Highlander Season 35 (Spring 2026): Provisional Tiers, Premiership Qualifiers, and Experimental Cup #10 & Pre-season Poll results

April 3, 2026

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With the signups closed, we are happy to announce the provisional tiers & our Premiership Qualifier teams! As well as the teams who have already secured their place in Premiership for this season! Below you can find all the info on the provisional tiers, Premiership Qualifiers, and the results from the Feedback Polls we asked you to fill out!

Provisional Tiers

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Down below are this Season’s provisional tiers. If you can’t find your team, it could be due to you recently changing your team name or not having 9 players rostered on your team page. Teams marked in yellow are more likely to be moved if there is a need to change teams around.

Final Tiers will release on the 6th of April.

Class Restrictions:

The final class restrictions will be announced with the release of the final tiers.

Open

European Damage Control
– Poland STiNGHAN – Can’t play

Premiership

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Based on previous season’s performances, the following teams have secured their places in Premiership for this season:

Additionally, based on their roster strength and the results submitted to the admin team, we have decided to bring the following teams into Premiership without them having to go through the qualifiers:

Which leaves us with the following 3 teams to battle it out for the remaining 2 spots in Premiership:

Premiership Qualifiers

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This leaves us with the last 2 spots being decided in the Premiership Qualifiers between 3 teams in a round robin format. The matches will be:

Match 1: Feila finanzieren durch DROPS vs ChudsX6
Match 2: Turn 90 Artillery (Norway) vs Feila finanzieren durch DROPS
Match 3: Turn 90 Artillery (Norway) vs ChudsX6

The two highest scorers at the end of the bracket will claim a spot for themselves in Premiership. If there is a three-way tie, the tiebreaker is first decided by map win difference. If that also leads to a tie, it is decided by rounds won. The loser of the bracket will be placed in High/Division 1

The result deadline for all Premiership Qualifier games is April 10th, 23:59. Games may be played in any order. If a single team loses both games, they would instantly lose the qualifiers, and the 3rd game between the other 2 teams wouldn’t have to be played.

To facilitate the qualifiers, the start of week 1 of Premiership and High has been delayed. Week 1 will commence the day after all necessary qualifier games have been played.

Pick/Ban Format & Map Pool

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Teams will follow the pick & ban process outlined below, using only the following subset of maps:

Both teams need to agree on who eliminates first. If the two teams cannot agree, they need to perform a Heavy Fist Fight [Explanation]. The winner of this Heavy Fist Fight can decide which team is Team A and which is Team B.

Team A bans a map
Team B bans a map
Team B picks a map
Team A picks a map
The remaining map will be the decider

Map pool:

Feedback Poll Results

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Before the start of the season, we ran the Highlander Experimental Cup #10, this time run in close cooperation with active mappers. At the end of this cup, we asked players to fill out the cup feedback form as well as vote for recent experimental maps that could potentially replace upward as the 2nd payload map for the season. We further asked players to vote for their favourite maps in the pre-season poll to decide the remaining maps for week 5. Here we will show you the final results and what decisions we will be making regarding changes for this season.

For this season, in week 5, we will be running koth_warmtic_f10 & koth_proot_b5b due to these 2 maps receiving the most votes on the preseason poll. Both these maps received wide support from players across all levels of play. These maps were followed closely by 2 payload maps, pl_swiftwater and pl_badwater, then followed by most other koth maps and gullywash. This poll had 255 respondents; respondents were allowed to select up to 4 answers.

We also had the Experimental Cup #10 polls; these polls were there to decide if any of the recently played experimental/alternative payload maps would replace upward for the upcoming season. Here, Borneo won by a slim margin of 15 votes. This poll had 140 respondents; respondents were allowed to select up to 2 answers.

We also then had the follow-up poll to confirm whether we were still going ahead with force-changing a payload map for the upcoming season. Here, the results were mixed. On one hand, there is a clear majority of 55.6% that are clearly done with playing both upward and vigil every single season. This confirms the feedback we have been getting for seasons that continuously playing the same 2 payload maps is not really what the community wants. However, on the other hand, it is clear people do really love upward as an even clearer majority of 73.9% want upward in the season. This poll had 153 respondents.

Now we had promised before that we would force through a map change ahead of the Experimental Cup. However, although there is a clear majority for playing another payload map, around half the community doesn’t really want that either. To decide on a proper tiebreaker on what to do, we went to our recent HL AFA 2025 & HL Experimental Cup #10 feedback polls. In these polls, we asked players to rank the maps on a scale of 1 to 10. This gave us the following results:

Although these feedback polls are filled in at a much lower frequency than site polls, which makes the data not fully accurate, it still provides a good indication of what the community thinks about different maps. What is clear from these polls is that upward is by far the most liked payload map in competitive Highlander, only being beaten by Steel. Meanwhile, the map that would replace it, based on the site poll results, would be Borneo, which barely has a passing grade based on feedback.

After both looking at the statistics and qualitative feedback on all maps involved, as well as the fact that we have not had a “normal mappool” season for half a year now, we have decided that upward will be in the upcoming season as our week 4 payload map.

The final map rotation for Highlander Season 35 is thus as follows: