TPG League (known for their DOD and racing sim leagues) is looking to start a Team Fortress 2 league.  TPG has several years experience running successful leagues on a state-of-the-art website.  TPG is sponsored by well known companies such as Steel Series and Branzone Servers and has some of the best admins in the business on its staff.

TPG is currently hiring the following positions for the upcoming TF2 league (all unpaid positions):  Head Admin, Assistant Admin, and Anti-Cheat.  Those who are interested should submit an application found here:
http://forums.tpgleague.org/dod/index.php?topic=2.0

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me at bullet@tpgleague.org.  Thank you.

We have recently changed our forums.  If you were previously registered, you will have to re-register on the new forums.  We do apologize for any inconvience this may cause.

 

TPG-gma|Atropos

Congratulations to Pokemon on winning the first season of TPG 3v3 Source.  Stay tuned for details about next season.

The schedule for week 1 of playoffs is now posted.  The map is dod_tiger.

 

dod_beaverville_b2mc will be used for playoff week 2, and dod_lerouge will be used for playoff week 3.

 

Good luck to all teams....

 

Playoff Brackets 

The rules for all leagues have been updated. All players are required to read these new rules fully as they have changed significantly. Due to the large amount of changes, these rules will not take effect until Friday, April 13th. The old rules will remain in effect until that time.

Perhaps the most important additions to the rules have to do with scheduling (4.1) and server usage (5.1). Section 4.1 contains details about how teams will no longer get bye wins automatically, and teams must initiate contact or reply to a message via the TPG Scheduler within 24 hours of the match default date or they will receive a forfeit loss. Section 5.1 explains that your team captain or scheduler(s) must keep the "Server Available" checkbox in the team profile updated if you intend to use that server for matches. This benefits the entire community by increasing the likelihood that teams without server are matched against teams with servers. Captains: Remember that you may assign up to two additional schedulers to manage all of these functions by clicking Manage Team Roster under your Team Panel on the left menu.

Some rules may be changed/added on a weekly basis as the season progresses. Updates will normally be made to their leagues the day after matches take place, leaving you plenty of time to learn/implement them. In order to simplify this process, we have added a new feature: When logged into the website and inside any league, an icon indicating that the league rules have been updated will appear under the League Info panel. When visiting the rules page, your last viewing will be recorded for your account. Upon subsequent visits to the rules page, any additions or changes to any specific sections will be highlighted for you.

I would also like to take this time to remind all players to make sure your e-mail address is correct in your profiles. It should be set to an e-mail address that you check regularly, as dispute notifications will be sent to this address. You can change your e-mail address by logging into the website and selecting "Account Management" under Control Panel on the left menu.

TPG is looking for one DOD:S 6v6 and one DOD:S 3v3 admin. Both must be motivated and honestly interested in the growth of the league. 6v6 is held on tuesdays and 3v3 is held on thursdays, it is mandatory that you are available and idleing IRC one hour prior to your leagues start time. If you are interested read and complete the form found here.

 

Thank you for your time. 

The map for week 6 will dod_notorange

Note: Teams who forfeit will be set to inactive and will not be scheduled. If your team receives a forfeit win please idle in #tpg3v3source on mIRC to see if any other team, who has also received a forfeit win, would like to do a make-up match. Also you can contact 3v3 admins if you have any problems or questions.

The map for week 5 will be dod_beaverville_b2mc.

The map for week 4 will be dod_lerouge.

The map for season 1 week 3 will be dod_tiger.  Please stay tuned for more information and the complete season map rotation.

Please also read this important forum post:
http://forums.tpgleague.org/showthread.php?t=2932

The Future of DoD

 The one thing I’ve learned about DoD over the years is that nothing stays the same. There is always change, sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad. Right now the future seems a little unsure with DoD. Other leagues have dropped DoD, or versions of it they don’t feel there is a market for anymore. There are newer games drawing players away from DoD. And of course there is also the issue of cheating and how to control it.

The story of DoD is pretty interesting. I won’t go into details, but let me say that the people playing today who have been around since the beta stages of the game, can tell you some stories about the life of it and how it’s developed over the years. The one thing I’ll say is that DoD has had the greatest misfortune of being the second most successful independent mod for Half-Life. Unfortunate in the sense that it has always lived in the shadow of CS. It’s always struggled to find it’s own voice and further more, not long after DoD reached the beta release stage, the market was flooded with competing WWII games.

Yet the game has survived, and not too badly. It’s survived where other similar games - much better in graphics and gameplay - have failed to keep an active online community. Why is that? I think the reason is that DoD is a game that really cuts to the core of what online gaming is about. It’s about you, your weapon and the other guy. How well you and your team communicate and execute. No planes, tanks, arty barrages, smoke and mirror tricks on the part of the game designer. I don’t see a reason right now why DoD and a community won’t be here for years to come. The community might get a little smaller as time goes on and it might get a little more grey, but it will be here in one shape or form.

And new people are still coming to the game. Maybe not in huge numbers, but they are out there discovering what makes DoD so cool and better than other similar games.

TPG will always be here as long as there are people who want to play DoD and there are people who want to volunteer to help our organization offer it. We may try new games from time to time, or even do completely new things like offer racing, but at the end of the day, DoD is what we do and it’s what we will continue to do. Are we perfect in everything that we do all the time? No. Do we get bad admins once in awhile? Yes. Is the Anti-Cheat effort perfect? Not by a long shot. Is there room for improvement? Absolutely. Will we continue to strive to improve the experience for the players so they keep wanting to come back here season after season. No question about it, yes. It’s a learning process that never ends. As soon as you think you have it all figured out, things change and it’s back to the drawing board to try to fix and improve things.

All I ask is that the community realize this and understand that we (the league) are humans here, we make mistakes but our goal is always to make TPG the place you want to be to play the game we all love - DoD.

TPG Founder / General Manager

Haiku 

 

The People Behind TPG

 Let’s talk about the volunteers who make TPG League and TPG Racing possible. When I started TPG League back in the Fall of 2002, we had four teams and I was the code developer, the only admin, forum manager and the janitor. I did everything. Within a few months though, as the league grew, I was overwhelmed and had to get people to help me. Over the years, I’ve been very fortunate to have a great group of people come through the doors at TPG to help out and keep things going. The vast majority of people who have been volunteers have done a fantastic job and served their time with passion, dedication and integrity for the time they were here. People like Sting, Eclipse, Nazgum...just a few names of people who worked here in the past and made a tremendous difference to the organization and made a personal impact on me.

Then there are the people here now - people like McGoo, Atropos, CrazyLegs, Druuna, Bullet, and Brian to name a few - people who continue to stay with the organization during the good and bad times. For people like this, TPG League isn’t even about gaming anymore. It’s about community, family, doing a good job and creating an environment where others can leave their daily pressures behind them for a few hours a week and have fun.

This doesn’t mean we haven’t made mistakes hiring people in the past. We think we are a pretty good judge of character and usually we make the right choices in hiring people, but do we miss the mark sometimes. There is no business out there that always hires the right people all the time. Even when you screen and interview people, sometimes you don’t know what you have until you see those people in action. At the same time, we know that sometimes there are "diamonds in the rough" and you don’t get to appreciate the value of those people until you give them the chance - even when to the average person, it’s seems pretty stupid that you ever hired them in the first place.

The State of the League

 Hello everyone,

I was asked recently to do a "pep talk" here on the DoD website. It’s not like things are falling apart or anything like that, but there has been some stuff posted on Gotfrag about us, and while it’s a personal policy of mine not to read the eRags, I did want to clear the air on some things.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything DoD related around here, too, so I’m long overdue. I’m going to break this up into three posts to make it easier on reading. I’m going to talk about TPG itself, the people behind TPG and the game DoD.

A lot has gone on around TPG in the last year. First of all, and many of you might not be aware, but we’ve added a whole new division to TPG League - TPG Racing. This is our venture into the world of car sim racing. We’ve been doing it since January of 2006 and it has been very successful with a thriving community of drivers here in the Americas and Europe participating in multiple races each week.

There is a lot going on the DoD side of the house (as I’ve had to start to call it). First of all we have a new website which has been in place for a few months. I created the first version of the website back in 2002 using Perl. It was a very basic first step but did allow us to create/maintain schedules and standings. McGoo greatly improved upon the first website in 2004 when he re-wrote the entire site using ASP tied to a MySQL database. This was our first truly dynamic website that allowed us to register/maintain players and teams, in addition to the other stuff. Towards the end of 2006, Brian stepped up to completely re-write the website, this time with PHP. His efforts have greatly streamlined how the website works, made the job of the admins easier and have hopefully made the website a lot more useful to the community.

I can’t explain enough the enormity of the task it is to write code to drive a website for an organization like TPG League. It’s literally hundreds of hours of work writing, de-bugging and re-writing code. For us to have a professional do this work for us would easily be thousands of dollars and not possible, because we are a non-profit organization that is totally dependent on volunteers to keep things going.

The development of a website like ours is also a continual process. In once sense you can say that the site never leaves beta development, as it is always being changed and improved. So have some patience with us and know we are aware of the current shortcomings of the website and will work to improve it as time and resources allow.

The map for season 1 week 2 will be dod_saint-lo_final.  Please stay tuned for more information and the complete season map rotation.

Please also read this important forum post:
http://forums.tpgleague.org/showthread.php?t=2932

As a reminder you must use the TPG web scheduling system to schedule your matches.  The matches for week 1 have been posted and you may find the map download and updated config in the news post below.  Information regarding the COF plugin and the recently released anti-cheat clients will be posted here by next week.  For now use of these in your match is optional.

The map for week 1 will be dod_bunky (server config - updated 2/20/07).

WEEK 1 MATCHES HAVE BEEN POSTPONED!  The matches have been pushed ahead one week to Thursday, March 1 in order to give TPG time to review new server plug-ins and update the rules. We appreciate your patience and look forward to getting the regular season off to a great start. Thank you for your cooperation.

The map for week 3 will be dod_orange_fight_arena.

The map for preseason week 2 will be dod_beaverville_b2mc.  Please provide some feedback in the forums about whether or not you like/dislike this map.  Also, some feedback specifically about the tick point values on the flags would also be appreciated.  We will try and contact the mapper to see if we can get anything changed if necessary.