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I’m here to advocate that a Highlander league should be a basic offering.

Reasons:

Uses all 9 classes
Is a matured game
Has a matured player base
Has other format precedence to benefit from
Allows for increased tactical ceiling
Spreads the pressure across the team
Stepping stone to other formats

How did HL become so popular even though other host sites have been conducting HL league/ladders prior to this tournament?

ET2FL approaching Valve to provide Medals, which was publicly announced/endorsed via the TF2 Blog!!

Fact is that people respond to rewards much more than just pure competition. Let’s not also forget that the purpose of this tournament was to target New/Low/Pub players. This is an important point.

You can’t fault all of us from across the Pond for coming here, not reading stuff, screwing up Teams, not checking for updates, demanding better pings, and more so. Wait, it wasn’t just us. ;)

Truly, the enormous, albeit positive, response from the actual TF2 Community in terms of this Tournament shows there is a hunger for this format. In fairness to ETF2L, it was an overwhelming and unexpected amount of response. When you scope for a start of 200 teams (or was it lower), but it results in an increase by factor of 4+ (~800+ teams) that signed up (including the incomplete ones), then a scale UP in Admin presence is inherent. My personal view of this were the Rules not being really set aside on their own for this event. That would be my only criticism. I don’t fault for piggy backing on existing content, but again since the target audience were New/Low/Pub players a dedicated location of Rules/Rulings/Changelog would have reduced many administrative issues. Some of these players, when they played Granary….thought their match was over after losing only 1 round!! (Not the greatest example, but still a valid one)

I would like to see a HL continue, with the same target audience. I would even advocate no Buddy at all. I would advocate the Admin presence to be proactive at verifing accounts of potential high level players…that do effectively carry. I’m just not a fan of Mercs that are higher level. Sorry, if I want to play the higher level, then I’ll go to the appropriate format and division. Not intending any offense, just pointing out that in order to feed those higher levels….you need to feed the Fresh Meat!!

I would concede that ETF2L would be successful at hosting NA teams for HL under the guise of it being purely for NA. (quit your loling, I’m serious!) I only say this due to benefiting from what is already setup here from the Challenge Tournament (i.e. team registered, systems mostly understood, auto-email notification, etc.). Also…a fair play, attitude theme is actually enforced here. This is something that I’ve liked since my experience with ESL in SWBF. ;) Don’t be a dickhead!

Other sites that have and still, to some degree, conducting HL formats in NA:

Teamware League: http://www.teamwarfare.com/

UGC League: http://www.ugcleague.com/

I point these out to say that they exist, but I’m not sure they could be successful. In the end, it’s all driven by Administrative person’s of the respective host sites. Proactive over Reactive will always prevail for a successful outcome from my point of view.

I wasn’t aware UGC were planning to remake their dying highlander league. They can use the success of ETF2L tournament with US teams to increase signups to their new highlander league.

Perhaps ETF2L can help let the masses know?

Quoted from ZyZo

7v7 with 1 class limit also seems like a option.

The argument that 9 people are harder to gather than 6 is sort of invalid. At least I think 9 people isn’t hard to gather up.

Just look at other games where you need 40 players (world of warcraft) My team haven’t had problems getting people to play. We have 13 people in our team and rather then having problems gathering all we have to ask the question which setup do we play with today?

This might not be the case for all of you but if you have a team of people playing fairly regular and a few people who can jump in it won’t be a problem.

Maybe we can make a poll out of this? like a vote for 7v7 or 9v9?

Personally, I think the first step is to decide whether there’s even going to be anything new or not.

Our team has barely had any problems getting a full team together, but I know that’s not the case in all teams. No matter how you look at it, there are still only a limited number of players in the community. Requiring every team to get 9 players together instead of 7, inevitabely results in there being fewer teams. The number of teams less in 9v9 than 7v7 wouldn’t only be the result of fewer teams being created, but also the result of more teams folding, which in turn affectes the remaining teams and lowers the quality of the league.

I know at least half of my team would be interested in seeing more 9v9 play, and I know quite a few who weren’t on a team that would also be interested. Admittedly, the availability issue could be problematic, but I’d like to see it done. (And possibly open to NA teams – a bunch of us got hooked on this.)

Quoted from DeNeusbeer

So yea, if there’s the general idea that there’s a future for a highlander league, all it will take is a few people willing to put in some time and effort into adminning the thing.

I for one would volunteer.

Quoted from Hildreth

[…]

I for one would volunteer.

ashkan approves

i’d love to see a highlander league in a more permanent basis, absolutely; already i can see it starting to form a community that should be allowed to flourish. to NOT have one in place, given the popularity of the current tournament, would be crazy. but i wouldn’t be so sure if a 7vs7 was put up in instead, because – and i think that this is the case for alot of teams – we would have to drop two players. i don’t want to be the one to tell two people in my ream that we don’t need them anymore. i also think that several of the ‘advantages’ of a 7vs7 (easier to organise, more tactical depth etc) are moot, but that’s another story.

what seems more of a concern is a point that someone has already brought up – the manner in which such a league would be divided up, and how accomodating it would be of players moving up in the 6vs6 league. the rules atm are:

2.1.1 Participants: Only players that are new to competitive play or playing in division 6

The tournament is meant for new and casual players. Players that have been in the roster of a team in division 5 or higher in season 5, 6 or 7 (or the equivalent in any other league), are not allowed to participate, other than as a buddy. Breaking this rule will lead to penalties for the whole team.

the question is, does this need tweaked and/or updated if a new league is to be put in place? if so, how?

so far in this tournament, the admins (credit to ’em) have come up with good ideas, and tricky questions like this have gone answered, so i don’t think it’s unreasonable to hope that it’s a problem that will be dealt with and that contingincies will be made for teams with players that have progressed from div6 to div5/4.
personally, i think there might end up being two/three seperate groups; one to cater for div5+ highlander teams (if there is demand for that, they may just carry on with 6vs6), one to cater for ‘standard’ highlander teams that follow the +1 buddy rule and possibly another for teams that finished in, say, the top 256/128/64 of the current league. that sounds a bit messy, but that’s just a vague idea of how it might be dealt with until the highlander scene is so established that it can just run in its own right, separate from the demands and pressures of 6vs6. if it’s given support then i can really see that happening – highlander is a whole different ball game, and i can imagine that, with time, the top teams of 6vs6 will look very different from the top teams of 9vs9. lower 9vs9 teams should, if you give the league enough time to develop, sort themselves out into lower divisions, and you end up with a system that looks very similair to 6vs6 anyway. it’s getting the transition between what we have now, and what that end result is, right.

*ramble over. maybe D:*

pretty much, yeah. the difficult bit will probably be the transition between what we have now, and getting people into the right division; but like i say, that will come with time, good support for the league and a willingness to give it a go :D