season and I expect them to expand upon that format in future ones.  This will likely help the younger and less experienced teams to further embrace the league like they have UGC and TWL.

SCHEDULING

Scheduling in XPL works similarly to the systems employed by CEVO and ESEA.  Teams receive their match assignments on Friday or Saturday of each week and have until the following Friday at 2am to complete their matches.  Forfeits may be issued if a team leader fails to post in match comms by the end of Wednesday night.

While this system is certainly functional, it could use a few tweaks.  The main complaint from my perspective is that each of a team's matches is actually scheduled as two separate matches.  This is a result of teams playing two maps every week, and it tends to make scheduling much more cluttered than it should be.  I'm guessing that software limitations are the reason that matches have to be scheduled as such, but ideally in future seasons everything can be scheduled in one spot rather than leaders being forced to schedule both maps separately against the same team.

As mentioned above, teams will be grouped into bunches of six.  Four of each team's matches will come against teams from this group.  Teams will additionally play three games against other divisions within their conference (East/Central).  Week one games were played against teams in the opposing conference.  This system will ideally allow teams to primarily play against similarly skilled teams, while occasionally branching out and potentially playing tougher opponents.

TEAMS

Already in its freshman endeavor XPL is seeing a nice mixture of teams with widely varying skill levels.  Teams from every rung of the competitive ladder are represented, from invite-level teams (Apocalypse Gaming) to Div 1 teams (Perplex) to brand new teams (Seal Cub Clubbing Club).  It will certainly be interesting to see how the season plays out, and whether or not a lower-level team ramps up its game to challenge a higher team for the ultimate prize pot.

One issue I'm seeing that may continue to plague XPL is inactive teams.  After a single week there seem to be at least a dozen teams that are inactive, and this could really hurt the quality of the league going forward.  Ideally these issues will be addressed and inactive teams will quickly be dropped from the rotation, but too many teams dropping could deal some serious damage to the credibility of the standings.

It is certainly of some concern that only forty out of almost sixty teams actually played their week one matches, and we've already seen this type of inactivity tank TWL Division 1 for several seasons now.

ADMINS

I personally feel this is one of the brightest spots on the XPL resume thus far.  The admins for the league appear to be very dedicated, more than willing to hear out players and their suggestions, able to take and respond well to criticisms, and eager to tweak the league to perfection and fix things that aren't working.  Quite simply, they are exactly the kind of admins we all wish ESEA had right now.

It's hard to envision this league failing completely as long as it is run by people that truly care about the game and the community.

ANTI-CHEAT CLIENT

My main complaint with XPL's anti-cheat client (named GameGuardian) is that I honestly am not sure that it does anything, aside from drop my teammates' FPS by a couple of digits.  There's just no way of knowing if the other team is using GameGuardian, if your teammates are using it, if you even need to use it, if the admins know you used it, and the list goes on.  The thing very much appears to still be in an early beta.  Updating it is a pain, as you actually have to go into the install directory and find the auto updater there.  Attempting to update it when you run the program will result in it shutting down, but no sort of update actually taking place.

For those interested, the client is more CEVO Match Network than ESEA client, meaning that you're not left at the program's mercy and unable to play a match because a programmer didn't get his work done in time after a 10:00pm Valve update that added Croation language support.  That somewhat redeems the program, but as mentioned, it just feels unfinished, unnecessary and inadequate.  I understand the need to police games when cash prizes are involved, but I would be very interested to know exactly what type of policing this program actually does.

RULES

When it comes to the rules, XPL wisely decided not to rock the boat too much.  Playing in XPL will be a familiar experience for anyone who has played for any other league.  The class limits are the same, as are most of the rules regarding match timing and weapon unlocks.  The league interestingly decided to allow the use of Crit-a-Cola, meanwhile banning the Scotsman's Skullcutter, the Sandman, and the Tribalman's Shiv.  The reasoning behind banning the Sandman (everyone hates it) and the Shiv (it's a pure upgrade really) are clear, but I can't really see a reason to ban the Skullcutter, as it has more cons than pros by most estimations.

I'll spare you a complete rundown of the rules and instead focus on the one area I think could use improvement.  Under the current rules, teams play two thirty-minute halves, one on each map, in every match.  While this would otherwise be fine, I am not a fan of the decision to make the win difference five as opposed to simply awarding the map win to the first team to get to five.  While I understand the principles behind such an idea (no one wants to lose a close match 5-4 with ten minutes left), this rule could potentially drag out some matches that otherwise could have ended quite a bit earlier.

It's certainly a minor complaint, but at the same time, the five round limit has been generally accepted by the vast majority of competitive players for ages now.  Almost every scrim I've ever played in has been "first to five," and I don't see that changing any time soon.

MAP ROTATION

Perhaps XPL's most shocking decision was to have the people who are actually going to have to play sixteen maps be the ones to pick them.  Gone are the days of TWL forcing a terrible sixty grinding minutes of Indulge down our throats; the days of UGC making us play a CTF map that actually kills a small part of our soul; the days of everyone in ESEA realizing that, while it might be pretty, Coldfront kind of sucks.  That's right...we're in charge now.

XPL uses a unique twelve-map rotation.  The top four maps, as voted by players in the league, are played twice.  The remaining eight maps are each played once.  Teams play two different maps each week to allow for variety and the assumption that some teams just aren't good at certain maps.  I'm a fan of the system, and even though it can lead to some really long matches, it's at least more unique and fresh than the alternative that every other league gives us.

As far as the actual maps go, there are some notables to go over.  For one, new community favorite Gullywash is one of the maps that will be played twice.  This map has gained some impressive steam and gotten very popular very quickly, and it's nice to see it get the recognition it deserves.  The other maps that will see dual play time are competitive staples Granary and Badlands, with Freight (the original and best) being the fourth and final map to be played twice.  XPL will also see cp_well issued back into the competitive fold (I for one have missed it), and also features appearances from Obscure and the new, less spammy Mainline.

Overall, while I'm not a fan of a couple of the maps, I like the rotation.  It's nice and varied and should provide for eight unique weeks of gameplay.  The only blemish I can see is that we will see Freight three separate times, twice as cp_freight and once as the recent official version, cp_freight_final1.  While I have no problem with each version showing up once, playing what is essentially the same map three times is excessive, and I would much rather have seen another map like Prolane crack the rotation to shake things up a bit more.

OVERALL

As someone who has a team participating in XPL, I am definitely looking forward to the first season.  XPL is breathing a bit of fresh air into a competitive community that is frankly getting a bit stale, and should provide a nice counterpoint to people frustrated by the TWL upper divisions that are slowly crumbling due to lack of interest and the younger teams that would prefer not to have to pay twenty-five bucks a season to get pummeled week-in and week-out in ESEA-O.

Every league is inevitably going to have problems such as the ones I've brought to light above, and the best leagues are going to have admins who are dedicated to acknowledging those problems and fixing them.  Here's hoping that XPL's admins fall into that latter group.

Good luck to all of the other teams involved, and I hope those of you that aren't will consider giving your support in the future.