With the dawn of Season 14, everyone’s eagerly awaiting Premiership playoffs. In the meanwhile, let’s shed some light on what’s going on in Division 1.

ETF2L Season 14 powered by Twitch: elemental violence vs Last Man Standing

Tonight will also see a “Division 1 clash of the titans matchup” (copyright Trell) happening between two teams from the opposite sides of the table. In the blue corner, Last Man Standing (former UV-Gaming) are standing firmly on their second spot, still under a threat of being pulled down by Outsiders, but with two matches still ahead of them, they are in a strong position to earn a promotion this season. In the red corner, elemental violence‘s performance is hardly on par with the expectations towards them, but nevertheless, with three matches remaining, they are still able to end up first in the division, in which their recent addition of CUBE might help a lot. I’ve caught up with E-thug to ask him about tonight’s match:

We’ve played LMS a lot lately when it comes to PCW’s and it has gone both ways. Tonights match is hopefully gonna be a close one.

Will they manage to secure the victory?
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Provisional Divisions 

In the two weeks signups have been open, over 190 teams have signed up for Season 4! The Provisional Divisions have been drafted and are now available for your pleasure:

>>>Provisional Divisions<<<

If you are not happy with the Division your team has been placed in, please contact an admin on IRC (or use this page) and type !admin. Some teams may end up in a lower division than their Provisional division, if other teams make stronger claims for their spots. You can still submit additional screenshots to back up your claim for a higher placement.

Final divisions will be published this Monday.

We are still accepting signups up until Sunday, March 24th. Teams signing up from today onwards will be placed on the Waiting List, to replace teams of similar skill level that drop before the end of Week 1.

Season 14 powered by Twitch Playoffs information

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With Season 14 powered by Twitch approaching its final week, it is time to look at upcoming Division promotions. The coloured rows in each division indicate who gets promoted (green), who gets demoted (red) and who gets to play a playoff match (blue). Upon closer look, you may notice that there are no green rows in Division 2 – read on to find out why.

Division 2 Promotion Matches

For the past few seasons, 2 teams were demoted from Division 1 every Season, with 3 teams coming up from Division 2. While this worked out reasonably well up until this season due to drops, Division 1 got pretty tight in Season 14, with more worthy contenders than free slots. To avoid this issue in Season 15, the winners of each Division 2 group are invited to a Round Robin style playoff with the top 2 advancing to Division 1. Before this round robin playoff can start, the tie between  vier // red and  tsunderebolts and kawaiitning has to be broken. The deadline for this match is Saturday, March 16, after which the round robin with the winner of the 2A tie breaker,  RELAPSE! Gaming and  Scandi vs HUUHHU will commence.

Additionally, to make more room in Division 2 next season and to be able to scale it down (read below), the 6th teams in Division 2 have to play a relegation match. Because Division 2B has 5 drops, this only applies to Division 2A and Division 2C. The loser of the relegation match will be demoted to Division 3 next season.

Season 15 Division 2

To address the issue outlined above, starting with Season 15, the amount of Division 2 groups will be reduced to two. The amount of drops in Division 2 this Season will make the transition easier and helps to enforce this change without causing too much disappointment. Please consider for your team’s Season 15 signup take into account that both, Division 2 and Division 3 will be a lot stronger than in Season 14.

Premiership Playoffs Scheduling

In order to assist Premiership teams in scheduling their matches, we are introducing a special default date setup for Season 14 premiership playoffs:

• Each participant of the upcoming Premiership Playoff match must submit at least three days on which they are available to play in the coming play week (excluding Friday and Saturday).
• If the match is not scheduled by Friday at 23.59 CET, the admins will decide a default date, based on the days sent to them by the participants. If a team did not submit at least 3 possible days, the default date may be chosen in favor of the team with higher availability. If the previous match is played on Friday or Saturday, the schedule deadline moves back to Saturday at 23.59 CET.
• Rescheduling to a different day is only possible if the match is rescheduled with 24 hours warning.

This change applies to Premiership playoffs only. Tiebreaker matches have unrestricted scheduling within the tiebreaker period, and will receive a single default date two weeks in, as before.

Please keep in mind that you can still use wildcards today. The option to use wildcards is locked from this point on.

Staff Update

One of ETF2L’s oldest active admins and the guru in charge of 6v6 division seeding and default dates,  Sonny Black has received a promotion and joined the ranks of Head Admins. For the past one and a half years he has been one of the hardest working and most passionate admins in the staff, making this promotion not only well deserved, but perhaps long overdue. His chief responsibilities will be supervising the regular 6v6 Seasons and overseeing the Anti-Cheat Staff.

This staff change marks another step in the ongoing German takeover of ETF2L staff.

General Rule Update

We have reviewed our rules on abuse and decided that they could use a bit of an update. The old rule was not clearly structured and left a lot of room for interpretation. The revised rules are somewhat more specific on what constitutes a punishable violation. New additions to the rule are:

• A list of the possible punishments
• Promotion of cheats in any way (jokingly or not)
• Inclusion of offensive avatars
• Inclusion of offensive player- and team names
• Inclusion of customizable in-game items with offensive images or language

The full updated rule reads:

2.5 Abusive behaviour and racism in ETF2L matches and on the site is not welcome
Any offensive behaviour including but not limited to swearing, racist comments and advertising cheats will be prosecuted and may lead to warnings for your team, forum bans and league bans, in severe cases. This applies to the following rules 2.5.1 – 2.5.5.

2.5.1 Abusive chat
Try not to use the chat function during a match unless it is in a positive manner. Any offensive chat as well as spamming binds will be punished. Chat abuse and racist or offensive comments during the match chat or on match pages will be prosecuted.

2.5.2 Abusive avatars
ETF2L accounts that are linked to a Steam account automatically grab the Steam avatar as avatar for this forum. ETF2L reserves the right to take action against abusive or racist avatars.

2.5.3 Abusive nicknames
Abusive nicknames (ingame and on the site) will not be tolerated. In general, we advise to use a nickname that resembles the ETF2L nickname.

2.5.4 Abusive teamnames
Abusive team names that include severe abusive language or racist expressions are not welcome. The player who changed the team name will be made accountable.

2.5.5 Use of abusive language and symbols on ingame items
Some ingame items, such as the Flair!, the Photo Badge, the Clan Pride and the Conscientious Objector, allow to use a Decal Tool to add images to the item. If the image is in any way offensive or racist and the item is used in any ETF2L match, ETF2L reserves the right to take action against the player and his team. The same applies to items renamed with a Name Tag and items with a custom description, applied with a Description Tag.

Bans

The following players are now banned from participating in any ETF2L competitions. These players may not play in the League under any other accounts – any attempts to do so will result on (longer) bans on all accounts associated with the player. All recent matches involving these players have been defaulted.

•  pH. – VAC banned – 11 months (reported his VAC ban one month ago)
•  Artasdmc – VAC banned – 11 months (reported his VAC ban one month ago)
• AMS. – VAC banned – 1 year
• Zarix – VAC banned – 1 year
• Fizz – Double account Zarix – 1 year
•  Spankyy – Admitted to cheating – 1 year

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Last chance to sign up for Highlander Season 4!

The signups for this season are still open until tonight, Friday 8th March at 23:59 CEST, so get your team together quickly and sign up! 

Rule changes

We’re re-adding a Premiership Division Only rule due to casting organistations promising Highlander casts, lets hope they stay true to their word!

• 1.10.2 Premiership players must use their real nicknames.

ETF2L Season 14 powered by Twitch: Epsilon eSports vs BFF

After their latest showing almost two weeks ago, which we hoped to be “the match of the season”, Epsilon eSports‘ dominance remains unshaken. What could be a very close match proved to be yet another seemingly easy step towards victory – defeating Crack Clan 5-1 and 5-0 on cp_process and cp_snakewater was not expected by many to be a viable score, but if anyone could manage to dispose of the second best team in Europe so swiftly – it’s them. As such, even though betting against them could be found to be unreasonable, it’s common to see people rooting for Epsilon‘s opponents – considering that Epsilon eSports have not dropped a single map in their official showings since i46, anyone to defeat them would cause an upset of the month. The last brave six to take a chance at overthrowing the king of the hill will be BFF, for whom this last match of this season’s group stages will be the toughest one yet. Will their strength be enough for them to achieve the (so called) impossible?

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