No, it's purely for chat only which is the dumb part about it.

As for why Reckoner has not been tested, I haven't heard of that many things even about it for a whole year since the most recent rc4a version was pushed out. I'm rather surprised honestly of how many people suddenly have asked that why aren't we even playing rc2 version of Reckoner after the preseason cup now, or even the latest version for that matter. In most cases the simple answer would be that the map is not really in development anymore but popular demand can still change that as seen from the fact that EU is still playing an outdated version of Granary Pro. But honestly I'm not even sure am I out of loop all of a sudden because I myself do not remember any comments having been made about Reckoner until now, which I will keep in mind for the future. I mean, please, if you have any issues with ETF2L in any way, please let us admins know, public or private. I would've probably kept double elimination in Premiership playoffs yet again for this season had Starkie not made a public thread about it, but since he did and it provided a good amount of thoughts on what we could change with the playoffs, we did all that for this season now just because someone expressed their opinion out.

To comment on why we have been changing maps every season now, I do agree that it has become really messy since we haven't been able to keep up the map pool similar for even 2 seasons in the past couple years. Some might find it to add in a new interesting element to the table, but I can really understand the confusion behind it for the sake of consistency. I would want to keep things mostly similar to avoid making too many changes overall, but it's impossible to know of what the future has to bring to us. People like to say that "TF2 is dead" yet it still remains to get a lot of insanely great stuff made by the community that can take over older favorites.

And as a last note, I already personally spoke to Raf about what he said about having a proper yearly map discussion and a cup with prem teams playing in them and I would be really up for something like this where we can get not only the top players playing the maps they'd like to give a chance but also showcase some high level competition in them. I would still like to have new maps to test in ETF2L cups that we do before every season, but they can be said to be purely for general map testing only in a cup setting with ETF2L used as a base only and not as possible candidates for the upcoming season's map pool all of a sudden without people actually becoming more familiar with them beforehand. This is only a thought at this point, but I would be supporting this sort of thing really so that the smaller seasonal cups will remain to provide feedback for the map developers and the yearly discussion/showcase will be what would actually change up the map pool if needed, but it'd require for Premiership teams at the time to invest their time and interest into.

If you do spot several spelling mistakes then I do want to apologize on them, I wrote this all alone and didn't want to use any tools to check on broken sentences or such. In case something still brings up questions to you in one way or another then feel free to ask about them.

I'll bite in to this one by one, if there's something missing out on what do you want to know then just feel free to ask me all you want.

First off, as for why Sunshine is being played only once while Metalworks is played twice simply comes from my thoughts on making EU more used to the map in general, it's already well proven in NA but keep in mind that the last time Metalworks was played in ETF2L was back in Season 17, in 2014. There's already a lot of information for people to seek further into, but giving it only a single week to play on is not going to make anyone feel like it would be here to stay, maybe it won't. However still, we as admins are completely aware of how Sunshine is already liked in ETF2L and has become one of the Top 5 maps to play in competitive 6v6 as per the poll that we did at the beginning of Season 32 so we do have proven data on that already in our hands.

As to how players are going to make a map veto with this many maps, it can be done with the already existing system that ESEA uses in their playoffs, for the people that are unfamiliar of it it's upper seed to decide who starts, AB to ban maps, AB to pick maps, ABAB to ban maps again with the last remaining map as the decider. Do keep in mind that this is not yet confirmed, we are still able shift around the ban/pick order so that at least teams taking part in the Premiership Qualifiers don't need to suddenly ban Metalworks and Logjam only to play Badlands for the first time in possibly 5 months. Whether that will also remain the same for the playoffs at the end of the season is up to a debate as well, but I don't see this having too many issues as of now.

EoN's #44 post brings up a really great point, I had overlooked this from even being a possibility. I would say expect a new rule update on that matter, most likely to include the first team to win the mid point if neither team has mid point in control even after the time is over, ensuring that round resets do force teams to start fresh.

I've probably said this enough to make it sound like an excuse at this point, but adding in Metalworks is a step towards having a similar map pool in line with ESEA, with Logjam just being an exception so we do not have to end up with a similar mess of opinions Cardinal had brought to us a year ago where the map got a heavy amount of critique that we couldn't give it a second change even afterwards, the fact that the map development stopped for it by that point didn't help that fact either. Personally I would also want Logjam to receive seasonal updates to bring it to peoples liking again like it did for the people that wanted to play Logjam again before it was added in Season 32. But just to touch on to the ESEA part still, we are aware that this will be the last season ESEA will have for TF2 and whether other upcoming orgs wish to alternate the map pool significantly is up to them to decide on, but if they would rather copy the map pool mostly from us then we already have a rather familiar template for NA to work onwards from then.

The reason why testing Propaganda has been skipped over in ETF2L is pretty much my fault, I do believe that the map could very well shape up to be a decent map at the very least in EU, I would be glad to test it out at least once. However before we had made our preseason cup to try out maps in, I got approached by lucrative, a key figure in NA that really wants to introduce new maps to a competitive format and help them succeed in the future. Not calling him out for doing anything bad, rather the opposite because he's pouring his heart into getting a kickstart to these new maps that could easily be ignored otherwise. Anyhow, he suggested for me to try out new maps that had done well in his map testing PUGs with plenty of positive results in some of the ones that were chosen for the preseason cup we had in last week. I would like to note however that Metalworks was not one of the maps lucrative suggested for us to try out, having that included was purely done because of people asking for it to get played in ETF2L. I wanted to add it into the cup to see if the playerbase would be a lot more fond of it now than previously, however had we not added it in I'm pretty certain we would have the same guys asking that why is EU not playing Metalworks still when it has been played in NA for many years already for now, that's not something I'm able to answer to but that's the reason why Propaganda could have been recently played instead. All the feedback regarding how much you want to play it will be kept in my mind for the next time we want to give new maps a similar chance.

Will continue in the post below to make sure I won't get annihilated by any possible character limit for a single post.

As far as I know you've always been able to rent a PC there, previously the cheapest option (with 144hz included) was £104.55, but that package only gives you the PC and the monitor. There are also options with a keyboard, mouse, mousepad and headset rental included which costs like £15 more.

Dropping the two halves is okay, having windifference 5 however is a mistake and gives people the incentive to just be in the lead with 2 rounds and then park the bus. Winlimit should always stay so leagues can count the rounds scored and make the round difference based on those if needed, promoting teams that want to win 5 rounds instead of winning a map.

This doesn't of course help for playoffs as those should count for map wins only, but rather the main season itself.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1tSo2J5_VmKvs2Fm40zO5_77G6JY08CZl

In general I do agree that i-series will still be a great option for people that do live in UK and are able to cut their own costs by a good amount with their own belongings. Just stated that for me personally it's so much more expensive that I could afford to go to CPH games almost twice for the price of going to Insomnia just once.

Aside from just talking about money that's getting used only, I do hope that giving us the chance of having the grand finals even on the B stage this time really did boost a lot of attention overall for TF2 within the higher organization of the event, especially since the TF2 section was right next to the entrance so anybody spectating was instantly able to sit down and watch the stream.

NGL I personally kind of want to just not go to i-series anymore and just focus every year on to CPH Games instead, not only has the organization and all the people behind the scenes been super amazing for the event this and previous year but also the event itself being nearly perfect for a good majority of us.

No hard feelings to i-series LANs at all, I've had my most competitive team experiences there and I still do cherish them just as well.

This is the first time I've even heard people in public actually say that the current playoff structure is bad or boring at all hence why we haven't even considered on any change yet beforehand, but I do agree with the points you've listed here except for the double elimination itself, but I'm not exactly defending it either.

Pretty sure the implementation of the Double elimination in the first place was done to make the playoffs less anti-climatic where the 1st seed team was already a guaranteed winner pretty much (duh) regardless of the 2nd/3rd seed team having just battled out for a spot in the grand finals and being as warm as they could be, can't remember these things exactly from 3 years back. However I do agree that the current format does drag on for too long and changing up things for it would make things at least a bit more fresh so the playoffs won't need to last for 3+ weeks.

Something that could work in place of this would be to have a playoff structure similar to Season 23 instead of Season 21, where 4th seed team was also taken into the playoffs and had to play their match before the semi-finals and grand finals, in which case the 4th seed team won the 3rd seed in this example. I'm aware however that this can't happen in every season and this was also the only one where this did happen with single elimination.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/182234646640197632/557231208971501618/bloodis_12800_invis_spy_hs.dem

cu@

https://twitter.com/papiontheriddim

Happy birthday to my former teammate WARHURYEAH!

We've decided to revert back to _final1 while strictly banning the out of bounds bug. If anyone still decides to use the bugged spot in an official match despite it being banned then we recommend reaching out to any ETF2L admin for a match complaint.

SID FROM ICE AGE to own