Staff search

In order to start Season 6 with an adequate team, the ETF2L is once again looking for new league admins to strengthen our staff. If you are interested in working for the biggest Team Fortress 2 league worldwide, have a read below!

Admins

The work of a league admin consists of three seperate parts:

• verifying results from played matches
• helping out people on IRC with various requests
• taking part in discussions with our admin team about new competitions, rules, match issues and more

Being a league admin means having some free hours every week and have the will to commit to the work. Also a regular use of IRC is required!

Anti Cheat Admins

In addition to this, we are in need of experienced people for anti-cheat issues. If you have a good knowledge of how cheating cases should be handled and analyzed, you are more than welcome to apply.

Forum Moderators

Last but not least we are searching for forum moderators. Do you regularly visit our forum and like to browse through active threads? Are you a responsible guy and probably already have experience on moderating forums? Help us out and write an application!

Applications

If you are interested in joining our team send an email to [email protected] with the following details:

• ETF2L Nickname
• Real name, age and nationality
• Spoken languages (average english required)
• Past admin experience
• Motivation: why do you want to join our team?

Please have your application sent before the 13th of September. You can expect a response from us in the week after that.

Soldier 1on1 Turris Cup: Insanus Exfanus wins the title!

The second fun cup of this summer, the Soldier 1on1 Turris Cup, is finished aswell! In the final Insanus Exfanus from Division 1 team FakkelBrigade dominated his opponent  Pingu and won by a clear 3:0 streak. Congratulations!

The competition was archived and can be found in the [Hall of Fame].

SteelSeries introduced today the new SteelSeries Zboard™ Limited Edition Aion™ Keyset and SteelSeries QcK Limited Edition Aion™ Asmodian Mousepad. Co-designed with NCsoft® Corporation, Aion’s publisher and developer, the limited edition gear provides customized functionality and original artwork from the game that allows players to battle and quest with ease into Aion’s breathtaking world of Atreia.

Aion, the most anticipated MMO of 2009, is a visually stunning massively multiplayer online RPG where players fight in an epic celestial war between twin races of winged beings. Aion has received numerous international industry awards and will be available in stores this September in North America, Europe and Australia.

“The popularity of Aion internationally was so impressive that when the opportunity arose to partner with NCsoft to create branded products for the release of Aion in several of the largest western territories, we were thrilled,” said Bruce Hawver, CEO of SteelSeries. “The limited edition gear is designed for Aion players to customize their experience and help improve their game.”

The SteelSeries Zboard Limited Edition Aion Keyset will offer the full breadth of in-game commands on color-coded keys across the board. The keyset also provides players with:

• Dedicated action keys, menus, and chat commands that are labeled across 69 keys
• Full customization of each key through the SteelSeries Z Engine
• Quick-access emote keys for greeting, intimidating, or taunting your opponents

The SteelSeries QcK Limited Edition Aion Asmodian Mousepad features a high -quality cloth material that provides a precise, consistent glide and a specially designed non-slip rubber base, which prevents the pads from sliding on any surface. The SteelSeries QcK Mousepads have been thoroughly researched, designed and tested by professional players.

“SteelSeries has a reputation for designing high quality products that resonate with gamers. NCsoft believes that SteelSeries creates great gear that visually represents Aion and provides excellent tools for our players to have a great gaming experience,” said Chris Lee, Senior Global Brand Director for NCsoft in charge of Aion.

The SteelSeries Zboard Limited Edition Aion Keyset and SteelSeries Limited Edition QcK Aion Asmodian Mousepad will retail for $19.99 USD and $14.99USD.

Products are now available for pre-sale at Game Stop and Amazon.com. Pictures of all new products can be found at [FragYou.net], the official SteelSeries blog.

Nations cup start

After one week of sign-ups, the ETF2L nations cup is ready to start. 30 countries from all around Europe signed up for this event. The event will go as follows:

All teams will participate in the group stage, which will consist of six groups of four teams, and two groups of three. The groups with three teams will play matches of three maps, this way every team will play six maps total in the group phase. After everyone has played a match against the rest of his group, the best two of each group will continue to the playoff stage, which will be a single elimination tournament.

Seedings

To create balanced groups, and balanced play-offs, we have seeded the participants into three pots. A, B and C, based on their skill and past performance. Pot A has also been seeded 1 to 8, in order to try to make the play-offs more interesting. Each group stage group will consist of one team from Pot A, one from Pot B and two Pot C teams.

The seedings are as follows:

Pot A:

• 1. Finland
• 2. Sweden
• 3. England
• 4. Belgium
• 5. Germany
• 6. Russia
• 7. France
• 8. Norway

Pot B:

• Denmark
• Ireland
• Israel
• Netherlands
• Poland
• Portugal
• Spain
• Ukraine

Pot C:

• Austria
• Belarus
• Bulgaria
• Croatia
• Czech Republic
• Estonia
• Hungary
• Italy
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Romania
• Scotland
• Switzerland
• Wales

These groups have been randomly seeded into divisions, which you can see here:

-> [Groups | Fixtures] <-

This means each team will have to play either two or three matches. The final deadline for these matches is 1st of October. This means 1 match per week, and 1 additional week for catchups.

Rules, maps and details

• [Rules]
• Maps Week 1 (1-7 September): cp_badlands, cp_gravelpit, (3rd map for Group A+B: cp_granary)
• Maps Week 2 (8-14 September): cp_granary, ctf_turbine, (3rd map for Group A+B: cp_fastlane)
• Maps Week 3 (15-21 September): cp_freight,  cp_well, (3rd map for Group A+B: cp_badlands)
• Unlocks: All unlocks allowed, for any class, except for the sandman.(A detailed post with our new rules and config will be released in a few days from today.)

Please start scheduling and playing your matches as soon as possible.

Public server update

As some of you have already noticed, our public server recently changed its IP address. Its physical location has remained the same. You can now find the server at the address pub.etf2l.org (or 213.163.72.214). Please update your favorites accordingly. The server status can always be seen on the widget in the rightmost sidebar.

As announced earlier, sign-ups for our upcoming Nations’ Cup open today at 20:00 CEST. Any national team which represents a country and that can field a team is welcome to enter. You can sign up to the group phase the usual way. In the group phase teams will be divided by their skill level, which prevents the top teams from eliminating each other in the group phase. The size and amount of groups will be determined by the amount of participating nations.

The teams will have one month to complete all their group phase matches, from 1st September to 1st October. After that, the best teams from each group will advance to the playoff stage.

The first prize for this tournament is 6x SteelSeries Kinzu Optical Mouse, the second prize is 6x SteelSeries 4HD Mousemat!

Schedule

• Signups open: TODAY, 20:00 CEST – [Sign Up]
• Signups close: 30 August, 23:59 CEST
• Group stage starts: 1 September
• Group stage ends: 1 October
• Playoff stage starts: 2 October

Rules

The normal ETF2L rules I’m sure you are familiar with will apply for this competition. If not, you can read them here: [Link] Note: rules on spy/sniper unlocks, as well as the Force-a-nature are subject to change, pending the current polls on the subject. These will be updated before the competition starts.

The special rules and guidelines of this competition can be found here [Link]. Below you can find the most important ones.

• During a match, a national team cannot field more than 3 players from the same team.
• A national team has to consist of at least 7 players.
• The played maps can be changed to include the winner of our mapping contest. Any changes will happen before the competition starts.

Season 6 & Nations Cup: Prizes by SteelSeries

We are back from the summer break and happy to announce our partnership with SteelSeries, one of the leading manufacturers of gaming peripherals and accessories, will continue. Our main sponsor will provide high quality gaming hardware for the winner and runner up of our two upcoming main tournaments!

The best national team out of 32 possible participants will win 6x SteelSeries Kinzu Optical Mouse in our Nations Cup. The Vice-Champion will gain 6x SteelSeries 4HD!

The 6th installment of our regular season will be in the sign of SteelSeries lately released high-end gaming mice Xin.  The winner of Division 1 will get 6x SteelSeries Xai Laser Mouse. Besides, the Runner Up will win yet unreleased 6x SteelSeries 9HD. Good luck to all teams in Season 6 presented by SteelSeries Xai!

Mapping Contest: Poll Phase

Almost 4500 players tested the Top 5 Mapping Contest maps in the first 4 weeks after our public server was published. We have reached the poll phase of the content which will decide the Top 3. Every Top 5 map has its own rating poll, every registered user is able to rate a map from 1-10 (10 = perfect, 1 = waste). See below for link with all polls.

Top 3 rated maps will be put on a final cup. Eight top teams will meet each other in a group phase and a following playoff phase. All participants will rate the top 3 maps again to decide the winner. The winner will be part of Season 6 and the 5^th Cup final.

-> Mapping Contest polls <-

General polls: Sniper & Spy weapons, FaN and freight

Also it’s about time to clear up the future rules for next tournaments. The start will be decisions about the lately released Spy & Sniper weapons, the tweaked Scout weapon FaN and which version of freight should be played. Take your right to vote!

All polls are listed on the separate poll page below the Mapping Contest polls.

-> Weapons & freight polls <-

Recent winners: Season 5 “Player of the Season” & Pyro Paintball 3on3 Cup

Last but not least a big congratulation to Extremer [Profile] who gained the Player of the Season award in Season 5. The demoman from I Don’t Know? is the first Division 2 player who gained the most valuable award of our regular season tournaments.

Also the Pyro Paintball 3on3 Cup is finished. Super Gut [Profile], the favorite due to excellent match results in further rounds, beat Division 2 team Game Control in the final (10:7 – [Match Page])and won the first Pyro cup title!