Player outlines are now part of the vanilla game, and I feel that those should deprecate mine.

API-based player aliases were removed to reduce dependencies on external services. An alternative is planned, but the groundwork is still being laid for that.

For FROYO the matches are in the middle of the afternoon for them, so the tournament has to be held on the weekend so they can participate. Since it's a two-day tournament, it has to be played Saturday and Sunday.

ESL has competitions for a lot of semi-new semi-competitive games.

I'm sure that we too could have a league if we demonstrated a lot of interest, but most European players are probably happy with ETF2L and wouldn't be dedicated to such an effort. They've also tried ESL years ago and most players stuck with ETF2L in the end.

Part of the issue is that the servers and players will be isolated to the LAN, which helps prevent DDoSing but also doesn't allow anyone from outside LAN to connect.

DDoSes are the primary concern for hosting a massive public Mumble if I remember correctly, not including the massive server resources required.

However, there is still interest in the idea and we'll continue to investigate it.

The best solution for preventing spoilers would require backend changes to the site, which I have no power over. Hopefully we have something concrete in time for i55.

This time I did the summary all by myself, so no credits.

Thanks to everyone for a great season, and can't wait to see the titans clash at i55!

I feel that option 1 is the best, as it does still allow teams to go back into the action almost instantaneously, but it also allows them a bit of breathing time after 30 minutes of nonstop play. If timing is an issue, you can force the game to go live again after a certain amount of time (maybe three minutes) like is done in CS between regulation and OT.

dashner

Correct - the entire tournament will be played in the tent with production being organized in the stage area allocated in the tent. This will likely result in the schedule of the tournament being spread out more over the three days (since we are not allocated a specific time for the grand final on the main stage), but there are still some time constraints that have to be followed. More details will come out soon probably.

Even two best-of-three series is technically disadvantageous to the upper bracket winner if the two series are not independent from each other (e.g. can pick/ban the same maps for the second series).

For having only one combined series, I believe that the "fairest" method was a best-of-seven series, where the upper bracket winner had a two-map advantage, so lower bracket would have to win four maps and upper bracket only two. The maximum number of maps played in such a series would be five.

What are Invite playoffs possibly blocking to start the next season? They've already announced the next season (which is still at least three weeks out), registration is open, they can unlock rosters because Invite rosters are already always unlocked by the rules, all of the playoff teams are still guaranteed an Invite spot, and they can cut the checks at any time once the playoffs finish.

Thanks to Insomniuhh, whose live match summary saved me when I pushed the power button on my UPS, causing my computer and my network to go down just as the match started and forcing me to miss the first few rounds.

I'm slowly working up to getting it published before the match even ends.

They were informed this morning.

It's because of how ESEA's rules are designed to promote roster longevity, something which isn't really respected given how many teams die off and reform each offseason. It now takes four seasons before a team can be part of the Pro League in CS (with hijack rules to prevent most teams from skipping part of that process), and ESEA won't let up on that by doing placement tournaments (the closest thing is the two promotion/relegation matches for the Pro League, something new this year).

We are lucky that we don't have the rigid structure of Pro League and that teams can still be manually placed in Invite by an admin, mainly because we don't have the size necessary to make something like that happen, but lower divisions don't have that privilege and must follow ESEA rules.

It's not something that the TF2 admins can really be blamed for since it seems they're given a tight leash when it comes to running the league the ESEA way. (Remember when they almost got fired for turning a blind eye to Open finals being played off-client?)