The Highlander Open, sponsored by ETF2L & PurePings
April 29, 2014
The Highlander Open Cup
Banner by ninzja
If you are confused or need help in regards to signing up, check out the new guide written by 
kKaltUu!
>>> Sign up now! <<<
NOTICE: Fun teams can now enter too. If you are currently in a normal Highlander team and want to create a team with you as the buddy, go ahead and make a Fun Team (ignore the 6v6 part)
Introducing The Highlander Open, a brand new initiative to introduce non-competitive players into the comp scene or for those wanting to get into league-style competitive TF2 in a simple manner sponsored by ETF2L.org and PurePings. After a few months in the works, we are now thrilled to announce it is happening!
And what exactly is this, we hear you ask? Well check out our fantastic and visually pleasing Highlander Open Page! It contains all the basics about what exactly the Highlander format is, and essential (light) reading for all who want to get involved.
This tournament is meant for people who are new to competitive play, a competition to find the very best pub team essentially. That said, we understand that many Division 6 HL teams are community teams, so they will be eligible to take part and those that have played in Division 6 6v6.
If you are a lone player wanting to get into a team or if you want to get more players for your own team, check out the Recruitment Section. If you are a team looking to get a buddy, load up the Steam Group page and check out the comments.
Rosters must only have a maximum of 1 player with experience in Division 5 and higher HL and 6v6 as that person is your ‘buddy’ and can only play as a medic.
Resources
- Comprehensive competitive highlander guide written by kKaltUu and Wiethoofd. Russian version translated by
irfx - Play some TF2Center lobbies and gain great insight and experience in highlander gameplay
- Find more out about Competitive TF2 as a whole at comp.tf
Sponsors
- ETF2L – Hosting the cup with their extensive back-end system
- Hypernia.com – Providing the massive amount of servers required to let the event run smoothly
- TF2Pickup.net & Whitelist.tf – Donating TF2 items for prizes
- TF2Center – All-round service for those new to competitive to be able to partake in mix matches
- Team Colonslash – Providing the gigantic mumble server and a few extra TF2 servers
Format
The tournament will kick off with a Group Phase designed so that all teams involved will have the chance to play some exciting games with a final catchup week to play any outstanding matches or tiebreakers.
After the Group Phase the best two teams from each group will engage in a straight knock-out cup as we progress on in our journey to discover, and reward, the very best Pub team in Europe.
Prizes
Players that complete all their games will receive participation medals and those that finish in the top 3 at the end will receive:
1st Place – Medal + 9 class-specific Killstreak kits.
2nd Place – Medal + 9 class-specific Strange weapons.
3rd Place – Medal + 9 class-specific Cosmetic items.
Schedule
- Signups open: Now (Your team leader will have to sign your team up – for more info check out the ETF2L FAQ)
- Signups close: Thursday 26th June
- Final divisions announced: Sunday 29th June
- Schedule deadline for Week 1 matches: Sunday 6th July
- Week 1 start: Sunday 13th July
Please note that dates are subject to change due to tiebreakers and other unforeseen circumstances.
Maps
- Week 1 – koth_viaduct & pl_upward
- Week 2 – pl_badwater & cp_granary
- Week 3 – cp_gullwash_final1 & koth_lakeside_final
- Information about maps during the single elimination playoffs will be posted when final groups are created.
Unlockable Weapons
The full list of banned items is as follows:
- The Vita-Saw
- The Enforcer
- The Pomson 6000
- The Phlogistinator
- The Holiday Punch
- The Cleaner’s Carbine
- Pretty Boy’s Pocket Pistol
- The Red-Tape Recorder
- Bombinomicon
- The Jingle Belt
- The Bootie Time
- High Five Taunt
- Darwin’s Danger Shield
- The Crit-A-Cola
- The Short Circuit
- The Diamondback
- Baby Face’s Blaster
- The Reserve Shooter
Servers
For competitive, you will need play on a private server (password protected) with a special Highlander config file and weapon whitelist (provided) on the server used to set the competitive environment. We understand not everyone will have access to their own private server so you have a couple options in that case. You can rent a server using serveme.tf (courtesy of Arie & providers). If that is not possible or you’re in an emergency situation, we will have official match servers available (provided by Hypernia.com & Team Colonslash).
Also, your team needs a way to communicate with one another right? Well in the competitive scene we mainly use Mumble as our voice chat client so to benefit you lovely players more, we have a 10,000 slot mumble server set up (courtesy of Team Colonslash) for you to join and have a channel for your team, it couldn’t be easier! Details about the mumble server will be released at a later date.
Huh, ETF2L?! How does this work?
For those of you who are new to the ETF2L site, to sign up for the tournament you will need to be part of a complete Highlander team of at least 9 players. Your leader can then sign your team up for the tournament. We will be adopting ETF2L’s ruleset for General and Highlander rules as well as the Highlander server configs and weapon whitelists. The FAQ section will explain everything about making accounts, teams and signing them up for tournaments.
The Forums are a great way to talk about TF2, competitive play and the upcoming tournament. Don’t have a team yet, or are you looking for more players to join your team? Be sure to check out the Recruitment Section.
Even though this is a European centered event, we will welcome players from other regions with open arms. We will even try to place you into the same groups to ease the process of scheduling matches with your opponents. Against European opponents however, you will have to play on European servers at European times. The usual playing time for ETF2L matches is Sunday’s from 19:00-21:30 CEST. Make sure you are willing to (and can!) play at such times and on European servers before you sign up.
If you still can’t find the answer to a question or if you have any problem, then the quickest way to get into contact with an admin is to join the QuakeNet IRC channel #etf2l, and type “!admin highlanderopen <messagehere>” to get hold of someone who will help out. You can use the webchat plugin to connect to the IRC channel here.
Where you can help
You can help us with advertising too.
- Do you run a TF2/gaming news website? We’d love it if you announced the cup to your readership.
- If you’re a creative type with ideas for promoting the tournament – be it propaganda posters, a competitive play survival guide for new teams, etc – feel free to contribute.
If you’re an easy-going person who cares about helping the TF2 scene, we’d like to invite you to become a HLO buddy!
- Buddies will be the representatives between HLO and the community teams. You’ll join their roster, be responsible for answering their questions, making sure they schedule their matches properly, and depending on how good a buddy you are, organising and helping them out with practising and tactics.
- Buddies will also be eligible to play in the Highlander games themselves. But you can only play medic to keep it fair!
- Buddies will be assigned to teams on depending what language they speak. If you have a link to a particular community, you can request to be their buddy.
- Buddies will also be awarded with a medal like the rest of their team.
- You can put yourself forward to become a buddy simply by joining the new Highlander Open Buddy Group. Please make sure that your Steam page has the correct country information posted on it.
Special Thanks
Many people have assisted in making this great tournament possible by supplying us with advertisement, images and many other things. We would like to express our thanks to all of them. A special highlight goes out to the following people who have put a lot of time in releasing this tournament:
Queenie – Organising logo creation, SFM stills and promotional video (coming soon)
Raizio – Providing crucial TF2 servers for the event to run
Permzilla – Supporting the tournament with ETF2L’s back-end and overall guidance
Have fun and good luck to all that participate!
– 
Jon
Posted by Jon1155 in Highlander
content rss
Interesting stuff!
Great idea well done who ever came up with this :)
HYPE!
Da hell?
Daymn! High with the lander
Why do you host a cup with a server sponsor that is different from your official server sponsor?
This isn’t directly ran by ETF2L, more of being run on it as a medium
Banner link fixed
This sounds really nice, props to one who came up with it, hope there won’t be any sand-baggers though.
What Jon said. This is not being run by ETF2L, merely hosted on the site to use the backend as a host.
Seems really nice :)
gl noobs
Nice project. Good idea to give teams a 2 months to sign up.
Brings back memories from the Highlander Community Challenge :)
Cool thing you’re doing this, hopefully there will be plenty of people participating.
Would love to see some action! Hope that we(TF2Pickup.net) will be able to cast/stream some of the matches, aswell as TF.TV! Great work so far from BlackOutGaming! :)
i like the idea ^_^
Ohhhh we are so lucky, that we have a community like this! Great job guys!!! Is there a way to support this project? (I will try and help a few of my friends from czech pub server to set up a team, anything else.. donations maybe?)
It’s up to us, players, to reach the communities. I invited my old community.
I get I cant participate :( I liek cups
But I think it is a great idea to do this for new players, hopefully it will attract new teams for future ETF2L seasons!
You can become a buddy to help other teams as well as donate items for prizes etc http://steamcommunity.com/groups/HLOBuddies
Great job, am really excited for this, can’t wait to see new players start up and play, this is a great initiative to help new players, and promote the game, keep it up, so far looking amazing :).
Post it on TFTV for extra coverage.
I’ll tell T-A!: HNNNGG!! about this
About 4 years ago I played my first comp TF2 match . It was all because of Highlander Community Challenge. Hopefully this will create a similar experience for all participants. And as much I loved playing in HCC, I’m willing to be a buddy for a new team.
Let’s get HL revitalized again!
We’ve had 2 teams signup already who clearly didn’t read the newspost properly.
“This tournament is meant for people who are new to competitive play, a competition to find the very best pub team essentially. That said, we understand that many Division 6 HL teams are community teams, so they will be eligible to take part.”
There are some really talented players on the pub Chessclub originally was made from. Maybe I can get together a cute little chessclub junior team
neat, send a message to Tf2 team so they put this on their Blog :D
This is just a really amazing move!
Outrageously cool, gl to everyone involved!
Great initiative! I really hope this will be a success!
Release the heavy mains
This is really good, great that ETF2L is giving a leg up to help out as well!
It’s always been really rewarding helping competitive teams taking place from assorted pub players. Would recommend to anybody that feels like helping to be a hl buddie.
nice but y not 6s :(
I kinda find it annoying that you would have to leave your current HL team as buddy :<
This will be taking place during the Nations Cup period, so leaving your HL team for the team in HLO won’t be affecting much as there’s no normal Highlander seasons on.+
Also, being a buddy for a team doesn’t mean you have to play for them :), although I feel its a nice gesture to.
Oh man, I’m exactly the target audience for this, only I’m going on vacation exactly when this starts! I was getting all excited about finally having a chance to play competitive. I hope this is succesful enough for a part 2.
Like SabaSaba, this dearly reminds me of the Highlander Community Challenge, where competitive TF2 started for me. I created my own team with mostly RL friends and had a great time since then.
I will sign up as a buddy for sure.
if this thing happens imma give my 3 spare earbuds as prices. :) we should gather like huge ass price pool for this…
Just a heads up the initial phrasing was very confusing on what type of teams you were looking for, I thought it was open for everyone… Its less confusing now but the phrasing is still somewhat strange.
Also the buddy system looks like a great idea but I don’t like that you can play for the team, basically you can carry enough at a high level, and why particularly only heavy, engineer, spy or pyro ? You can still carry hard at any of these classes against pub level players.
Also somewhat disappointed at no mention of comp.tf anywhere :/ the site was exactly aimed at the target audience you are trying to reach here…
Other than that great idea an initiative. Hope theres more to come!
a cup for new players, 0 mentions of comp.tf
how to community?
I agree with Kaneco. I think a similar rule concerning classes for experienced players was in place during the HCC, so I understand where you are coming from. But HL in Europe has gone a long way since then. An experienced Heavy or Spy will wreck the other team, Pyro and Engy is not much better. Especially if you are considering a skill level even below lobbies. I don’t really have a perfect solution for this, but at the very least higher division people shouldn’t be allowed to play their main, if at all.
Oh, and another thought:
Wouldn’t it be possible to create a special “Buddy” rank so buddies wouldn’t be forced to quit their current HL team, even if it is only for a short amount of time?
switch heavy for medic :p
“Release the heavy mains”
oh dear
The buddy should be forced to play Medic. Trust me from experience with the BlackOut Newbie Cup :P
Agreed with Russian
let me refresh a legendary thread
http://etf2l.org/forum/general/topic-27115/page-1/
I agree that buddies should not be allowed to play their main class.
it’s not about affecting the normal HL season, i know there won’t be any regular HL games going on at that time. It simply is about leaving the team ;)
Also, is there a way to look team members? I got a few friends who haven’t played comp yet, but not enough for a whole team. So rather than being buddy for a random team (what would be no problem), I would like to look to get members for a team with my friends. And seeing people LFT in the buddy group, i don’t know if the recruitement section here is known very much^^
The newspost has a link to the recruitment section. If people still can’t find their way there, then there is not much we can do.
Haha Tutorial, that thread got me banned from the T-A forums :D
why highlander?
great idea. i hope that the highlander scene grows a lot more. hopefully some pub players finally get the courage to show what they can beside pub play!
Really cool!
Defining someone’s main class is an nearly impossible thing to do. I’m quite a good example of this I think – if anyone could tell me which class I ‘main’ in highlander please go ahead and try (fuck off quintosh :>). And then think about how many people this would need to be done for.
You’re always respawning so it’s hard to tell ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
damn! lazy pulling out his big gun
pls host a cup for a proper format like 4v4 or 6v6 :^)
“proper” format
I like the idea and initiative, but:
“It’s fair for the buddy to go Heavy, despite the Joe drama a while ago about him carrying his ugc steel team
It’s not fair for the buddy to go Medic”
? ? ?
this sounds amazing
highlander masterrace everything else is not a proper format!!!!!11
So many dutch flags, makes me feel all warm inside.
But you can only play heavy, engineer, spy or pyro to keep it fair!
Playing heavy is much more “unfair” rather than playing medic imo
also cranary for hl is just pathetic
@Arcticcu: All hail the HL format.
This is mentally insanely good! ^_^ One of the best ideas ever made by TF2 community, Big Giant + for you, Oh and refering to “unfair” or “proper” formats, really now guys? if you play 6s and dislike Highlander it does not mean its improper?(how does one write dis) and “unfair” Heavy is easy to play, so kinda medic would seem more complicated? although yes, if you are a medic main that will be over powered, but in the end It is just a start, I am pretty sure things are gonna be tweaked, changed and altered according to responses. STAY STRONK!
Do you plan on reaching out to TF2-centric communities such as Lethal Zone and UKCS? (assuming the latter doesn’t delete your thread like they did with mines for the newbie cup).
Also, I cannot stress this enough. Don’t let buddies play anything except Medic!
http://etf2l.org/forum/community/topic-24279/page-3/#post-433818
Update: Buddies can now only play medic for a team.
Just imagine : cool demo or solly with big exp, can play just as medic ( but they have 30-100 hours as med)-it will be funny.
Or heavy and pyro.
Provided the buddy’s game sense is well developed and they have a team who is listening to them, I don’t think it’s going to matter they are playing Medic that much considering higher level players usually play against other higher level players which is overall balanced (experienced Medics trying to say alive against experienced players etc.).
However, if you put a high level player on a damage dealing class against new people then it will result in an uneven playing field for the most part. The only possible way would be to have both teams having their buddy play the same class against one another (demo vs. demo etc.), but then you will likely still have a skill gap there anyway.
The simplest solution is to just have the buddy play Medic and you will avoid all sorts of problems. At the end of the day, it’s about getting new people playing competitive TF2, so if anyone has a problem being forced to play Medic and the team doesn’t have their own player then they can either swallow their pride for the good of the community or just not participate.
*stay -.-
not that i dislike this decision, but why haven’t you thought about this before the announcement? I mean you certainly were thinking about the buddies only playing certain classes, how did you think heavy/pyro/engi/spy were fair and didn’t include the medic before?
I kinda find the change now shit, cause i nearly finished my team as buddy where i were able to find a medic, as i weren’t allowed to earlier. Now I either can’t play or have to force my current medic on a class he didn’t look for.
On the one hand i am doing this to help new people getting into the comp scene, on the other hand i want to play as well with the team as i have a few friends in there. And what if i didn’t re-read this post again? There was no other notification of the change.
I know this has been announced two days ago and that there is still more than a month until signups close, but this is annoying :<
at least add engi, so i can make use of my aimbot.
oh wait, i’m not german :<
Kuferl, the tournament is in July. This is a minor change, no need to be upset.
Mentors playing medic is probably the best solution. The only weak point that i see is if there are many new players that wants to try medic, but can’t because of the mentor. Try not to focus too much on what classes you yourself would like to play, and instead lets have every mentor on equal footing with the same class. Playing medic would make most sense in terms of calling and directing your players.
Obviously not every mentor is at the same skill as medic, but that is missing the point of this tournament entirely i think.
true
as i said, i totally agree with buddies not playing heavy carry classes, it simply is a bit annoying that it got changed, as i already got a medic in my team ;)
Would still be nice to have a separate newspost about this update, so that nobody misses it for sure…
Quote: “The simplest solution is to just have the buddy play Medic and you will avoid all sorts of problems. At the end of the day, it’s about getting new people playing competitive TF2, so if anyone has a problem being forced to play Medic and the team doesn’t have their own player then they can either swallow their pride for the good of the community or just not participate.”
I have a question: Why allow the experienced buddy to play in the team during the Cup at all? Why not just keep the buddy as a mentor only?
It creates a situation where *every* team will try their damnest to get a highly experience, platinum-level player to be their Medic buddy.
The HLO is about getting new people with no prior competitive experience… unless you’re maining as Medic?
Let’s try a thought experiment. Assuming I can get a team to accept me as untested Medic, while the other teams have their buddies as Medic, then if we lose my team will blame *me* and only me; no matter why we lost, no matter if my team failed to protect me sufficiently, no matter if everyone ran off and left me alone at 99% übercharge to fend for myself (and yes, I had that happen once on Nucleus, I kid you not). Well, I can hardly wait!
As someone who enjoys playing as Medic (although I can play the other eight classes too, with varying degrees of skill), the phrase “swallow their pride” gives me a bad taste in my mouth. It carries the insinuation that having to play Medic is such a terrible fate, fit only for sad losers, that people need to be forced to do it? Um, thanks.
Sure, I could try to enter the HLO as another class to at least get a chance to listen to an experienced main caller during a match, to improve my own ability in that regard. But my enthusiasm level just dropped to zero. :-(
/rant
I think a lot of people regard their own classes as the best Crunchy don’t overthink it. If Medic is the class you want then you should play medic. A buddy is completely optional and he is not required to play the matches either, so you can still play medic in this tournament if you want to ;)
“NOTICE: Rosters must only have 1 player with experience in Division 5 and higher HL and 6v6 as that person is your ‘buddy’ and can only play as a medic.”
Does that mean someone who isn’t div 5 or higher can’t play as a medic or am i missing something?
Nevermind, didn’t read the post above :P
When does the whole tournament end?
the single elimination section will be dependant on the number of signups which will dictate the number of rounds, but overall it should end around mid august
Do subs get the participation medal too?
Oh, I just noticed the matches will be played on Sundays? (What time and timezone?) Crap, then there’s no use for me to sign up anyway, weekends are usually full.
I can’t create a team, it says I don’t have Perms to access the page.
Everytime i click the link , it says You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.
How come I cant sign up? Every time I click “Sign Up here” it says I dont have sufficient permission to access this page…
Is there another way to sign up?
Same as above, not working.
You need to have a team in order to sign up. You might find one here -> http://etf2l.org/forum/hlo-recruitment/
Or create one yourself -> http://etf2l.org/wp-admin/index.php?page=teams&add=1
It says I don’t have ‘proper permissions’ when I click sign up
When trying to sign-up: You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page. :(
I’m having the same issue. No premissions or something… Can someone enlighten me?
is it koth_viaduct or koth_pro_viaduct?
Where do the divisions get posted?
Cause I have a team entered and want to know who im fighting
will like stranges and killstreaks be like killstreak fan o war or more like profi rocket launcher kits? :D