Latest ultiduo information

A quick reminder that ultiduo signups close very soon – today (Sunday) at 18:40 CEST. Although the cup is fully signed up, we’re expecting a high amount of drops during check-in, so there is still time to get a place!

For any of you already signed up, a quick reminder of how to check-in today (18:40 – 19:40 CEST). Join #etf2l IRC on quakenet (here is a client if you do not have one), then say the name of your team checking in, e.g. “[teamname] checking in” (replace [teamname] with your teamname). If you do this and you are not on the waiting list, your spot is confirmed. If you are on the waiting list, the higher you are on the waiting list the earlier you will be added (if at all) to the competition. It is first come, first served during signups, it does not matter when you check-in as long as you do.

After check-in closes, final editions will be made and then there will be a live draw on #etf2l at around 19:50 CEST. As soon as you are drawn, feel free to contact your opponents to play immediately.

Due to unprecedented demand, we have also expanded the cup to 128 slots. This means that tomorrow, the first Sunday of two, there will be 4 rounds. All games will remain best-of-three. If this is likely to cause issues for you, we will allow your 4th round to be played during the next week following agreement with your opponent. None of the first 3 games will be allowed to be postponed, since you signed up expecting to be able to play 3 games.

So, a recap on the timings (CEST):

18:40 Signups close
18:40 – 19:40 Check-in
19:50 Live draw in #etf2l
20:00 – 20:40 Round 1
20:40 – 21:20 Round 2
21:20 – 22:00 Round 3
22:00 – 22:40 Round 4 (with the option to delay).

As you can see, there are 40 minutes for each round. This means that even in the closest of games there will be time to spare (3 rounds of 10-12 minutes each). This also means that even though the cup theoretically ends at 22:40, a lot of games will finish very early indeed – a whitewash takes 10-15 minutes for 2 rounds. Again, feel free to play as soon as you know who you are playing.

Another update to the tournament is with unlocks; the disciplinary action is no longer compulsory to use. It is, however, allowed for any teams who have it to be used.

If you need a server during a cup (ask your opponent first), type !admin in #etf2l. There are 10-11 servers available for all games, so please try and find another server before asking – they are very limited.

A final thing for any teams who have 3 or more players in your squad: you are only allowed to play with 2 players throughout the cup. You are allowed to have a squad of 3, but 1 will not be able to play – bear this in mind.

For any squads with 0 or 1 player(s), you have been removed from the original signups. If you wish to signup, you are still able to as long as you get a 2nd player on your team, then simply re-signup.

All other information is in the previous post here.

Experimental Ordinance #7 roundup

2 days ago, we saw the 7^th Experimental Ordnance Cup get under way on the slightly confusing maps cp_sdnaldab and cp_yranarg.

The cup was split into three brackets, High, Medium and Low. The high bracket featured previous cup winners  SNSD, Portuguese superstars myRevenge and previous surprise cup finalists,  Lagtastic Gaming.

The high bracket final went 6 – 1 in favour of SNSD over myRevenge. The mid bracket final was a decisive victory for Yummy Elite Sausages who took a 5 – 0 victory of Team Ara.  The low bracket final saw the tightest game, relative to score, with Classy taking victory with 7 rounds to 2 against Crime and Punishment

Keep checking the main page for more announcements regarding the latest experimental cups.

Excello Bigfoot TF2 Challenge

So far 28 teams signed up for the Excello Bigfoot TF2 Challenge on wednesday, 13th July. This includes big names like SG-1 and Team Refuse but it will also be the first public appearance of the newly formed Epsilon and Monster Munch. However, there are still 4 spots left to fill. The original newspost for this tournament can be found here. Do not hesitate and register your team now!

To all teams that already signed up: Please add your missing players. You need at least 6 players on your roster to compete and mercs are not allowed. You are, however, allowed to add as many players as you want. In case you have any questions, feel free to query CanFo, Crasp or SonnyBlack on IRC at #excello.tf2

Spectate the insanity: connect 85.236.102.65:27315 !

Tomorrow, on Thursday the 7th, the 7th Experimental Ordnance Cup will go live. This One Night Cup will feature the two most unfamiliar familiar maps in TF2, badlands and granary mirrored. If you have not seen or downloaded the maps yet, be sure to head over to this site and check them out.

Brackets will be announced today 23:15 CEST in #etf2l!

High Bracket: Click here
Mid Bracket: Click here
Low Bracket: Click here

Round 1: 20:00 CET (cp_sdnaldab)
Quarter Final: 20:45 CET (cp_yranarg)
Semi Final: 21:30 CET (cp_sdnaldab)
Final: 22:15 CET (cp_yranarg)

The Details:

Please contact your opponents in #etf2l on IRC, so ensure at least one of your team is in there at all times. If you have any problems contacting your opponents, please talk to an Admin. There will be servers with SourceTVs (hosted by Multiplay) available for you to play on. Request them by talking to an admin.

• All teams must have at least 1 player ready on #etf2l (QuakeNet) to find their opponent and schedule the match.
• If your match starts more than 10 minutes late, please reduce the map time to 15-25 minutes, depending on how long you have left before the next round starts. Bear in mind that if the map finishes in a draw, there will be a golden cap period to follow.
• If your match finishes in a draw, you must play a golden cap round to decide the winner. Please reset the config and play a 5 minute golden cap round. The first team to cap in this round, wins. If neither team caps within 5 minutes, the team that holds CP3 at the end of the 5 minute period wins.
• The following unlocks are allowed: Crossbow, Kritzkrieg, Quick-Fix, Ubersaw and Equalizer
• For most other issues the regular ETF2L Season 9 rules apply.
• Teams may use 2 mercs by default, multiple mercs are allowed if the opponent agrees.
• To disable the whitelist you just do rcon mp_tournament_whitelist “none” and then rcon mp_tournament_restart.

Season 9 is finished, wahey!

Last Sunday, ETF2L Steelseries Season 9 came to an end with an amazing Grand Final between Team Thermaltake and TCM-Gaming. The season and their winners have been added to the Hall of Fame, with all the precious pixel trophies handed out. Please make sure your team has the relevant trophy and take good care of it, if you feel there has been a mistake please contact an admin in IRC.

Season 9 Awards

The end of the season also marks the beginning of everyone’s favourite time: the Awards phase! This time we’ll have a few prizes waiting for the winners. As previously mentioned, this time nominees will be chosen by selected members of the community, before a public vote. Said community members will be contacted today and asked for their submissions.

We still have one award using the older nomination method – the People’s Choice Award!

Forum Contest: Guess the Admin

We’re running a little fun contest on the forum, where our dear users can view old pictures of us admins, and guess who is who. Make sure you check it out and make a submission!

PS. There are prizes involved!

Full List of Season 9 Winners

• Premier Division 1st place – Team Thermaltake (SteelSeries Siberia v2 headset)
• Premier Division 2nd place – TCM-Gaming (SteelSeries Xai mouse)
• Premier Division 3rd place – K1ck Esports (SteelSeries 4H headset)
• Division 1 – myRevenge (Ex-Concept) (SteelSeries 9HD mousepad)
• Division 2A –  The MIPC Organization
• Division 2B – BLAST (signed TF2 posters)
• Division 3A – SNSD
• Division 3B – Ace of Spades
• Division 3C – Team Versus
• Division 4A – Genocide
• Division 4B – Next Six Please
• Division 4C – Karma Clan of Games
• Division 4D – BblMneJl
• Division 4E – 2stronk
• Division 4F – 9 Men
• Division 5A – SERAPHSERAPHSERAPHSERAPH Fancy Dodgy
• Division 5B – Please Shoot the Medic
• Division 5C – Fragga`s fellas
• Division 5D – n2o is fancy!
• Division 5E – Team Ronnytech
• Division 5F – Audere Semper eSport
• Division 5G – semper idem
• Division 5H – Public Power
• Division 5I – El 7 de España
• Division 5J – PyRo|GEN ESPORT.TF2
• Division 6A – Les Princesses
• Division 6B – d-d-Did I Stutter?
• Division 6C – TouchMy’
• Division 6C – GLASGOW
• Division 6D – Team Colonslash: Fest!
• Division 6D – Team Gibus
• Division 6E – Excen Team
• Division 6F – High Fidelity
• Division 6G – who is?
• Division 6H – Foxhound
• Division 6I – BackDraft
• Division 6J – Insane Dutch Killers – Dragon
• Division 6K – CiC Core
• Division 6L – Deux bords

Bigfoot TF2 Challenge at excello

A lot happened in the last few weeks in the Team Fortress 2 community. Valve released several patches to fix their fixes and most importantly Team Fortress 2 became free to play for everyone and forever. One day later TF2 was the most played steam game and easily overtook Counterstrike and Counterstrike: Source.

We at excello want to take this opportunity to host our first ever Team Fortress 2 Prize Cup: the Bigfoot TF2 Challenge. A maximum of 32 teams enter the battle for six Bigfoot Killer 2100 network cards. Some of you might remember that even the Team Dignitas TF2 team uses this hardware. Some others might even remember the glorious swedish excello team featuring players like weqo, appe, Glufse, fette and sommie that took the second spot in ETF2L’s second season. This is the very same organisation.

For this cup the only allowed unlocks are the medic unlocks, excluding the Amputator Vita-Saw, the Solemn Vow and the Overdose. This means, that the Ubersaw, the Blutsauger, the Kritzkrieg, the Quickfix and the Crusader’s Crossbow are allowed to be used.

The map pool is a bit experimental as well. In the first round all teams have to play the latest version of the custom map cp_bazillion by Arnold. The second round hosts the all-time-classic cp_badlands followed by cp_granary in the third round. In the semi-finals we will see whose tactics for cp_gravelpit are superior in a best of 3 match.
UPDATE: By popular request, the finals will now be a best of 3 match with map elimination featuring cp_bazillion_rc4, cp_badlands, cp_granary, cp_gullywash_pro and cp_gravelpit.

The first four rounds of this tournament will be played on the 13th of July so do not waste any time and head over to excello.net and register your team! The finals will be played on a different day that can be decided by the finalists. The match can be scheduled until the 20th July.

If all goes according to plan, some matches will get coverage by VanillaTV (more on that later).

If this cup is a success the odds are very high that excello will host more prize tournaments for TF2 in the future.

In order to sign up for this cup, all of your players need to have an account at excello.net and need to enter a valid steam id in the format STEAM_X:X:XXXX on their profile page. The teamleaders can create a team and invite the players. Before the players join the team they need to confirm the invite in their inbox.
Please note that teams who signed up have to check in on the website from 19.30 to 20.00 CEST.

Admins for this cup are CanFo, Crasp and SonnyBlack. If any questions arise, feel free to contact one of them at #excello.tf2 on quakenet or answer the question in the IRC channel. We will get back to you a soon as possible.

ESL 1on1 Scout Whiskas Cup #2

After the success of the first Whiskas Cup Catman has decided to dust off the cobwebs from his wallet and host another 1v1 Scout cup, this time the winner will take home up to $1000 for first place!

All rounds will be played on Catman’s map dm_whiskas_reload.

Prize money available for first place will depend on the number of signups we achieve. If the playercount only reaches 500 then $500 will go to the winner, if it goes up to over 1000 signups then $1000 will be yours to play for.

Signups for the cup will start on 10/07/11 and run for 3 weeks. The ESL staff is still looking to add hardware prizes for 2nd, 3rd and a random give away for all those involved so even if you don’t reach the final you may still leave with something.

Player’s will be required to “check-in” once signups have closed to ensure their participation in the cup, so tell your friends and lets reach the 1000 player’s!

Of course, ESL Wire is mandatory to use.

Head over to the ESL newspost for more information and the sign up.

ETF2L Steelseries Season 9 Final Result

Last night’s Premier Division final between  TCM-Gaming and  Team Thermaltake proved to be one of the closest and most exciting matches seen in Team Fortress 2 for some time.

Unfortunately I missed the majority of the first map (badlands), but thanks to the miracle of technology and the wizards at VanillaTV, nobody needs to miss out on the action! You can watch and/or re-watch all of last night’s play at any time by going to their VODs section.

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