Hello everyone! Myself and the rest of the RGL staff team are hoping that you're as hyped as we are for the first Prolander Official of 2019 this Thursday!

Week 1 is going to start things simple and take place on Upward, just like last season. Before we start, however, there are a few crucial changes we've decided to make to the league that you should know about.

There will be no Pick/Ban weapons for this week
In order to let people ease into the league better, we've decided not to allow teams to utilize the pick/ban weapon system for the first week. All teams must use the default RGL whitelist.

Servers can now be obtained from admins
RGL now owns a small pool of servers that teams can use for their matches if they are unable to get access to a server with the updated configs and whitelist themselves.

The Cozy Camper and Darwin's Danger Shield are now banned
Trust Drapper to save the controversial decision for last huh? North American RGL ran their most recent One Day Cup with these two items banned, and received strong positive feedback. Due to this feedback, NA, EU and AU RGL have collectively decided to bring these items into the default ban list

In mid to high level play, the Sniper is undoubtedly a top-tier class. He is a class that is extraordinarily difficult to counter unless your team's Sniper is better than the other's. Banning the Razorback took Sniper down a notch and drastically increased the viability of the Spy - the so-called "worst class", However, we still feel that too many games are largely decided by who has the better Sniper. Banning the DDS increases Pyro's viability as a Sniper counter, and banning the CC means that sniper-prone classes like Heavy can always rely on flinching as a method of escaping the deadly Australian's sights. This increases the viability of TF2's weaker flex classes and levels the playing field, therefore we've decided to go ahead with the bans.

That's all for this update, we hope you're ready to spread some gibs across Upward this weekend!
-Drapperbat and the RGL staff team