FAQ

Hello visitors from the Valve blog. Welcome to the European Team Fortress 2 League. Read this FAQ if you’re interested in the new to competitive play Highlander tournament.

How do I sign up?

You cannot currently sign up. Sign ups will open in 3 or 4 weeks time. There will be a promotional video posted on the Valve blog that will signal the official opening of the tournament. In the meantime, put together a team or two, and tell your friends about the upcoming tourney.

Are non-European teams welcome?

Yes, as long as you are fine with playing on European servers and in European timezones.

Can you tell me more about the in-game medal?

The in-game medal will be like a hat. Everyone can see it.

You will win a medal when you A) Win the tournament (winners medal), B) Finish 2nd in the tournament (runner up medal) or C) Are eliminated from the tournament (participation medal). You do not get a medal for just signing up.

Can I help make the model?

If you have previous TF2 modelling experience, yes. Remember to follow the TF2 style guidelines. Download this file and use it for size reference: http://www.filefront.com/16066897/badge_size.obj

When you have completed a concept of your medal, get in touch with an ETF2L admin. We will look at all the submissions and pick one before we ask the designer to make a finished version of it.

How many people can be in one team?

14 people can be registered to each team. Make another team if you have more players (eg Community Team A, Community Team B, etc.) You cannot play in more than one team.

It’s (almost) business time

I don’t think ETF2L has any formal written-down kind of mission statement, but if it did, it’d no doubt be about growing our league as a great place for you to play, but it’d also include something vague about nurturing competitive TF2 as a whole.

We’ve already made efforts in that area to improve TF2’s reputation as an esports title with members of our staff volunteering to write for Cadred or admin Esports Heaven, for example, but we’ve never taken on a really huge project. But we’re about to. And we need your help.

So, before the official public announcement, we’re very proud to announce to you, the competitive TF2 community, The ETF2L Highlander Community Challenge. The objective of this project is simple: give the non-competitive TF2 player the opportunity to play competitively and make their experience the best one possible.

Think of it like a Nations Cup, but rather than country vs country, it’ll be public community vs public community. We’re looking to officially announce the tournament this time next month and start taking sign-ups for a May/June start.

We want to show all the TF2 players around Europe just how great competitive play can be. We want to show them what a great community we have, and, if they decide to enter a team, we want them to stick around after the Highlander stuff is over. It may seem weird to you, but the feedback we get from people trying to make the leap from public community servers to 6v6 often boils down to the competitive ruleset being too alien compared to what they’re familiar with. We hope that this Highlander tournament will serve as a stepping stone for people who are curious about competitive TF2.

A quick note

Just to be clear: this is for people who are new to competitive play. The teams will come from public community servers. That said, we understand that many Division 6 teams are community teams, so they will be eligible to take part.

If you’re not a Division 6 player, though, there’s still plenty you can help out with. And we’re planning to host a regular Highlander tournament after this one is finished.

where you can help

We’re in the midst of writing and producing a short promotional video for the tournament which will be embedded on Valve’s TF2 blog, hosted on a special ETF2L landing page and posted on community message boards, but we still need some major help on reaching some important parts of the European TF2 scene.

• We’re looking for native Russian, German, French, Spanish, Finnish, Italian and Hungarian speakers with great English skills who will be able to translate a script, record a quality voice-over and deliver work to tight deadlines. If you’re over 18 and confident in your ability to meet those requirements, please contact me on Steam as soon as possible.

Do you have experience creating custom content for TF2? Do you know anyone who is really good at it? If so, we’re in a huge rush to get in-game medals produced to give out as prizes.

• We’re looking for three separate medals to be built: participation, runner-up and winner.
• The medals must adhere to the TF2 style guidelines.
• We need (at least) concept art of these as soon as possible for the promotional video. Get in touch with me via Steam if you can make these models to the required standard. If you have an online portfolio with any related work, please link to it when you contact me.

You can help us with advertising too.

• Do you run a TF2/gaming news website? We’d love it if you announced the tournament to your readership – but only when the promotional video is ready and the news has been broken on the Valve TF2 blog.
• If you have any links to people behind TF2/gaming podcasts, please let them know what we’re doing and hook us up with them.
• If you’re a creative type with ideas for promoting the tournament – be it propaganda posters, a competitive play survival guide for new teams, etc – feel free to contribute.

Finally, if you’re an easy-going person who cares about helping the TF2 scene, we’d like to invite you to become an ETF2L buddy!

• Buddies will be the representatives between ETF2L and the community teams. You’ll join their roster, be responsible for answering their questions, making sure they schedule their matches properly, and depending on how good a buddy you are, organising and helping them out with practising and tactics. (Note: All teams will be automatically added to a Highlander ladder where they can arrange non-tournament games.)
• Buddies will also be eligible to play in the Highlander games themselves. But you can only play heavy, engineer, spy or pyro!
• Buddies will be assigned to teams on depending what language they speak. If you have a link to a particular community, you can request to be their buddy.
• Buddies will also be awarded with a medal like the rest of their team.
• You can put yourself forward to become a buddy simply by joining the new ETF2L Community Challenge Steam Group. Please make sure that your Steam page has the correct country information posted on it.

In conclusion

I think that’s everything. If you have any ideas or questions, post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

It’s projects like these that will hopefully keep our scene healthy for the months and years to come, so let’s do our best to make it a great tournament and show the world of TF2 what ETF2L has to offer as a place to play the game we all love.

Wednesday Night Wrestle

Gorge gets its competitive debut tonight, playing host to notag and Crack Clan in this Week 8 battle.

Crack Clan, famous for their recent EsportsHeaven upsets of apparently stronger squads like SpecialAttack, Pentia and (the now folded) Team Rockit, will be hoping to recreate that magic in ETF2L this evening as divisional favourites, notag, on the hunt for the full six points, look to run away with the division title.

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ETF2L Radio #3

Casting the action live for you tonight will be none other than Byte, Dave and Anderson.

Join us as we discuss whether notag are ready for Division 1, what the future might hold for Crack Clan, take an in-depth look at Gorge and, after the game, for interviews with the players involved.

• Download the STVs and Mumble recording here.

Match Overview
Team Infused vs rockit
Week 8 (Division 2b)
Wednesday, March 24th 20:15 CET
SourceTV: fakkelbrigade.eu:27100

cp_freight

3 - 4

cp_gorge

0 - 2

OVERALL
Team Infused [0:6] rockit

this is etf2l radio

Following the success of our game commentary last week, we thought that it was about time for another evening of TF2 casting, this time at even more short notice! Tonight we’ll be covering the €500 ESH Sapphire Challenge Final between reigning ESH champs I Don’t Know? and four time ETF2L winners Team Dignitas.

Your casters tonight will be Evil, soldier for the top Division 1 team what women want, Anderson of The Direct Hit and Team Vertex, and myself, Cadred writer and ETF2L admin, Jimmy Breeze.

Join us tonight for a bit of banter, analysis, and hopefully some post-match interviews too. See you there!

• Starting at 21.15 CET
• SourceTV: fakkelbrigade.eu:27100
• Mumble cast: fakkelbrigade.eu / port 64740 / password: spuf

Introduction

The methods for managing your ETF2L matches have pretty much been the same since the site was first created. At a later date we introduced the schedule proposal system, to make sure both you and your opponent had to agree on a date before it was finally entered into the calendar. This system works as is, but it is in no way perfect. The handling of your matches takes place on 2 pages: The “Submit Results” page, where you enter your match results, and the “Calendar” page. Especially the second one lacks some overview with it’s 3 sections full of data it is easy to lose track of what’s going on, especially if you’re playing in multiple tournaments.

We have gathered some of your thoughts on that (made after the introduction of the scheduling system), and created an all-new page which tries to handle all the functions from the aforementioned two pages in a intuitive manner. We call this page, in a very web 2.0 style: “My Matches”.

New page

The page can be found here: [Link] It should be simple enough to be able to work with it without introduction, but we’ll give one anyway.

So how does this page work then?

How it works

When you load the page, you will see a list of all your upcoming matches.

This is what i see when i log in to my account. 2 upcoming ladder matches. The first 3 columns (competition, week/round and Match) speak for themselves. They display what match we are talking about.

Schedule history

The Schedule column shows the date this match is scheduled for, if both teams have come to an agreement that is. You’ll notice a little (+) in that column. If you click that, a list containing the full schedule history of that match will expand, so you can see who proposed what and what happened to it.

Schedule proposals

Next up is a link for making match proposals. If you click that, a dialog box will appear over the page. Here is an example of such a dialog box:

As you can see, it has 2 sections. The first section displays the latest proposal and its current status. In this particular case, the opponent suggested to play on 18/03, so there’s a button you can click to accept that proposal. If you were the one making the proposal, it would say “Awaiting opponent approval” in the same spot.

In the second section, you can suggest a new date and time for the match. Simply find the day on the calendar, add the time, and click the submit button. Adding a new proposal can be done at any time. Be it to change the proposal you made yourself, or to make a new proposal to your opponent. This will automatically reject the previous proposal. With this, you can finally edit your own proposals without waiting for your opponent to react, also a much requested feature.

SourceTV Information

Moving on is the SourceTV link. This will spawn a simple dialog where you can enter the sourceTV information of your match, to get all your fans on board.

Submit Results

The last link is, inevitably, Submit Results. This will open a dialog box, which contains nothing more than a modified version of the old submit results page you’re so familiar with. Enter the results, and submit it :)

Visual clues

Lastly: To help you realize there is work to be done on this page, we have added several visual clues. A small image will appear next to every fixture that has a schedule proposal that needs your attention. The notification widget on the front-page displays if you have any new proposals aswell, and links to the My Matches page. There is no excuse to not respond to a schedule proposal now.

Feedback

We hope you appreciate this new page and that it will help you keeping your matches organized. However, we realize that such a change won’t always go without hiccups. Therefore the old Calendar and Submit Results page will stay on-line for the time being, just in case you cannot get the new page to work. We tested it as much as we could, but you never know what problems may pop up. We advise you to use the new page in any case, and report any problems. You don’t want to be stuck when we pull the old ones off-line.

We have opened a feedback thread in our ETF2L forums, where you can report any broken sections, UI failures or other things that should be improved. If you just want to say the page is cool, that’s okay too.  [Feedback Thread]

Join us for a fantastic evening of TF2 action with a live Mumble cast, starting at 21.15 CET, between I Don’t Know? and The Last Resort.

We have three great TF2 minds casting the action, watching SourceTV alongside you. The hosts are Byte of TCM-Gaming fame, Cadred staff writer and former Division 2 player Dave, plus Team Vertex soldier and host of The Direct Hit podcast, Swarley.

• Starting at 21.15 CET
• SourceTV: fakkelbrigade.eu:27101
• Mumble cast: fakkelbrigade.eu / port 64740 / password: spuf

Alternatively, tune into the German language livestream cast from TF2Portal.de.

Thanks to FakkelBrigade for the SourceTV relay and Mumble server!

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Match Overview
Epsilon eSports vs Marco FTW
Week 4 (Division 1)
Wednesday, March 17th 20:15 CET
SourceTV: fakkelbrigade.eu:27101

ctf_turbine

13 - 7

cp_gullywash

1 - 2

OVERALL
Epsilon eSports [3:3] Marco FTW