We've got lan tournaments covered. There's one this summer, and another in 2018 as well. Hoping to turn it into a yearly thing.

Can't go into specifics right now, but it's definitely a part of my plan. I'm also focusing a lot on Twitch stuff, which helps with the sponsorship thing. More viewers means more sponsor interest, and you're right, a lan definitely helps with that.

probably want to formally announce that summer lan some time soon

have you ever tried contacting valve for their support? i know its unlikely but maybe you could convince them to release an item with proceeds going to LAN prize pools or something.

Valve has announced the finals to his ultiduo tournament i believe

Getting a post on the blog =/= getting support from Valve

You can shoot them an email and if it's a TF2 related event, they'll (probably) post it.

That's.... not what he meant.

That's a good idea, but I honestly can't see Valve agreeing to that.
I guess it won't hurt to ask them. Might wait a bit though, as I doubt they'd consider something like this from a league that has only been out for a couple of months.

Edit: Just to see if we're on the same page. You're talking about an in-game item, right? Kinda like those map support badges you can buy?

http://www.teamfortress.tv/40487/call-for-insomnia-61-community-signatures

:thinking:

yeah, like how DOTA 2 funds the international with the compendium. All they would have to do is release a cosmetic with part of the proceeds going to the LAN prize pool. It could raise a ton of money really fast as well as letting the community know about your event. Valve has shown in the past that theyre reluctant to do this kind of shit, but it's worth a shot to try to convince them.

Yeah, that's actually a really good idea. I'll reach out to them for sure, just to see if we can work something out.

Though, I'm not going to do this for the 2017 lan. Want to wait for TFCL to grow a bit, so Valve doesn't just laugh us off. I mean, they'll laugh us off anyway, but at least it won't be a total humiliation.

We're live on Twitch right now. Casting semi-finals and finals via cpTV.

https://www.twitch.tv/cappingtv

Grand finals are about to start. It's between End Game and corsariceguy.

https://www.twitch.tv/cappingtv

Three big things.

1. General Update
http://tfcleague.com/2017/05/13/tfcl-league-updates-news-may-13th/

2. Highlander S1 with $252 pool
http://tfcleague.com/2017/05/13/announcing-season-1-highlander-252-prize-pool/

3. Sixes S2 with $248 pool
http://tfcleague.com/2017/05/13/announcing-season-2-sixes-250-prize-pool/
(edit: fixed the pool amount for 6's)

Signups open now.

HL has $2 more than 6s

Absolutely outrageous

Had to. Otherwise I'd have to split the pool so it had pennies. Can you imagine that? A pool where one player might get $19.56 instead of a more rounded $20? The horror! D:

edit
Prizes are this for those too lazy to click the link.

Highlander Prize Pool - $252

First Place: $135 (avg. $15/player)
Second Place: $72 (avg. $8/player)
Third Place: $45 (avg. $5/player)

Sixes Season 2 Prize Pool - $248

First Place: $120 (avg. $20/player)
Second Place: $80 (avg. $13/player)
Third Place: $48 (avg. $8/player)

Just be glad it's not a 7v7

Valve's being awesome again! :D

http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=29491

https://i.imgur.com/3u6C42j.png

lol they made the same typo in the description too

I didn't do it!

They also opted to use neither of the two images provided, and instead grabbed the video on the home page. Guess it was more neutral or something.

So, quick question. If I were to host Ultiduo as a seasonal thing, but without a prize pool, would anyone here still play in it?
It'd still have medals.

make strawpoll

http://www.strawpoll.me/12989433

Cool to see the prizepools.

Why did you opt for a different HL whitelist tho, Razorback has been banned in UGC for awhile now and was a ban that was pretty much universally requested by Platinum teams for ages?

e:

oh I see what might have happened, the whitelist on the UGC HL Quick Info page is currently fucked and is the one from Season 18 aka last year, not the actual current whitelist. So if you judged it based on that (which you seemed to have other than the Short Circuit which is banned correctly), then yeah?

The relevant changes since then I believe are:

* Razorback banned.
* Pomson allowed.
* Beggar's Bazooka allowed.
* Loch n Load allowed.

The whitelist was from late 2016, and I kinda never got around to updating it. Though I believe the logic back then for allowing the razorback, was that the lower and mid level teams wanted it to be allowed, and they vastly outnumbered the platinum level teams at the time. This was back when the we first announced (and never actually did) the alpha season, so getting as many teams on board as possible was the goal, not so much the top teams. Quantity over quality. Banning the razorback was also controversial at the time, so I decided to be "good guy Sidular" and keep it unbanned. To make the silver and lower players happy.

I honestly haven't looked at the changes made to UGC's whitelist for the current HL season. I want to mirror it as much as possible, but there also isn't a universal standard when it comes to highlander. I'm likely going to experiment a bit with the whitelist, and just see what sticks, and what doesn't. Since the razorback ban wasn't universally well received by all divisions, I figured it was worth testing again. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it's gone.

Either way, this season of highlander is really just a pilot for TFCL. The whitelist isn't perfect, and things might break along the way in regards to format management on an administrative side. I'm honestly still in the testing phase for a lot of this stuff, and just want to see how everything plays out.

Also, I'm open to last minute whitelist changes. I don't want to mirror UGC's whitelist at this time, so if you (or anyone) have an idea for a weapon that should or should not be banned, I'm all ears.

#205

If you look at this season's vote results at UGC the Razorback only earned a 35% unban percentage, so almost everyone actively engaged in Highlander wants it to remain banned.

Likewise the Beggars + Loch n Load have received a majority vote to unban in the most recent season. The Pomson didn't get a good vote percentage so if you don't wanna allow it I wouldn't blame you (truth be told it's only hated because it used to be broken good in the past and now it's basically complete garbage and you won't see it this season at all pretty much) tho.

But saying the Razorback wasn't universally well received by all divisions doesn't really correlate with the amount of votes it got to be unbanned at all, and even Silver players want it to be banned going off the S21 poll results where only 35% of Silver players voted for an unban. The only division that had a majority vote to unban it was Iron which is literally a division of people with zero Highlander experience as even Steel that season was split 50-50.

Most of the people who are likely to play in this if it happens are going to be very experienced Highlander players looking for the $ who are generally whom you should be catering to anyways since they use the weapons to their full potential and you are running a serious tournament with a prizepool. (and the Razorback has been a near universal ban request with those people for quite some time, almost a couple years if memory serves me correctly. It just took UGC forever to budge on it.)

Personally I'm of the mind that you should run UGC NAHL's whitelist basically straight up because it's the best out of all the Highlander whitelists right now and we don't need yet another tournament splitting whitelists as it does not help the format what-so-ever and has been a grievance of mine for the past 6 years I've been playing the format.

That said if you absolutely refuse to run it for whatever reason, if you did have to ban anything I'd say to ban Spy-cicle (and Razorback obviously). For the same reason as the Razorback: hard countering one of your more potent counter classes super easily is just dumb and lets you get away with VERY dumb positioning mistakes just like the Razorback. This will encourage more Big Earner usage which is fine since that is a knife that actually gets you punished harder if you make mistakes in general.

Even then, I would still encourage you to mirror the whitelist instead to not divide the format further.

can you participate in UGC and TFCL at the same time?

also, UGC unbanned pomson which I'm not a fan of at all, personally I think that should be banned

pomson is really bad now

you have to be near point blank range to drain anything more than 1-2% (and far away shots drain 0%) with average speed projectiles, it does substantially less damage than the shotgun, it doesn't penetrate anymore, it has less ammo than the shotgun.

if your team somehow allows an engineer to get that close to your medic with uber (which would require the engineer to somehow flank all the way to the combo which also requires basically no teamwork or comms or for the engineer to somehow walk through a demo and a heavy and not die) and the projectiles manage to hit your medic and no one else takes the shot for him/the medic doesn't dodge it, honestly you deserve it.

essentially, it requires your team to basically be pants on head idiotic to actually drop an uber due to it

it's allowed in 6s because of this.

Everything Necrid is saying is correct.
I'm positive that any player that originates from UGC HL (close to every signup) would appreciated a mirrored whitelist, especially top level players.

Alright, I'll update the whitelist so it mirrors the UGC whitelist. Like I said though, the current TFCL whitelist was made a fair while ago. I recall people at a lower level complaining about the razorback ban, even though players at a higher level were fully in support of it. I've even talked with a few platinum council members (that still a thing?) and they all expressed their concern for the razorback. Perhaps it's because I never used it, and never got to experience the issues firsthand? So I may be a tad biased towards that.

But anyway, I'll get the whitelist updated tomorrow so it's a mirror of UGC. Though I'm going to be upfront here. I'm not going to stick with UGC's whitelist forever. I want the TFCL players to come up with their own smart and fair changes to the whitelist. Odds are, these will be very similar or even identical to whatever UGC uses, given the shared community. But at times, TFCL players could vote for something that UGC votes against. My concern with copying UGC's whitelist forever, is if they make a major mistake or a controversial change, TFCL will have to follow through with the same change. Which means if they get hate, we get hate.

Which is why I want to have the TFCL community vote for the changes in the future. When the quickfix was included in the global 6's whitelist, pretty much the entire community was very heavily against that. It nearly tore the idea of a global apart, with some leagues looking at alternative options. I just don't want something like that to happen with TFCL, and highlander. Doing a direct mirror of UGC opens TFCL up to that risk.

Anyway, I'm babbling. It's 4 AM and I've kinda not slept yet. So, I should call it a night.

Long story short though. Yes, I'm gonna mirror the UGC whitelist for the season. Will update it tomorrow after I wake up.