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Announcing Season 20 powered by Tt eSPORTS: Signups OPEN!

After wrapping Season 19 powered by Tt eSPORTS up and crowning SUAVE champions, we are happy to announce our next 6v6 Season. All the information regarding the coming Season can either be found in this newspost, or will be announced in the future! Stay tuned!

>>> Sign up now! <<<

Sign-up process

Make sure to choose your desired division when signing up. If you created a new team or feel you can jump a division, feel free to apply for the division you believe you deserve you should be in. To prove you are capable of the division you applied for, we require you to submit screenshots of results from your recent practice matches or tournaments where you scored decent results against teams that play on the level you aim for. The quantity is not the most important factor in this case, it’s more of a helpful measure for us to figure out if your team will be able to keep up with the pace. There is no magical, minimum or maximum number of screenshots that you have to submit.

Since the new tier system is not yet implemented, there is a crossover period between divisions and tiers. Please continue to apply using the division structure, and we will seed the tiers based on these division applications. If you want to be more specific about a tier you request, send an application to staff@etf2l.org (details listed below). As a reminder here is the division to tier rough conversion:

• Premiership – Premiership
• High– Division 1 and Division 2
• Mid – Division 3 and Division 4
• Open – Division 5 and Division 6

Please note that the success of your request also strongly depends on the free slots in the tier you aim for. Established teams will be favoured over new teams or teams that request to jump a tier. The screenshots have to be uploaded to an online image storage service (for example, you can use imgur or Dropbox). Keep in mind that if you opt for a zipped archives with tons of pictures attached to an e-mail, your application will be ignored. Keep it clean.

Also helpful for us, but not a must however, is adding who the opposing team is in each screenshot (and maybe even the division they played in the last time). That makes it easier for us, because sometimes it can be quite hard (especially in the lower tiers) to figure out who the teams in the screenshots are.

If you are applying for Open (which is our entry division), you do not have to provide any proof that you are capable of playing at that level.

Please send your application to staff@etf2l.org. The division assignment request has to include the following information in order to be considered. Incomplete applications will be ignored!

• Do not use HTML in your e-mail. If you want to add a link, just paste the link in the e-mail as you would enter it in your browser.
• Team name
• Team link on ETF2L.org
• Tier/Division you apply for
• Link to the online photo album
• Reasons why your team deserves to be placed in the tier you applied for (optional)

Season Schedule

Signups: January 7 – January 23
Publishing of Provisional: January 24
Publishing of Final: January 25
Pre-Season Playoff Week: January 25 – January 29
Main Season: February 1 – March 19 (7 Weeks)
High/Mid/Open Playoffs: March 22 – April 2
Premiership Playoffs: March 29

You can still sign up your team after January 23. Teams signing up later than January 23 will be placed on the waiting list and added into the next available week.

Premiership Playoffs

After a successful day of Premiership Playoffs in Season 19 powered by Tt eSPORTS, the schedule will be the same as last season. The full schedule for the playoffs is listed as follows:

March 29th

19:00 CEST – 3rd vs 2nd

21:15 CEST – Winner vs 1st

The day of the finals is set to Sunday March 29th. This day may be changed to a day before Sunday March 29th if all 3 teams agree.

Unlocks

After our pre-season whitelist was announced, for the first time the community has had the chance to try new unlocks before they are allowed in the season. Based on the feedback we have received from TF2Pickup.net we have decided to allow all unlocks from the pre-season whitelist. Now that we have the opportunity to test unlocks before they are allowed, we are reluctant to add any additional unlocks into the season without testing, however we are going to make an exception here for the recently released demoman unlocks. The full list of additional unlocks allowed for Season 20 is:

• The Shortstop
• The Direct Hit
• The Cow Mangler 5000
• The Liberty Launcher
• The Scorch Shot
• The Detonator
• The Scottish Resistance
• The Frontier Justice
• The Ambassador
• The Iron Bomber
• The Quickiebomb Launcher

Maps, Prizes & other changes

Everything else will be announced in the future, we just wanted the schedule to be available to you all as early as possible.

This is what all of you have been waiting for: The Sunshine Cup Knock-out Stages!
The part where the teams will give each other a run for their prizes!

Each bracket has its own ‘mini-tournament’, starting at Sunday 18th of January 19:30CET with the round of 8. The semi-finals are going to be played at 20:30CET, leaving the grand finals to be played at 21:30CET.

The schedule is rather tight, so please submit your match results as soon as you’re done with a match! Matches without results will be decided by coin flip at the start of the next round.

Just a quick reminder for every team (especially the newer ones):

We encourage using the match comments to keep in touch with an opponent. Any agreement between two teams regarding the use of mercs or servers must be recorded on the relevant match page.
If anything requires verification it MUST be documented either by a screenshot of the original conversation or by leaders from both teams providing confirmation in the match comments (the latter is more optimal because screenshots can easily be faked).

The tournament trees for various brackets aswell as prizes and casts can be looked up below.

These brackets will also be listed in the Sunshine Cup powered by serveme.tf Home hubpage

Read the rest of this entry »

Mad-man  quintosh & Irish lad Bulow on BlackOut TV are your hosts for the penultimate game of Season 7! PremTech are now taking on the big boys from Highpander© for the one final spot in the Grand Final. Morale will be running high for PremTech after they snagged a victory battling  Stacked last Sunday in the first playoff but will their brilliance continue to shine through and carry them to the final or will Highpander© be determined to get the chance at a season win for the second time in a row? Whatever the result tonight, no-one will be walking away with nothing, the losing squad winding up with 3rd place while the winner moves forward for a chance at the 1st place spot next week against  Tourettes Chessclub. Be there at 21 CET for all the frags and gore!

Read the rest of this entry »

Due to the technical issues that hit last Sundays Archimedes Cup group stages, we have revised the schedule. The play days will remain the same with the exception of the final, which will be extended to be played within the space of a week from the 26th January to the 1st of February. The full schedule is below:

Sunday 18th January

*Group stage round 1 — 19 CET to 20 CET – cp_badlands
Group stage round 2 — 20 CET to 21 CET — cp_process_final
Group stage round 3 — 21 CET to 22 CET — cp_granary

* Teams that have replaced dropped teams will play Round 1 again, otherwise all results stand including defaulted matches.

Tuesday 20th January

Knockout round 1 — 19 CET to 20 CET — cp_snakewater_final1
Knockout Round 2 — 20 CET to 21 CET — cp_gullywash_final1
Knockout Round 3 — 21 CET to 22 CET — koth_viaduct_pro_rc4

Sunday 25th January

Quarter Finals — 19 CET to 20 CET — cp_logjam
Semi Finals — 20 CET — 22 CET, best of 3 maps, teams get to pick (see explanation of map elimination)

Deadline: Sunday 1st February

Grand Final — Best of 3 maps (Map elimination)

Changes to setup

Due to the whole host of problems caused by last weekends setup, we have now fully automated the process of connecting to the match server. Team leaders will be advised by either an admin or on the match page of a private TF2center hosted lobby page they need to do join, once their team is ready on the lobby page, they will automatically join a server without the need to have a server reserved in advanced. This will be done using a simple queuing system linked to serveme.tf, meaning that in the event of one match server going offline, you will simply be given another one instantly. No more fussing around because your server’s broken! Just let the system do it all for you.

Please note this does mean that players will need to login via TF2center, meaning those with current bans on the website should seek advice from TF2center admins (by visiting their forums) about getting unbanned for the tournament. Please note, there is no guarantee you will be unbanned, this is purely down to the discretion of the TF2center admins.

Results Submissions

Upon the completion of a match, the winning team leader will be allowed to submit the results either by using the classic method of taking screenshots or by posting the logs.tf matchlogs, which will include the links to the SteamID’s and the scores for the match. All serveme.tf servers will automatically generate logs, you can find them by visiting logs.tf, logging in and searching your recent matches. Please note, if the logs fail to upload or are not uploaded correctly, you will still be required to submit a status screenshot.

The cup’s hub page has been released  and all relevant details can be found there.

The groups have been released and all matches have been set to the respective times. Make sure to play them on time. If you have a dropped team in your group, just disregard all matches against that team. We’re looking to fill all gaps with waiting teams, but there’s only so much we can do. Sorry. Make sure to check shortly before the appointed match time, if any dropped teams have been replaced! We will not replace any dropped teams after 19:00CEST . If you want to be on the waiting list, just sign up – you’ll be put on it automatically.

Due to limited signups two groups are short one team, and have a placeholder team in their group. All matches with that placeholder team will be defaulted. We also have one bracket of half size which will play only two knockout rounds on Sunday.

>>> GROUPS <<<

To guarantee a smooth cup , everyone on your team has to have cp_sunshine_rc4 downloaded  and ready to use. Your server needs to have the correct map and s20 configs too, which you can find on our League Configs page (the correct map has been uploaded to the serveme.tf servers, too).

Each team should have at least one representative in #etf2l on IRC at all times to contact your opponents; if you don’t usually have an IRC client running, you can use our webchat plugin.

Up to two mercs may be used, even if the opposing team would allow more. One of those mercs may be a default merc, which need to be presented to the opponents beforehand, but cannot be disallowed by  the opponents unless he is more experienced than the team he’s supposed to play for. The other merc may be disallowed without giving any reason.

Please forward all map related feedback towards the feedback thread.

Make sure to verify your match results swiftly, before the end of the night, so we can move on to the Knockout Stages smoothly. Remember that a match which has no results submitted before the respective deadline (Friday 15.01.15 23:59 CET) will be nullified.