Highlander Season 21 – Wrap-up

This post is long overdue but got heavily delayed by the troubled times the site went through lately. Nevertheless winners were crowned and should be remembered.

We want to give big congratulations to   SDCK! sponsored by tf2hunt.com as the winners of Premiership! With Feila eSports finanzieren durch DROPS improving on their previous season and reclaiming the second place. And finally after going through qualifiers we see inVision having a fantastic season placing 3rd.

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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. We are still looking for an 8th Premiership team, if any of teams currently in Division 1 want to move up you can contact an admin.

Due to the recent data loss we lost a lot of information on player experience, we tried our best placing teams but we obviously don’t know all players’ experience by heart. If you feel like you can help us by pointing out some oversight you can contact us on our Discord Server.

Unhappy about your place? Feel free to contact us over at our Discord Server. These tiers are still subjected to change if teams make a good case as to why they should be moved.

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Just going to keep this short but due to various reasons we’ll be delaying the season by another week. We apologize for the inconvenience it may cause for teams.

The exact reasons for the delay?

A couple more technical issues have appeared. This includes, but isn’t limited to:

• Verified statuses of players on rosters not always updating properly
• User information not being updated
• API setup being funky

We also had one of the originally planned premiership signups retract their placement. If any teams are interested in applying for this spot please contact an admin.

We want to spend some additional time on making sure everything on-site is ready for the season to avoid any issues during the actual season.

Together with this various teams have stated that they’re not adequately prepared for the season starting so shortly after the site came back online.

Schedule

• Signups: April 28th – June 4th, 19:00 CEST (Premiership signups closing June 2nd at 23:59 CEST)
• Publishing of Provisional Divisions: June 4th
• Premiership Qualifiers (In case we get multiple applicants): June 3rd – June 7th
• Publishing of Final Divisions: June 7th
• Main Season: June 7th – July 26th (Roster Lock will be active starting from July 19th, 00:01 CEST)

This obviously throws a bit of a wrench into the schedule for the remainder of the year but expect a more thorough write-up on how this will be dealt with in the near future.

Configs

As briefly touched upon in the previous newspost there has been an update to the configs. The exact added commands are listed below.

etf2l_9v9.cfg

Removed:

tf_tournament_classlimit_scout 1
tf_tournament_classlimit_soldier 1
tf_tournament_classlimit_pyro 1
tf_tournament_classlimit_demoman 1
tf_tournament_classlimit_heavy 1
tf_tournament_classlimit_engineer 1
tf_tournament_classlimit_medic 1
tf_tournament_classlimit_sniper 1
tf_tournament_classlimit_spy 1

etf2l.cfg

Added:

tf_birthday_ball_chance 0

etf2l_6v6.cfg

Added:

sm_deterministic_fall_damage 1
sm_fix_ghost_crossbow_bolts 1
sm_fix_slope_bug 1
sm_fix_sticky_delay 1
sm_remove_halloween_souls 1

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Use our Discord

I’ll make this post divided into subsections so people can roughly find what they’re looking for. Firstly Season 36.

Season 36

Most of the information about the season can be found over here https://etf2l.org/season-36-home/. Make sure that your team is signed up for the competition once more. If you sent in an application email before you do not have to resend these.

The premiership participants, although not all the rosters have been recreated, are the following(names might not be up-to-date):

• nerdRage
• 6ix
• Ora Elektro
• wer das liest ist doof
• Watering my Tigerlily
• Boinicle
• Virtus.bro
• Les fakecallers de l’extreme

Schedule

We’re currently on a pretty tight schedule but are expecting that teams are still at least semi-ready to participate within it. Provisional tiers and the sign up deadline are currently on Thursday the 28th of May. If your team doesn’t manage to get its players together by then you can sign up late. Expect the provisional tiers to take quite a bit longer this time around due to the whole server dying thing.

Plugins

For Season 36 we’re for a first time running plugins in a larger scale. We want to thank https://serveme.tf/ for generously making this previously premium feature public. Make sure to go over and show some love. The configs will be enabled by default if you execute the `etf2l_6v6.cfg`.

Are you hosting a server yourself? Then all you need is this plugin, https://github.com/ldesgoui/tf2-comp-fixes, made by TwiiKuu. Specific installation instructions you can also find on that github page.

Server Status: What, Why and How

I’ll try to make this into small bite sized FAQ type chunks on everything you need to know.

What is Gone?

All of the data from the data from the database from the past year. This includes additions, edits as well as deletions. For most people this will mainly just be there name being changed back. We ask players to currently not request name changes while we focus on getting the site as a whole running.

Next to this all the uploaded demos and scoreboard/status screenshots are gone. Match history from longer then a year ago will still be available.

What About Medals?

The season 35, Highlander Season 21 and Highlander Open #3 medals will have to be delayed until a later date. When exactly these will get distributed will be very dependent on things such as final data recovery attempts or data recreation attempts. Expect to have a plan about this in the near future and execution of said plan to follow over a longer period of time.

What About the API?

As you may have noticed the API is currently not up and running. We’ll be looking at this within the near future.

What About Bans or Similar

We’re currently still recreating the previously applied bans to the best of our capabilities.

How Come the Volume Became Corrupted?

ETF2L has almost always ran with a single point of failure which was the hard drive of the server. This setup was a bit convoluted however, something along the lines of an LVM LV that is made as loop device that is then used within a VM. After this became corrupted we tried various methods of recovering the data that was present on this volume however they all failed and after trying non-stop for close to 2 week it just became time to throw in the towel.

Why Aren’t there External Backups?

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
ETF2L has for the past 6 years not had a single new admin with the technical aspect of ETF2L as their primary focus. This for a couple of reasons, one of them being that ETF2L works. After the implementation of the swiss system very little to no technical change has happened and the site has worked just fine.
Next to this, although I can’t speak for my predecessors as to why they opted for this, what I can say is that ETF2L’s setup is messy. Training new technical admins which costs a lot of time and effort often makes it a hard task to do which sometimes might not even pay off if those staff members leave again shortly after joining.

With the system running just fine and no technical staff being around to look at potential issue with the setup or improving the setup it lied dormant. As I, Aoshi, do have a technical background I looked into the server setup roughly 2-3 months ago with the core intent of setting up SSL. We succeeded with the SSL around a week before the server died. The backup situation, which was noticed during this setup was next on the chopping block as soon as the Season 36 setup was completed. However, the rest is history.

Why weren’t there external backups to begin with? From what I can personally remember and roughly from talking to my predecessors is that the current ETF2L setup was done fast and not really looked back on. Why they did certain aspects is just lost to time as there is no documentation of those setups and some of them are outdated or simply don’t work anymore. ETF2L, before being hosted on its own, was hosted on Hypernia. They offered us a free hosting server as well as a couple of game servers. However, receiving a short notice we got booted off of that server and had to move to an independent payed for instance. At this point in time we still had next to the website and API, a file and database management setup, a Gitlab setup and mail server. These had to all get migrated within a short amount of time by volunteers that were at that point already on their last of the countless hours they had spent on improving ETF2L.

What Now?

Data recreation is definitely something that we’re interested in but need to research as well as look at how possible it is. The server situation is still a bit wonky but we’re looking at solidifying this within the next month or so during the season as this generally takes less time then actually setting up the season. Expect updates on these as we try to keep you informed

Staff Changes

While we’ve been off the grid for a while and already had a bit of staff changes on the backburner here is an overview of the past 2-3 months. DCS said goodbye after being on staff for 5 years. AlesKee, proky, BlueBunny and supra all four said their farewells. We want to thank them for all of their time and effort on staff and hope to see them around in the future.

On the flip side both Ananash and Lowenzahn completed their trial as league admin.

Lastly we still have admin applications open. The first batch got a bit delayed due to the whole server fiasco but expect some response within the next couple of days. If there are other people still interested feel free to apply. Both League and Coding applications are currently still open.

If you’re interested in the coding position and want some more information, just contact Aoshi on Discord. He’ll respond at a “reasonable” speed.

You can find further information over here https://etf2l.org/etf2l/jobs/, as well as an explanation on how to apply.

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Down below are this season’s updated provisional tiers. If you can’t
find your team it could be due to you recently changing your team name.

Large changes from the previous being that the previous mid tier has
been split into mid and low and made round robin rather then swiss.

Unhappy about your place? Feel free to contact us over at our Discord Server. These tiers are still subjected to change if teams make a good case as to why they should be moved.

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