Having listened to a lot of feedback from players over the last couple of weeks, it seems that there are a large number of players who do not want a season that starts in 3-4 weeks time, and would much prefer to play after the summer holidays. We have listened to this feedback, and the three Head Admins had a chat last night about the various options that we have available.

One of the biggest problems we have is that if Season 8 was to start at the end of May/start of June, there would be quite a few teams who would not enter – including some of the top teams in Division 1 and Division 2, as well as various teams from Divisions 3-6. We don’t want to have a league that suffers because of a lack of entrants and equally we don’t want to run a season with fewer teams and then have all the teams who did not enter Season 8 come back for Season 9, expecting to put in the same divisions they finished in for Season 7. It would be a logistical nightmare and cause a lot of issues both for the Admin team and for the players themselves.

Four months is a long time to go without a full league season, we do appreciate this. Unfortunately there were major changes in the Admin team when Daykiller left, leaving Kop, D2M and RaCio in charge. We all had to spend some time learning how the league system worked behind the scenes, as well as fixing some of the issues from Season 6 and trying to make Season 7 one of the best seasons ever for ETF2L. I believe we achieved this, however there were still a number of mistakes and problems that we will be fixing for Season 8.

If Season 8 is postponed for a few more months, please don’t panic. We have a lot of ideas for Summer competitions including:

• 6th Cup
• ETF2L Champions League
• More MNM-style Fun Cups
• Nations Cup
• Summer League (This would not officially count towards promotion/relegation spots for Season 8. However the results can still be used to request being moving between divisions.)
• Top Secret Summer Fun Cup

Finally, for those of you who are new to competitive TF2 and realise that the majority of this post might not have concerned you too much, we’re also looking forward to the Highlander Community Challenge which will be held very soon.

We’d like to give you all an opportunity to comment further on the available dates. So please have your say in the poll below and add a comment as well if you can. We will read every comment on here and we hope that the poll will give us a good indication of when you would like to play.

Thanks for your time!

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Division 2 Promotion Battle

Tonight sees the first of two matches that will decide who gets promoted to Division 2 from the four playoff spots in Division 3. Dimegioclub, Fragmative, Ragequit Black and Eternity now occupy these spots after their pre-playoff matches decided where the teams equal on points would stand. Tonight, Dimegioclub will play Eternity, with Ragequit Black playing Fragmative tomorrow.

Dimegioclub reached this position with surprising results, without winning a single match 6-0. They did however manage to avoid losing any match completely, always taking away equal or more points than their opponents from every fixture. Compare that with Eternity, who won almost all of their fixtures 6-0, only losing both maps to first place Paranoids e-Sports and drawing both maps to third place StripClub. Will this superior form in the season pay off for them in the playoff match?

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The game starts Tonight, May 5th at 21:00 CEST

SourceTV: 80.84.250.93:27020

Match Overview
Dimegioclub vs unexist
Playoffs (Division 3a)
Wednesday, May 5th 21:00 CEST

cp_granary

5 - 1

cp_gullywash

3 - 2

OVERALL
Dimegioclub [6:0] unexist

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Tonight we saw a rather different but equally succesful Monday Night Cup take place on koth_viaduct

There were two brackets, a high bracket and a low bracket, each containing 16 teams.

High Bracket: Click here
Low Bracket: Click here

Congratulations to the winners of each bracket:

Low Bracket
[r@ts²]
BACON!
uBearZ
Team Spartans

High Bracket
7 brothers who aren’t brothers
The Last Resort
Team Effort
Team eMpathy

A number of games ran 15-20 minutes late with teams either struggling to get players on the server or even be aware of what was going on. It would be nice if we could work on that for the next cup and try and have every match start on time, giving teams the opportunity to play the full 30 minutes on a new map.

Additionally, my apologies with regards to the golden cap rules which were not made clear on the news post. After copying the details from last week, I didn’t make the correct edit to replace ‘holding cp3’ with ‘team who has the lowest time left wins’, until just after 20CEST. Was nice to see teams play in good spirit though, and to understand that it’s right to award the team who were more attacking with the victory if a round is not won.

Please give your feedback on MNM #4 here.

See you next week for more tasty map goodness!

Welcome to Monday Night Madness #4

Welcome to the fourth edition of the Monday Night Madness cups, this time featuring koth_viaduct

The cup is a one-night cup, and will start Monday 3rd May 2010 at 20:00CEST.

There are 32 teams split across 2 brackets of 16 – High/Low.

Map: koth_viaduct (valve map)
High Bracket: Click here
Low Bracket: Click here
Round1: 20CEST
Quarter Final: 20:45CEST
Semi Final: 21:30CEST
Final: 22:15CEST

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 with contacting your opponents, please talk to an Admin.

One merc is allowed per team. In the interests of fairness, please try and ensure he/she is from the same division or lower than your own.

KOTH Rules:

• Standard 6v6 gameplay, normal config
• Usual league rules
• mp_windifference 3 or timelimit set to 30 minutes. (PLEASE ensure you change this before you start).

VERY IMPORTANT: As you have no doubt seen and realised if you have participated in or followed previous cups, accurate timekeeping is very important. There are a number of rules with regards to time-keeping that you should be aware of and please try your best to follow:

• If your cup match is starting more than 10 minutes after the scheduled round start time, you must inform an Admin.
• When 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 has the lowest time left on the clock wins.

Good luck to all teams! :)