ETF2L’s Sponsorship and Policy Update, Bans, Tip of the Hats
October 3, 2018
STN.tf joins in on the fun!
As many of you have surely noticed by now, STN.tf is returning as a sponsor for Season 31! After joining forces with scrap.tf for the summer season, they will once again throw €1.000 into the pot! Big thanks to spyfly and his team for supporting competitive TF2!
As the winner of Season 31 already receives PC rentals and LAN tickets for Copenhagen Games 2019 worth approximately €1.600, part of the STN.tf contribution (€700) will be awarded to the second place, leaving €300 to the 3rd placed team.
If you would like to contribute yourself, our ETF2L PayPal account is open for donations year round! Simply transfer your funds to [email protected]. If you want your money to support a specific season or tournament, make sure to leave us a message in the payment info!
We also accept donations in the form of items. To do so, send a trade offer to our ETF2L steam account (accepting only keys or unusual hats) or contact one of our admins!
If you do not have any cash or items you can support us by disabling AdBlock on ETF2L.org! A small contribution can go a long way!
ETF2L’s stance on harassment within the community
Over the last few months, we’ve been looking into making a clearer stance regarding how we will handle toxicity and harassment. This will be done by having some clearer outlines on it as a whole.
On-site comments, as well as off-site comments made by players, can and will be taken into account if they are reported by whoever those comments were directed to. This includes officials, match comments and forums, scrims, external forums (such as teamfortress.tv) and so on.
For the Premiership tier, we’ll be reviewing the match logs from all of their played officials. The reason for this is that the matches are often casted as well as being a representation of the league.
The rest will still remain on their report-based system. If you want the admin team to look over a case please come forward and contact us using our Discord.
Every case will be handled separately due to the context being an absolutely crucial aspect when dealing with these cases. Consistent harassment, as well as highly derogatory terms, is something that we would like to see fade out of the community. At the end of the day, however, this isn’t a safe space and it is undeniable that light-hearted “trashtalk” is still part of a competitive community.
However, continuously toxic behaviour will lead to on-site punishments. This can be in the form of simple warnings, but can eventually lead to bans. A few examples of this are:
messy – 2 months
HeeSang – 1 month
These players are banned for harassing another member of the community for months on end.
Joining them is 
Hannes who will be banned for 2 weeks due to their highly derogatory comments during the Highlander Season 16 Low Grand Finals.
ETF2L is following up on a promise
Back in October, when we issued the first bans for derogatory behaviour as well as racist and sexist slurs, we made a promise to donate a cut of the Season 30 prizemoney to charity. The deducted amount of €175 will be equally split between these two organisations:
- Woman Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) is a Canadian women’s rape crisis centre that offers a 24-hour crisis hotline as well as additional services such as free counselling & victim services. They are also helping women through support groups, volunteering opportunities and general awareness.
- Galop UK is a British LGBTQ and anti-violence legal advice charity. Galop UK prominently provides consultation and support for victims that have had issues with reporting domestic & sexual abuse, or racially or extremist-fueled LGBTQ+ hate crimes such as Islamophobic violence to the police or the criminal justice system.
ETF2L and its sponsors and partners are happy to support these two selfless organisations. A special ‘thank you’ goes to uberchain, who thoroughly searched the world wide web and provided us with these two options.
Don’t forget: the TF2 community is a family!
… and there are black sheep in every single one of them. But that does not mean our community is rotten to the core! In fact, the very core of the community – long-time ambassadors of our game and even quite a lot of those who have long left the scene – come together once again in order to host the annual charity stream Tip of the Hats!
They are back at it, raising money for Children’s Oncology Services, Inc., which offers camps and other educational and excursion programs throughout the year that allow children with cancer to just be kids. At the time of writing, this initiative has already raised ~14.000 USD in 2018, even though the stream does not go live until Friday, 5th October! For exact information on the schedule and guests, visit tipofthehats.org.
Let us come together this weekend and remind ourselves about what Team Fortress 2 is all about: community, passion, love, sympathy and tolerance!
ETF2L’s partners:
Make sure to visit our sponsors STN.tf and Copenhagen Games!
ETF2L on social media:
Follow us on twitter!
Like us on Facebook!
Join our Steamgroup and invite your friends!
Use our Discord!
Posted by ETF2L Staff in Bans, League, Rule Updates, Site, Sponsors
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Rip messy and nati0nal, very epic to have a more clearer view at these cases
I’m scared
Banning people for something they did when it wasn’t an offence is a big yikes too
Should’ve let me play heavy
thx for banning them :)
2pac shot first !!!!!!!!111!!11!1
Gamers Owned Epic Style By Le Admin :D
I am glad these two dangerous psychopaths are banned, although, were I the judge, it should have been a much more severe sentence. I have been constantly subjected to years of torment, including fatphobic comments and constant harassment because of my religion and anime preferences (HXH IS GOOD STFU). For example, during scrims they would frequently call me ‘fat retard’ and also insulted my ethnic heritage by making fun of my proud Iberian descent. I am glad the brave men and women of the European Team Fortress Two League Administrative Team have finally stood up to this hate speech, and decided to make an example of these two, hopefully to defer other would-be griefers from bullying each other. I also want to commend the Administrative Team’s choice of charities, which is so progressive and tolerant of them. You have earned a round of applause from me, and with that I shall take my leave. Toodle-oo!
he is memeing please ignore^
he is banned please ignore^
Hannes lmao
bluebunny is scary
So if u call a shit player with a massive ego a shit player they can just run to admins crying and get u banned ?
doesnt seem like it could be abused at all wp etf2l
Welcome to ETF2L Season 1984!
Expected
What? This cant be real
etf2lgbtqiapk
Article 7 of the Human Rights Act
Article 7 means you cannot be charged with a criminal offence for an action that was not a crime when you committed it.
@chippo & @messy
It already was a punishable offense. Just not as clearly outlined anywhere. Expecting toxic behavior or repetitive harassment to be allowed in the first place really makes me think though.
bannad för highlander ajajaj
#moistgate
ceNSORSHIP in the cOMMENTS ajajaj
Can you go more in-depth as to why degu and pred got a ban on ETF2L as a whole (not being able to participate in games) whereas messy/Nati0nal apparently only got banned from forums and comments? I’m not sure what either of these people have done but it seems out of place punishing people with only a forum ban for “harassing another member of the community for months on end”.
It’s nice to see there’s a statement on this now but this doesn’t seem very consistent, and I’m still very cynical about the way you are going to enforce this rule.
On-site comments, as well as off-site comments made by players, can and will be taken into account if they are reported by the whoever those comments were directed to. This includes officials, match comments and forums, scrims, external forums (such as teamfortress.tv) and so on.
I don’t get it – Are you Policing the TF2 community now? On which websites? All? Will you be collecting social media profiles and investigating their history for everyone and use their posts when a report is made about their behaviour? Will it be more on a reporting basis, ie “Person A called me this in twitch chat, also tweeted this at me, please ban from ETF2L”
+1 for trying to appear tougher on harassment as it’s been relaxed for a few seasons now but I am struggling to see how this can be done consistently. ETF2L are now the Internet Police not just their own website Police (which they been doing a sub standard job on anyway).
Good luck with that.
Hi a gamer called me a pussy today can I get him banned?
no chippo, you pussy.
Good stuff and good for etf2l to take a stance against these repugnant people. Cant wait for some of the black sheepy members of the tf2 family to get triggered by these new guidelines and post their idiotic opinions.
ps: somebody from portugal(im looking at you 31) should report ceejaey for calling it a 3rd world country.
pps: I’d like to report the entirety of the 6s community for calling highlander shit.
ppps: hildreth already bringing out his typical absolutism arguement of if etf2l considers any 3rd party website then they must police every single website and conversation held on the internet.
I would go further into detail but since i have a troll reputation there is no point in doing so since most people here wouldnt understand the nuance of my inquisitive intellect.
Rip bast
#freemyboys )*:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G44xTr8D_bw
regarding hildreth, wasnt it pretty clearly stated that they will police prem logs and the rest will stay a report based system?
ETF2L Internet Police
extremist-fueled LGBTQ+ hate crimes such as Islamophobic violence
WTF is this a joke, charities like that are a scam and this doesnt make sense at all, when i was french kissing other dudes in london the only hate i got was from brownie muslims
in a day and age where homos are being beaten up by muslims for their sexuality, a charity like this is a total offense and disgusting tbh, remember Pim Fortuyn
https://www.hln.be/nieuws/binnenland/personeel-leuvense-pitabar-geeft-homokoppel-slaag~a1a651b5/
De Leuvense politie werd erbij geroepen en onderzoekt de zaak nog. Omdat er schijnbaar geen andere aanleiding voor het dispuut was, weerhoudt ze momenteel de kwalificatie ‘homofoob geweld’ als verzwarende omstandigheid. De slachtoffers liepen geen uitgebreide verwondingen op en dienden dus geen verzorging te krijgen
“Sorry citizen can’t label it as homophobic becuase muslims were ones doing it :))”
Gotta love these people here pretending now that National and messy are not one of the most toxic and disliked people in the tf2 community.
@smrk I think the point of most comment here is not that messy or national aren’t toxic or disliked. From my understanding people mostly have a problem with ETF2L banning people for offsite behavior. Furthermore some people are outraged because they believe what National and messy did was harmless or nothing out of the ordinary.
I think there are very few people who know exactly what messy and National has done, because ETF2L, understandably, has not released all the “evidence”. This has then led to people saying stuff like “So if u call a shit player with a massive ego a shit player they can just run to admins crying and get u banned ?”, I would be very surprised if the admins were just lying about the “harassing another member of the community for months on end.” statement.
very nice, racism and islamophobia all in one place.
apart from that ETF2L shouldn’t be dealing with things that are happening offsite, tbh i feel like a forum ban would be strong enough, not a full ban.
“Forum ban would be strong enough.”
Hardly any people post on ETF2L Forums in 2018.
forum ban so then he can’t be toxic on site.
all of this is happening off site <- (thats the problem here) so why should he banned in the first place lmfao
madness, all messy wanted to do was spread love with his beats and yall put this on him………………………….. crazy Vro
haha owned
imo you can support organisations and beliefs without donating to them. We’re a tiny community with hardly any support, that money should be going to prem players who sweat their balls off every season instead of a LQBT charity
I agree with Hildreth, policing the TF2 community sounds like overstepping boundries.
But on the other hand, I see the push from the culture change in the community which asks for steps like these.
Hopefully we can get some more clarity on what’s considered harrassment and what is still competitive banter in the eyes of ETF2L.
ur always free to donate ur money to prem players, no ones stopping you
and you can donate yours mate
honestly this ban makes me want to leave this comminity
Nothing is stopping you
“extremist-fueled LGBTQ+ hate crimes such as Islamophobic violence”
hahahahahaha what the fuck
I recommend using uBlock Origin, it is a free and open source adblocker, that leaves a very tiny RAM footprint compared to other popular options
It also has features that allow hiding some HTML elements which eliminates the nuisense of being forced to accepting malicious cookies
The reason I’m recommending it here, because I do not support the slippery slope ETF2L is going down here
i would like to give a statement on what “HARTZ THE STUPID FARTZ” said, plz dont ban MY FAVOURITE STREAMER CEEHAIL its only an old joke, he did no arm. and before i get banned, I DO NOT HAVE A PERSONAL VENDETTA AGAINST LEILA, i talked with leila on mumble the other day, and i apologized for my inoffensive TRASHTALK, and she was nice to me. i would hope if the etf2l admins would not ban/suspend me.
i hope that*
Once again, ETF2L is on a slippery, “progressive” slope. As stated by others (Dave, kKaltUu, …), how are you gonna police all of the more and less known members of the community? Where does monitoring end? Are platforms and communication methods like Snapchat, Twitter, Discord DMs gonna be investigated too? I’ve got Orwellian shivers running down my spine.
The donation of a part of the prize money to Galop UK is either a very early and extremely poorly executed Aprils Fools Joke, or once again an awful decision of the ETF2L admins. As stated by my fellow Belgian gamer Sacrilege, there is no sound way to combine the Western ideology surrounding LGBT issues and the Islamic interpretation of these same issues. Any organization that tries to do so is morally bankrupt, in my opinion.
Furthermore, does ETF2L strive to be a politically neutral platform? From my understanding, either some influencial individuals in the organization or all of the admins are quite left-leaning and implementing the accompanying into the services they are offering. Since the site and the offered services are free to use, they/the organization have/has every right to do so, but it’s still worrysome.
Kind regards, a concerned gamer.
* accompanying beliefs into
BAN STINSON/DCS FOR SCAMMING ME OUT OF AN ETF2L SHIRT!!!!!!!!!!!!! >:(
Theres so much autism in those comments its almost like you guys all got vaccinated against common sense
Some valuable insight coming out of French TF2 player “PISTOL.PETER98[FR]”
Sacrilege demonstrating a complete lack of reading comprehension here smh
Gonna assume we’re not gonna get more info than is stated but “bullying someone for months on end” seems like a massive overstatement. Being toxic in officials already ends up in being your match possible overturned and besides that I don’t see how someone CAN be bullied by someone over the internet for months on end.
It’s very inexplicit and it might’ve been “light-hearted trash-talk” just the same. The span of time it happened in makes no severe difference other than making it more confusing. What made this a ban-able offense? The time span it happened in or the severity of the comments made to the target of bullying? I’ve called people a few names because they’re either doing piss-poor in my games or because they’re incredibly overconfident. Does this mean I might get banned now because I’m going to tell people they “suck at videogames” if they suck at videogames?
Solution to concerns = Don’t be an asshole to people
It’s not rocket science.
Just wondering if anyone has any more information on what exactly they did to harass a player for months on end?
Ben Shapiro MURDERS administrators of a community for an 11 year old cartoon game (FOR KIDS) with FACTS and LOGIC
also can i be banned for bullying people due to them being short?
Most of the tf2 community has been toxic in one form or another. If we banned people for being toxic there wouldn’t be anyone left. Only serious cases such as racism should be banable imo.
pps: I’d like to report the entirety of the 6s community for calling highlander shit.
even though he is joking he speaks the truth xd
ez bans tbh
yepyepyep jordan b peterson is the absolute dont take away my right to be an idiot and harass people otherwise u will feel the pain
I want to clear up some misconceptions that have so far formed with this clarification. First and foremost, the post is a clarification as it isn’t changing up anything that would have otherwise been punishable. The only thing that has changed is the checking of prem officials’s chat logs. Which is a minor thing.
Being banned is the final solution, in order to get banned you’ll have to have a very bad track record by being reported numerous times or actually stating proper horrible things. This applies to the aforementioned cases, however extreme cases such as these normally don’t occur more then a couple of times a year. With the clarification that these cases are indeed bannable offenses we hope that these will slowly diminish over time.
Its pretty straight forward really, on-site only includes the forums and comments. No match logs, discord and so on and so forth. To be able to take in cases fully it will sometimes be required to look at off-site evidence when presented.
Because where do you draw the line of something being related? I’ll give a very extreme example.
If one player where to go and consistently tell another player to kill themselves and that they are worthless on twitter. Does this count as related? They are both parts of ETF2L’s player base after all but are doing this on a non-related platform.
Which leads to the point of everything off-site being potentially used but the further away you go from being related to ETF2L or its services the less relevant it becomes to ETF2L punishments. Which is also why the section of:
Its crucial as it blocks people from being offended or witch hunting other people’s conversations for no apparent reason. Getting offended on somebody else his behalf is not something we find sufficient.
No, we still work on the same old report based system. A person that is being targeted by harassment or being targeted for their ethnicity or similar (talking straight up racism and whatnot) can report such targeting to us. Moreover, if you want to come in and make a claim about a person it needs proper proof which includes the full context.
We’re all here to have fun and compete within TF2. Within every competitive environment however there will be toxicity. Its unavoidable as its simply something that comes forth from competition.
If you as a player cant handle being called bad every now and then playing something competitively might not be for you.
Before we go over to any form of proper player directed punishment we will usually try to reach out to them. We did so both for the national as well as the messy case, which still at this point is internally being discussed after having further conversations with them.
How much brain damage is required for you to think that 2 people being banned for repeatedly harassing a single person for an extended amount of time opens the door for people to get banned for telling people that they “suck at videogames” or other shit talking.
its almost like etf2l admins are not planning to ban everyone for no reason?
it’s simple. if you don’t act like an absolute piece of shit you won’t be banned.
I feel like that’s common sense though kinda insane that some people still don’t get it
shit joke league
“Being banned is the final solution”
German ETF2L admins literally implementing a “final solution”
Seeing stuff like this go on is absolutely terrifying. Playing games and talking to people online should be a light-hearted and enjoyable experience, even if the subject in question is considered to be offensive or off-colour. To restrict how an entire community is allowed behave just because of a few edgy people talking a bit of shite is beyond ridiculous. There are other scenarios, however, in which people online can be horrendously mocked for having a serious disability or belonging to certain ethnicity on the likes of different social media platforms like Facebook; with cases such as these being treated as much more serious and understandably so. Websites such as these are much more personalised and are where family and friends can talk with each other and is intended for a much wider range of people, meaning behaviour like bullying and offensive speech toward other people wouldn’t and shouldn’t be tolerated in what’s considered to be a family-friendly environment.
Situations like these, however, do not even come close to fitting this criteria. Don’t people know what they’re getting into when they talk to people they don’t know online? Are they not aware of internet safety and what kinds of content and people they will inevitably be exposed to? People from all walks of life talk and play games with each other and naturally not everyone is going to get along, it is a part of life believe it or not. Consequently people will say things they wouldn’t to people in real life, which indeed may be hurtful to some people, but there is nothing stopping them from simply ignoring the comments they deem to be hurtful and avoiding the particular group of people responsible or the entire community if needs be. It is absolutely disgusting how an entire community is being spoiled just because of the few insignificant events that have come about as of late.
These two guys along with a lot of the TF2 community are good people, and even if they weren’t it still wouldn’t be okay to punish them just because a person from the other end of the globe isn’t happy about the words they read from some bloke’s comment they don’t even know or should care about. I have been a part of the TF2 community for nine years now and it pains me to see such a large portion of the community be affected by such silly things like this, and I fear that if nothing is done about it soon there won’t be much left of this community.
Stop this nonsense; let people have fun and stop trying to fix whatever so-called issues that will naturally come about as a part of a free community. Sometimes I think people really do forget all the positives of the internet while focusing on its insignificant “problems” like these that should be considered as personal quarrels and nothing more. There is no reason for the entire competitive community to be involved… and with that, I say, pootis is best class.
these people here who are so obsessed about “where you draw the line” probably spend hours writing up paragraphs above and even take college classes about human rights when they paradoxically spend all their energy writing long paragraphs against something that punishes bad behaviour
most people who post online on justice/moral matters are men who feel they must discuss justice online
when they really have nothing to say about this
i have nothing to say about this.
https://imgur.com/a/xgsa8fw
if one of you shitlords dare call my anime taste bad i’ll upload a 1488 mb virus into your pcs so you start to respect women.
@edgyneer, after a wall of text and “digging deeper” you came to the conclusion that national was banned because he posted “LOL” on somebodies recruitement post. Do you actually believe thats the reason why he got banned? are you actually braindead to such an extent that you think any admin would take time out of their day and read recruitmentpost comments and judge them and come to the conclusion that this person needs a ban?
Its devastating how idiotic your post is but at the same time I’m perplexed that you are able to put together more than five sentences without having a brain aneurysm.
ps: Im not gonna get banned for this cause im an ETF2L Donator and a pretty gay pizza.
funny that “edgyneer” tells botman “he doesn’t know jack shit about what he’s talking about” while he assumes that nationals harassment only took place, and if so would still be available, on ETF2L.
It’s astounding really, that you must have thought about this in your mind and still felt like THAT THERE WAS NO POSSIBLE WAY to harass someone outside of the etf2l.org site.
Try using your brain before writing up nonsensical paragraphs and posting them online.
5$ brain at the thriftshop
u guys ever squeeze ur nuts when ur peeing to make it go faster
hey mak so you know i sometimes am slow at doing my business at the loo but i know good laughs make you healthier
i was gonna have a big dinner yesterday so in advance i took a minute to write an idiot magnet trigger post here on etf2l and luckily someone called edgyneer took the bait and wrote a huge silly post full of pathos and paradoxes, so while i was just trying to finsih my business i opened etf2l on my phone and his post just relieved me, great timing today and happy life
@edgyneer you have nothing to say about this
you only mention things that have been posted on etf2l, such as the link to that video. Clearly it doesn’t cross your mind that it might have taken place on other 3rd party services such as discord or steam ???
Speaking of “inconsistency”, ETF2L never provide any proof to people that are not directly involved with the cases, so why would they do so now? Seems to me that this manner is the definition of consistent.
It is also not for us to decide anyway, as we are not admins.