SaphThis community will die out completely if we continue to let it be ran by people who don't play the game or don't actually care about being a part of the community besides when they're being edge lords and whiny nerds in random discord vc's (M17).
I agree that RGL has problems that need fixing, but I can't stand for direct slander of M17.
M17 doesn't play the game because he spends all his time doing shit for the community. Back when I started competitive TF2 in late 2022, I was playing Newbie Mixes in order to learn the game, and one of the most frequent coaches there was M17, second only to the head of the group (Rogue I think). He was there week after week, constantly giving advice to new players and helping them grow.
After I grew out of Newbie Mixes, because of a friend we had that became friends with M17, M17 then started also privately coaching our team. He spent countless hours reviewing shitty demos of scrims and trying his absolute hardest to give advice on how to help us grow as a team and as players. At the time (in a pre-mapreview.tf era), his map talks were the only modern low-level talks we could find on YouTube that gave us vital info on how to better position ourselves and how to react to plays.
His continued guidance helped us immediately jump into IM and place 11/22 in our very first season of RGL. WIthout him, I don't think we could've even scratched the top of AM. He even went above and beyond and kept on coaching us into our next season, providing personal demo reviews for each of us and giving us resources on who to contact in the event he felt he couldn't give the best advice.
During all of this, he's STILL coaching other teams and STILL doing Newbie Mixes every Friday; he was genuinely a total workaholic. He put that addiction to work towards TF2; trying to schedule a demo review was difficult because he also had other teams he was coaching on top of other community stuff he was doing. He spent way more time reviewing demos than actually playing the game ON TOP OF also going to college ON TOP OF still doing all the shit I mentioned previously. Oh, and he helped run the Newbie Mixes Team Drive at least twice.
I say all this just to highlight how much of a fucking godsend M17 was for us and for many others in kickstarting RGL careers (and this is just my limited perspective of his work). To say he doesn't care about the community just doesn't line up with everything he's done and everything he continues to do.
But I also don't blame you for having this perspective as most of the interactions I've had with M17 from him speaking as an admin have been negative. Most of the cases usually boil down to him sticking to the rules too rigidly or needlessly involving himself in a situation that didn't require his involvement. He also can be excessively negative sometimes.
But TL;DR, it is just incorrect to say that M17 doesn't care about the community. He doesn't play the game because he puts all his free time and energy into the community. He's done more for this community than I can even recall and probably continues to do even more. Your impression of him does have some validity to it, but it doesn't recognize all the hard work he's done and continues to do. RGL and its admins do have many issues and some of them need to leave, but singling out M17 here is unjust.
TL;DR of the TL;DR
#FreeM17
#FreeGarbo
#ReformRGL
#GiveP4SSTimeLeague