ETF2L 6th Cup Brackets

The 6th big ETF2L cup is upon us and the randomly generated brackets are online. 17 random teams got a “bye” for the first round, please do not play the next round’s match yet. The seedings for each round are random so the opponent that is currently assigned to you for round 2 is most likely to change after the next seeding on Saturday evening!

The 8 top seeds will enter the tournament for the quarter finals that are due to start on January 6 2013. This affects the following teams:

• AVENUE eSports
•  BFF
• Crack Clan
•  Damage Control
•  Epsilon eSports
• Lutuset
•  MyDGB.net
•  Quarantine

It’s dangerous to go alone, take some reminders!

• The winner for all matches that are unplayed by the end of the match deadline (every Friday night) will be decided with a coin toss
• Default date for each round is Thursday at 21.15 CET, rescheduling is possible
• The round 1 deadline is Friday, November 23
• Every round is seeded randomly. The draw will happen every Saturday at around 18.00 CET
• In the first 4 rounds, use the map elimination system to choose the played map
• For a list of the map pool and the allowed unlocks, please visit the 6th Cup’s hub page
• A whitelist that allows all unlocks for this cup can be found here and has to be loaded manually by a server admin

Ultiduo #4 by ETF2L and nervousENERGY Reminder

You are all hereby reminded that the group stage of the Ultiduo cup ends on November 20. Matches without result by 23:59 CET will be set to 0-0 and the first round of the knockout stage will be seeded as soon as possible. If you had problems with an opponent not showing up, make sure to present your claim to the admin staff today or tomorrow.

Admirable: Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear! Admirable what have you been doing? Five weeks have passed since the last ETF2L Season 13 interview was published… and that is a long time in Team Fortress 2. We’ve witnessed the final match of the main season, the playoffs loom large on the horizon and we even said good bye to the CHINESE MAFIA somewhere along the road, but today I will finally say hello to my next conquest, Fuo of Quarantine.  Hello!

Fuo: Hellooo!
Read the rest of this entry »

Complete Highlander Season 3 Schedule

The complete schedule for Highlander Season 3 is now available:

• Schedule Week: October 30 – November 3
• Main Season: November 4 – December 8 (5 weeks)
• Catch-up Week: December 9 – 15
• Tiebreakers & Playoffs: December 16 – 22 & January 1 – 19

Playoffs are officially assigned four weeks. Teams that cannot play in the first week of 2013 should play their match in the week before Christmas.

All ETF2L competitions will be suspended for a Christmas break from December 23rd until January 1st.

Highlander Season 3 Rule changes

Catch-up week is now official

The catch-up week is now an official part of the season, and thus teams are allowed to use wildcards during Week 5. Unused wildcards will be disabled after Week 5 ends.

Week 5 matches scheduled into the catch-up week without a wildcard or extension will still receive a late warning.

Dropped teams’ results will be removed if they did not finish the season

If a team drops before they finish all main season matches, their results will be removed from the table.

Previously, a dropped team’s results were kept if they played at least 75% of their matches.

ETF2L 6th Cup Reminders

There are still lots of open slots for the 6th ETF2L Cup. Please sign up your team until tomorrow, Saturday, at 18 CET, to get a chance at the €300 cash prize. The bot draw for the first round will follow shortly after.

It is possible that many teams will get a “bye” for the first round because we only have 133/200 signups by now. The top 8 teams, based on their Season 13 results, will still join the cup for the round of 32.

We would also like to announce that we follow the suggestion of Arx and reshuffle the bracket for each round. The brackets will be seeded every Saturday around 18 CET, you will not be able to predict your opponent for the next round.

chojje has updated his map cp_quay to beta 2. cp_quay_b2 is the official version that has to be used for this tournament. Please make sure that you also have cp_croissant_rc6 on your gameserver.

A whitelist for this cup can be found here. Please remember that you need to manually execute the whitelist after loading your config with the following command

• rcon mp_tournament_whitelist “cfg/etf2l_whitelist_6thcup.txt”; rcon mp_tournament_restart

ETF2L Season 13 powered by Tt eSPORTS Premiership Playoffs

Season 13 is now just 4 contestants, all who have a shot at taking home their share of the massive €2500 cash prize and the Tt eSPORTS hardware; however the loser of the game tonight will leave with absolutely nothing!

Watch live video from VanillaTV on www.twitch.tv

When Crack Clan and The Last Resort met earlier this season, neither side was willing to budge an inch, and as a result, the game ended in a tie.  TLR, however, managed to secure the higher seed overall, so the burden of proof lies with  Crack Clan. ipz had the following to say regarding the pressure his team was dealing with:

 ipz – “tlr_walkway_rc2”

Does this mean  Crack Clan intend to use  TLR as practice for the semi-finals? or perhaps  ipz thinks that HYS‘s band of mighty men will be a walkover? I ask  TLR leader,  HYS, for his opinion:

HYS – “I want to thank  cc// for allowing this game to go ahead tonight and apologise for the inconvenience caused to those providing coverage. Lets hope we can put on a show!“

Astute and meaningful; but perhaps I was barking up the wrong tree when I asked for a follow-up from Retsh0ck:

Retshock – “I’d like to think of myself as Papa Smurf”

I asked  Admirable to bail me out:

Admirable – “ The Last Resort are worthy opponents in the scheduling arena, but when it comes to Team Fortress 2 they are out of their depth. They are like tourists here in the playoffs swimming with sharks, so we will get then a nice safe spot to spectate the next round when we crush BFF.”

To learn more about Crack Clan in their TF2 HUB, click here

VanillaTV will be hosting this match LIVE on their Twitch channel from 21:15 CET, with a cast from the amazing  Pledge and the mercurial Skully; see you there!

ETF2L 6th Cup Signups still open!

The 6th big ETF2L cup that can hold up to 200 teams and has a prize pool of €300 still has over 100 slots left. Signups close this Saturday, on November 17, so you better convince your team leader today to get your team signed up. This cup is a good opportunity to get some official results for your team’s Season 14 application! It also gives you a reason to practice some of the up and coming maps that may make it into next season’s map pool. More information on the setup can be found on its hub page.

Potential changes to the Cup

Some aspects of the cup are still up for debate.

First of all, some of you requested to let fun teams sign up as well. This would come with a few problems, such as the cup going on for potentially 8 weeks with a break over the Christmas holidays. We fear that most non-serious fun teams would struggle to field a full team for all their matches, if the competition lasts longer than just a few days. Also, this would allow a player to be on the roster of more than 1 team in the same competition. However, if this idea gets enough support from our players, we may yet allow it.

Another point was raised by Arx in the comments of the last announcement. He suggested, that each round should have a random draw, rather than following brackets set in the first round. This would require quite a bit of extra work on behalf of staff, so make sure to voice your support in comments if this is something you would like to see!

Highlander: Default date explanation

It appears some teams have been having difficulty grasping the system behind default dates, so we thought it helpful to remind our players how default dates work:

• Default dates are issued to make sure every match has a scheduled date.
• Default dates are directly based on proposals submitted by teams on the match page.
• Default dates are only issued to matches that do not have an accepted schedule proposal before the schedule deadline:
• For regular league matches: midnight of Thursday before the play week for the match.
• For league matches with extensions: schedule deadline is moved further by a week
• For wildcarded matches: schedule deadline is midnight of the 6th day after the wildcard was used.

For a detailed look at how the default date process works and how to always get default dates you’re be happy with, please consult this thread on the forums.

ETF2L Anti-Cheat Team is recruiting!

ETF2L’s Anti-Cheat team is once again recruiting volunteers to help us keep ETF2L free of cheaters.

We are looking for players with extensive experience in upper divisions of our Leagues and/or previous anti-cheat experience in other communities. Anti-cheat admins are expected to be continually active, review submitted evidence and request further demos where needed, as well as provide their input on running cases to help the AC team reach a ban verdict.

If you believe you are qualified for Anti-Cheat work, for the AC team, check the Jobs page for a guide on how to write and submit an application. Promising candidates will be interviewed and welcomed to staff.