Another ETF2L marathon season is over, Beater has once again completed the herculean task of streaming, casting and admining Fantasy TF2, and he'll probably do a frag movie too.

So time to discover who the real winners are:

1st: Gobsmacked by Dubbs - taking the Season 27 fantasy double
2nd: Virgins by The Butch
3rd: EZ by Kam!

Pixel trophies have been duly distributed
Congrats to the winners, and a jolly good show by everyone who participated

Thanks Qun

Account sharing investigation to begin after the Gullywash result

With all due respect to Midnight Mick I don't think he has the MGE pedigree

No but I do have an alternate model where his Dad plays instead. 5-0 to aF

Nerding it up briefly, doing a least squares regression of the season's results 7 and aF are the two outstanding teams, 7 stand at +2.3 rounds over average and aF at +2.0.

7's offensive scores are at +1.6 over average and aF's at +1.2, both team's defensive scores are at +1.05 rounds over average. The most likely score from either team in a given map is 4-3 to 7 (12% of the time)

A probability matrix of Poisson distributions on the mean scores by either team throughout the season gives 7 a 55% chance of victory on any particular map in regular time with aF on 33%, with a 12% chance of going to GC (and the same percentage split for who wins that)

However the biggest error in the least squares regression was 7's week 1 spanking of aF 6 - 1 on Badlands (an even bigger shock than unexpected's win over 7 on Granary) so the possibility remains that 7 have extra gears available, and that aF's style is perfect fodder for them.

*Disclaimer - Product probably fucks a lot of the figures up above, but I can't be bothered to fix it

Domain renewal time is coming up, do people still use this beyond cock drawing speed competitions and gullywash nipple illustrations?

Although playing another koth map is a good idea and bagel has received a lot of positive feedback it's still going to leave a lot of 5cp in the pool. If people want to address the problem any time soon then they need something other than maps that will take years to build.

Either that or koth_nucleus

Looking at the season results Arctic Foxes would probably have picked up a few more league points and might have gotten 2nd and a better seeding. Depending on how it was formulated it might open up some avenues for collusion though which would be bad.

It wouldn't work for playoff games, but they're supposed to be exciting anyway because of what's at stake. It's really the fault of the casters if they feel nothing about the game they're casting.

A better option might be extra league points for hitting a round target or winning margin target

An external incentive to award attacking play without messing around too much with the game mechanics is actually an interesting solution, if nothing else because it's much more viable than making custom maps or plugins to change the rules of the game.

Just to inject some objective data into the debate I've compared round counts between this season of ETF2L and Season 19 which took place roughly 2.5 years ago. Season 19 had a few teams drop out so the number of games is different, and the comparison is made with percentages. Season 19 included Suave, etc.

This season average rounds per map are about 1.3 lower (down to 4.9 from 6.2). This season only 2% of maps have had 9 rounds or more, season 19 had 17% of maps with 9 rounds or more. This season had 27% of maps with 3 or less rounds, season 19 had 14% of maps with 3 or less rounds. The most common number of rounds in a map is 5 in both seasons, but this season 7.7% of games were 5-0 whereas in season 19 8.3% were 5-0.

So it looks like both seasons were anchored around a 5 rounds per map common score but in Season 19 the maps that didn't conform to that were skewed upwards and this season they are skewed downwards. Also Season 19 was marginally more likely to produce a 5-0 roll. Maybe season 19 had more uneven results due to teams dropping, that's a possible criticism, and I'm not sure if the map pool or rules stimulated any difference. Maybe I could have picked a better season, ymmv.

This might be interesting for anyone looking at how micro changes have affected the 6v6 meta in the past couple of years, but just as no players are super committed enough to perfecting an aggro style after years of micro buffs to defensive options I can't be bothered to compare every season.

It also helps if your roaming soldier is possibly the best player in your entire continent, something both Epsilon and Froyo have shared.

Hildreth said above that they don't want to or can't put in the time to practice to get there

I wouldn't want to theory craft too much but it would probably lead to attackers waiting until no realistic push back can happen before going for a fully committed attack, and anything before then would probably just be opportunistic poking to try to manufacture an advantage, unless the game clock demanded it.

I really think koth or AD does this better, it seems like everyone who wants change wants to warp 5cp into an already existing game mode, and really it's the lack of good maps in other modes that's the bottleneck.