Newcomer Guide

Hello and welcome to the European Team Fortress Two League, or ETF2L for short, the home of the best Team Fortress 2 players and teams in Europe!

This short guide is meant to help you find your way around the site and start playing competitive TF2. First thing you should know is that there are two major game modes within competitive TF2. Highlander and Six versus Six, often shortened to HL and 6v6 respectively.

The Game Modes

Highlander consists of teams of 9 players one of each class within TF2. Highlander is typically played on Payload (Pl), King of the Hill (Koth) and five control point (5cp) maps.

Six versus Six is the more serious game mode, with teams of six players playing per team. The players on a 6v6 team are allowed to play any class in the game however the amount of players that can play each class are restricted by class limits which can be found on the rules page, however teams will typically run 2 Scouts, 2 Soldiers, 1 Demoman and 1 Medic as this has been found to be the most effective but there is no rule saying this has to be run. 6v6 is normally played on King of the Hill (Koth) and five control point (5cp) maps.

Whitelists

Both Highlander and 6v6 have what are called whitelists, what these do is prevent people from using weapons that are deemed overpowered or very unfun to play against in that particular game mode. All the whitelists we use here at ETF2L can be found either on our website under the rules tab or at whitelist.tf, to see the 6v6 whitelist click here or to see the Highlander one click here.

How do I find a team?

ETF2L has two main types of competition for both Highlander and 6v6, seasons and cups. There are three 6v6 and two Highlander Seasons a year a Winter (Jan-Mar), Summer (May-July), and Autumn(Sept-Nov) for 6v6 with the Highlander seasons running in the Winter(Nov-Jan) and the Spring(Mar-May). To compliment this there are cups run throughout the year in Highlander, 6v6 as well as smaller game modes that don’t warrant an entire season such as Ultiduo and Bball.

To actually play in one of our competitions you need to be on a team participating, you have two options here you either join a team or make your own. We will not be covering how to make your own team in this guide as it is a much more complex process than joining one. What will be covered is finding a team from the recruitment section and making your own recruitment post.

The place where both teams looking for players and players looking for teams post on ETF2L is called the recruitment section, it can be sorted by country, game mode, class and skill. The country and class filters are self explanatory. For game mode 6on6 is 6v6 and 9on9 is highlander, occasionally there will be other types such as Fun, LAN etc. Skill is the most complex of the filters, in ETF2L Seasons there are 4 tiers of ability: Premiership (Prem) is the highest tier of competition people playing in this tier have been playing competitive TF2 for many years and many 1000s of hours, High is the tier below Prem, Mid the tier below High, and the lowest tier is Open. Open is the place the vast majority of players and teams start their journey into competitive TF2 and so if you are just starting out you should be looking in this section. Even within tiers there can be a large difference between the skill levels this is usually indicated either by the player or team putting that their skill is halfway between two tiers if they think they are somewhere between these two tiers.

If you are browsing the teams looking for players section and see a team you want to try to join click on the post and then going to the teams profile and adding the team leader to talk to them about joining their team.

An example of a recruitment post being created

If however you cannot find a team that interests you immediately what you can do is make your own player looking for team post

1. Sign into the ETF2L website with steam, this process is 100% secure we do not get your usernameor password we only get sent your public steam id
2. Click the team admin link on the far top right of the screen, this will take you to your dashboard.
3. Now click on recruitment on the left hand side then start creating your recruitment post; select the game mode you wish to play, either 6v6 or highlander, your skill level, probably open, then which ever class you want to play you can select as many of these as you wish.
4. Finally you have a box to write a short piece of text about yourself, where are you from, what times can you play, bear in mind that ETF2L runs on Central European Time (CET/CEST), if you have any experience or not, and what are you like as a person. These are all good things to put here but there is no correct or exhaustive list for this section.

How do I watch comp TF2?

Here at ETF2L we have two twitch channels that we mostly work with to help ensure as much of the premiership tier is casted as possible, 6v6 games are casted on twitch.tv/teamfortresstv with Highlander games casted on twitch.tv/blackoutgamingtv. If neither of these two channels are live you can look at the TeamFortress.tv or BlackoutGamingTV youtube channels for previous casts of games.

Other resources:

• Our previous guides to 6v6 and Highlander, this may be slightly out of date.
• Websites to play TF2 pick up games: TF2Stadium, TF2Center, TF2Pickup or PugChamp.
• PlayComp.tf a more extensive guide meant to introduce people to competitive TF2.
• Rollout.tf has guides on every 6s class as well as how to get to rollout effectively to mid fights.
• Whitelist.tf has a visual representation of every whitelist currently used in Competitive TF2 from around the world.
• Comp.tf is the competitive TF2 wiki it has lots of information on past, present, and future events.
• The TeamFortress.tv news posts & forums are an active hub of Competitive TF2 discussion with a focus towards 6v6.
• Serveme.tf provides free TF2 servers to be used for anything to do with Competitive TF2.