Season 28 announcement!
September 2, 2017
Banner by soda
Announcing Season 28!
First of all congratulations once again to Season 27 winners 
Arctic Foxes and Se7en for winning insomnia61. However there is going to be only a short break in the TF2 calendar with Season 28 signups open until 15th of September at 21:00 CEST. Due to the lack of time between insomnia61 and Season 28 there will not be any preseason cups.
Premiership signups will close on the 9th of September at 21:00 CEST
>>>> Sign up now! <<<<
Unlocks and Map Pool
The whitelist will remain unchanged from Season 27, if/when any rebalance updates occur we will provide updated information in a news post.
The map pool however is undergoing a few changes compared to Season 27. Cp_badlands is being replaced by 
Collaide‘s cp_prolands_b2b. This version brings in a few tweaks designed to make the last point easier to push out of, you can see a full changelog on the TF.tv thread. The more major change is the removal of granary and welcoming back an old friend, cp_sunshine. We have taken this decision because sunshine has had a few changes since we last ran it in a season. This combined with the lack of popularity with regards to granary and its divisive nature have led us to make the change for this season.
This change does not mean that granary is gone for good, we will be looking out for feedback regarding this decision.
Map pool
- cp_process_final
- cp_prolands_b2b
- cp_reckoner_rc2
- cp_gullywash_final1
- koth_product_rc8
- cp_snakewater_final1
- cp_sunshine
Map Rotation
- Week 1: cp_process_final & cp_prolands_b2b
- Week 2: cp_prolands_b2b & cp_reckoner_rc2
- Week 3: cp_reckoner_rc2 & cp_gullywash_final1
- Week 4: cp_gullywash_final1 & koth_product_rc8
- Week 5: koth_product_rc8 & cp_snakewater_final1
- Week 6: cp_snakewater_final1 & cp_sunshine
- Week 7: cp_sunshine & cp_process_final
Sign-up process
Make sure to choose your desired tier when signing up to the season in the sign up process. If you created a new team, feel free to apply for the tier you believe you deserve you should be in. To prove you are capable of the tier you applied for, we require you to submit screenshots or logs of results from your recent practice matches or tournaments where you scored decent results against teams that play on the level you aim for, send an application to [email protected] (details listed below) with a suitable subject. Emails with subjects like “Hello”, “Hi” or anything else that cannot be identified as a team applying for a tier by mail may be ignored.
Additionally since it happens time and time again, you do not sign up by mail, you sign up on the site and apply by mail if you are a newly formed team playing in anything higher than Open.
The quantity of screenshots or logs 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 or logs that you have to submit.
When sending links to logs on logs.tf or similar it is highly recommended that you include a short explanatory comment for each linked log, e.g. who your opponents are supposed to be and where they played last season. Also helpful for us, but not a must however, is adding who the opposing team is in each screenshot or log (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. We will not accept plain lists of logs without any comments!
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.
If you are applying for Open tier (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 [email protected]. The tier 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 you are applying for
- Link to the online photo album with comments
- Reasons why your team deserves to be placed in the tier you applied for (optional)
Season 27 Promotions/Demotions
Due to the lack of interest in the Fresh Meat Tier, and internal complications with its running we are reverting back to the more familiar four tier system of Open, Mid, High and Premiership.
All Low and Mid playoff teams as well as the winner of High will receive a promotion to the next highest tier, unless their starting roster changed by more than half of their players. Open playoff teams may still play in Open this season if they wish however they may also play in Mid if they send in an email in accordance with the section above.
The bottom two teams in the Premiership will be demoted and will have to compete with any potential premiership teams in the preseason playoffs if they wish to stay in the Premiership.
Season Schedule
- Signups: September 02 – September 15th, 21:00 CEST (Premiership signups will close early, on the 9th of September at 21:00 CEST)
- Publishing of Provisional Divisions: September 15th
- Publishing of Final Divisions: September 16th
- Pre-Season Premiership Playoffs: September 10th -16th
- Main Season: September 17th – November 2nd (7 Weeks)
- High/Mid/Open Playoffs: November 3rd – November 26th
- Premiership Finals: November 26th
If you intend to sign up for the Premiership Tier we encourage you to do so as soon as possible. Due to the Pre-Season Playoffs happening while signups are still open, we will only consider teams for the Pre-Season Playoffs that signed up before the 9th of September at 21:00 CEST. Additionally we expect teams without a guaranteed Premier Division spot to be able to compete on the provided Pre-Season Playoff dates.
We expect all aspiring Premiership Tier teams to send either us an email or directly contact a league admin on steam or discord with at least your intended roster. You must also include evidence of your ability to compete with premiership level teams.
Teams that do not send an email risk losing their spot in the Pre-Season Premiership Playoffs.
Premiership Playoffs
We are running Double Elimination as our format of choice for Premiership Playoffs again.
The games will be played between the 4th and 26th of November. We will allow some flexibility with dates, but the grand final must be played on the November 26th at the latest.
ETF2L on social media:
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Use our Discord
Posted by MoistPenguin in 6v6, League, Rule Updates
content rss
cp_prolands :D
cp_sunshine :DDD
now we just remove reckoner and tf2 is saved
should ban crossbow tbh
sorry, but what are the major differences between snakewater_final1 and snakewater_u14 again?
@TimTum, there are no differences anymore now, final1 was updated by the TF Team with everything that u14 contained.
hopefully granary never sees the light of day again.
no bagel, i end my life
Sunshine yes! :D
hype boys
ban crossbow
@Ban Crossbow XDDDD
Moist – Today at 8:51 PM
no need to change the whitelist at the moment
especially given the possibility of the items being rebalanced in the near futur
removing granary? this is such a weird april fools
Removing granary.. what a wise choice.. well done..
removing granary? …………………………………………………………………………..
for many years i have prayed for the removal of granary, thank you based etf2l gods for awnsering my prayers, i now shall kneel down and cast upon thou even more prayings in the hope that someday bagel gets added
tldlr thank FUCK granary is finaly gone
Bring back Granary, remove product and reckoner.
B-But reckoner is a god tier map
I prefer playing overwatch to Sunshine
do process, prolands, granary, gully, via, snake and then a switch around like sunshine/metalworks. Reckoner has been there too long and its boring :(
shouldve gotten rid of snake instead of granary imo (((and not bring back sunshine)))
long have i waited for this day
no granary in the map pool
now all we need is a xbow ban
all these scout mains talking about granary like its a bad map smh…. go play a real class…. SAD
I know a lot of people strongly dislike granary. But adding Sunshine means we now have 4 very similar maps.
Adding Bagel would have been the braver move, and kept the mappool varied.
also
bagel when??
if you use snakewater ( any version ) at least fix it so red team doesn’t have advantage on mids
Just add every competitively-played 6s map (Granary, Metalworks, Bagel, among all the rest) and work the rotation out accordingly.
BAM, everyone is now equally pleased and displeased at the same time.
…In all seriousness though, we could use more competitively viable KOTH maps.
No fuck koth
I don’t understand why you would drop any map other than reckoner if you wanted to get sunshine into the rotation again. Seeing how there’s been a fair amount of apparent issues with the map (the lack of options holding your second on even ubers, how every transition area is a long narrow hallway, how terrible it is capping mid; just to name a few), I find it incredibly frustating how the changes made to the map over seasons we’ve been playing it were so minimal. The changes made, while some of them were nice, have in no way tackled any of the maps core issues.
I don’t understand the reasoning behind discarding maps that were actively being worked on in previous seasons and yet keeping a map around that’s not seen any significant changes, despite complaints being voiced consisently throught its time in the etf2l rotation.
I want to make clear that my frustration with reckoner isn’t that I dislike the map. There’s other maps in the current rotation that I don’t really enjoy playing. It’s the fact that etf2l is so willing to keep around a map that objectively has had flaws under the pretense of playtesting and improving it, when the actual amount of change that map has seen is almost insignificant.
Jag gillar bagel
@Cupcake, Since you’re the only one who actually has a posted a real criticism about this change instead of plain asking “why remove granary?” I could give some details as well to why we ended up still keeping Reckoner in.
We’re well aware that there every time we have had a map pool up in our season in any kind of way, it always has had couple maps that not everyone is a huge fan of. Whether it is due to how most people tend to avoid scrimming on it or how most people find major flaws in the map altogether.
It was pretty obvious for us that the way Granary pro had gotten updated to RC8 had also a decline to how people enjoyed playing the map with the big amount of gameplay changes it also had in it compared to RC4, this was seen mostly in our map test cup before Season 27 where RC4 was more noticeably favoured instead of RC8 which was tested in the cup.
While we could just simply have RC4 played in the league instead of the newly updated version of the map, we would rather not run an outdated version of the map but instead let the map take a hiatus from our map pool for a while to give out a signal that Granary itself is at its latest is now in our own eyes in an even worse condition than Reckoner is.
I do acknowledge the bad parts about Reckoner that you pointed out, and I do agree with some of them, but to what you said about us keeping a single map that seemingly is the only one to have received several complaints over the seasons, so has Granary received its own part of negative feedback almost as much as Reckoner has, to which we are keeping them almost tied in terms of how many people in our league enjoy both of the maps.
It’s also still mentioned in the post as well that we are not completely done with Granary yet, if we do keep on getting more actual feedback like this then we’re more so up to reconsider our decision before the season starts.
@Bloodis afaik people complain about granary because they think it’s stalematey.
At i61 it seemed quite the opposite (and we are talking about the top level here, not open), especially in the Grand Finals, which in total had 7 rounds (4-3 to Se7en, more rounds than in every other game during GF)
To be fair, it’s pointless to rate a map as bad because stalemates at this point, since our current meta/gamestyle is the one prompting them, that’s why you can see low scores games and worse stalemates than in Granary in almost every map.
Pushing to/out of last it’s quite easy compared to other maps, e.g. Reckoner and Badlands.
Also, you always know that I say ”scout illuminati blablabla” because actually, no joke, this is where I feel every map is going. You are basically taking out variety from our map pool instead of promoting it. Nowadays, it feels like we are playing the same map all over again and the community is pushing the map layout of Process further as the ‘right and only’ way for future maps. I know Granary might be close-quarters but it was the only map who had a distinctive characteristic in comparison to other maps.
I’m sorry to say, but removing maps like Granary reinforces the ”dm-donkey” scout stereotype instead of the smart and creative-thinking one. We all know Scout rips apart any other class by pure dm and you are taking away the only map in which they have to think a little bit (before we used to have Gravelpit and Freight as well)
Finally, I do not know who thought having Sunshine back was a good idea since it is, in general, worse than Reckoner is.
Granary is a well functioning map with good flow for the most part, options get limited pushing into mid/making plays onto midpoint but this seems to be the case for most maps. Pushing out from last is quite easy on granary compared to most other maps. The midfight is hard for most, especially medics but this isnt necessary a bad thing since equal ubers slows down the game more than any other gamestate. If you compare this to reckoner you see the same problem aproaching mid but you also see the biggest flaws while pushing out from last, you must walk through multiple chokepoints simply to reach the point and the defenders of second always have a massive defenders advantage, this makes it possible for teams attacking last to take a lot of risk(even sacking demo) without any major consequenses.
Removing granary because some people dislike playing it and the recent version rc8 being worse than rc4 is not the way to go unless we have a clear better map to use in its place, especially when we have a map that is way more flawed and also is not enjoyable to play for a lot of players. Keeping rc4 would send the same message that the new version did not apply the correct changes to fix the flaws of the map that removing it would.
Awful decision. Removing granary is one thing that one day is probably a good idea, but why are you removing it for a map which is also not liked much, and doesn’t provide much map variety either? I’d rather see bagel, it’s so bad to have all the maps be basically the same
I agree with the posts defending granary. The map itself has always been there and the only attempt to remove it from mappool (S20) proved removing granary was a mistake. Stalemates come from players being unable to break them (because positioning or window of opportunity) and it happens on every map. Granary is probably one of the easiest maps to push out of last, unlike process, sunshine, badlands, snake… In fact Granary is very enjoyable for all classes, but I guess people dont bother (as I consider most granary gods like ryb and byte retired long ago) and being twice the amount of scouts than any other role
The map pool imo should force gamers themselves to overcome difficulties due to geometries. In the case of granary I still believe the small balcony between ramproom and yard made the map worse than it was as it’s just a spam alley and forces you to be away from it (Double check yranarg, it doesnt have it, would appreciate more feedback from top teams than the fun cup regarding this doorway). Furthermore the removal of most edges/lamps as hiding spots made it so much quicker
Most maps have the same geometry elements and ambientation in common (why no snow/water/night/… elements in maps in 2017; discarded because of PC’s not being able to handle them 7 years ago, but now…). Coming from the dinosaur era, I value maps that generate diversity in the gameplay and feel that should be re-considered when global whitelist with the balance changes from the pyro update (probably jinxed it) like obscure (very plain, open and not-stalematey and which only flaw was narrow last entries), gravelpit (where smart offclass and positioning win), quay (enjoyable once you had the hang of it), croissant (which is viaduct-style mirrored, not standard for 5cp; could be improved if lobby was simpler), 5gorge (has it ever been played?) or other koth (not bagel tho, it’s just not as good as product; unable to transition backwards in general; unable to transition forward without sollies because it feels long and narrow compared to product)
“This change does not mean that granary is gone for good.” Granary will probably be back next season. You keep forgetting the players who like sunshine, you cannot please everyone.
-granary +2fort