The European Team Fortress 2 League kicks off Season 20!
News:
ETF2L is happy to announce that they are taking applications to join the 20th season of European Team Fortress 2 in 6v6 format, if you are not familiar with 6v6 gamemode, feel free to take a look at this example.
Updates:
ETF2L has changed its league system and is allowing more unlocks than ever before, in addition to prizes for all skill divisions. Not only for the Premiership anymore, all of them!
The league system before had teams scattered in divisions ranging from the lowest division, division 6 all the way up to division 1 and finally to Premiership. There were 8 teams in one sub-division in which they fought against each other at a planned time when the both teams chose to play, or with an automatically put default time. However, if one team decides to drop out from the league, their team won't be replaced anymore in mid-season.
You had the option throughout the season to decide on what days to play the games, whenever you would want to play the games, and if possibly your team is unable to play, you will have a wildcard to use to move the match to another week.
However, what is new, is that there will not be 7 divisions, and no longer are there sub-divisions. Instead, the league setup will be in Swiss-Style tournament system with 4 divisions, from lowest to the highest, there will be Open, Mid, High and Premiership divisions. For example to understand this more properly, Premiership will remain the same, while High division will include teams from former divisions 1 and 2, Mid having teams from divisions 3 and 4, and Low having divisions 5 and 6.
Another new thing that will come along with the Swiss-Style system, is that the time to play matches is a lot more stricter. You are forced to play one game every week from Sunday to Thursday, at the end of Thursdays the results from all matches will be gathered and decided that which teams will play against each other on the next week of the season. On Saturdays the fixtures will be created and default dates will be set for teams to play their games, repeat and rinse until the season is over.
This also means the fact that wildcards are removed, as the matches have to be played weekly in order to function the Swiss-System must adhere to strict deadlines.
How are the fixtures decided however? With the Swiss system, the fixtures will now be created by matching teams with a similar points total where possible, ignoring teams that have played each other already. This is intended to create closer matches throughout the season. Also, adding a benefit for admins to have less work and have less chances on making accidental bad seedings for teams.
Another by-product of the new system will be an increase in ties, particularly in the bigger tiers. To solve this issue ties will automatically be sorted within the table by round difference (rounds scored subtract rounds conceded). This applies to all ties, including ones that affect any playoff positions. Tiebreakers will therefore no longer be used.
Playoffs would now take place in all tiers. This system makes it much easier to run playoffs in all tiers, just one look at some of the playoff trees from Season 19 should make it clear.
Season 20 Schedule:
Signups: January 7 – January 23
Publishing of Provisional divisions: January 24
Publishing of Final divisions: January 25
Pre-Season Playoff Week: January 25 – January 29
Main Season: February 1 – March 19 (7 Weeks)
High/Mid/Open Playoffs: March 22 – April 2
Premiership Playoffs: March 29
You can still sign up your team after January 23. Teams signing up later than January 23 will be placed on the waiting list and added into the next available week.
Personal opinion:
I'm really excited personally for this upcoming season, I have played in 3 last seasons already by now but finally I got a chance to play with another team. However, by the looks of what are the Premiership teams going to be for now, the season will be both amazing to watch and to play in.
I already got used to the previous system where you had wildcards to be used and you could plan to play on any day you wanted and liked it more since as far as I know, ETF2L was the only league anymore to still do that, but I do believe that with the change to Swiss-System will be better since many other leagues use this system as well to know which teams are the best in their own divisions.
The unlock list has expanded a lot with different classes, so it's interesting to see how would those turn out to be like during the season, as many people disliked the use of Direct Hit and Ambassador for example, while they are allowed in NA leagues and aren't that bad over there. The rest of the unlocks aren't that bad however, you can look at the list here. http://whitelist.tf/etf2l_6v6_s20
I don't think players who are not from European region would do well in this season, considering that all of the matches can not be played on the weekend, so you would need to play really early before the evening or really late at night. It still doesn't mean that you can't play however, but feel free to try if you'd like, remember that participating for the whole season will make you and your team eligible for a medal in-game!
So? What are you waiting for? You still have time to join in, so have fun as much as you can!
http://etf2l.org/
http://etf2l.org/2015/01/12/announcing-season-20-staff-changes/
News:
ETF2L is happy to announce that they are taking applications to join the 20th season of European Team Fortress 2 in 6v6 format, if you are not familiar with 6v6 gamemode, feel free to take a look at this example.
Updates:
ETF2L has changed its league system and is allowing more unlocks than ever before, in addition to prizes for all skill divisions. Not only for the Premiership anymore, all of them!
The league system before had teams scattered in divisions ranging from the lowest division, division 6 all the way up to division 1 and finally to Premiership. There were 8 teams in one sub-division in which they fought against each other at a planned time when the both teams chose to play, or with an automatically put default time. However, if one team decides to drop out from the league, their team won't be replaced anymore in mid-season.
You had the option throughout the season to decide on what days to play the games, whenever you would want to play the games, and if possibly your team is unable to play, you will have a wildcard to use to move the match to another week.
However, what is new, is that there will not be 7 divisions, and no longer are there sub-divisions. Instead, the league setup will be in Swiss-Style tournament system with 4 divisions, from lowest to the highest, there will be Open, Mid, High and Premiership divisions. For example to understand this more properly, Premiership will remain the same, while High division will include teams from former divisions 1 and 2, Mid having teams from divisions 3 and 4, and Low having divisions 5 and 6.
Another new thing that will come along with the Swiss-Style system, is that the time to play matches is a lot more stricter. You are forced to play one game every week from Sunday to Thursday, at the end of Thursdays the results from all matches will be gathered and decided that which teams will play against each other on the next week of the season. On Saturdays the fixtures will be created and default dates will be set for teams to play their games, repeat and rinse until the season is over.
This also means the fact that wildcards are removed, as the matches have to be played weekly in order to function the Swiss-System must adhere to strict deadlines.
How are the fixtures decided however? With the Swiss system, the fixtures will now be created by matching teams with a similar points total where possible, ignoring teams that have played each other already. This is intended to create closer matches throughout the season. Also, adding a benefit for admins to have less work and have less chances on making accidental bad seedings for teams.
Another by-product of the new system will be an increase in ties, particularly in the bigger tiers. To solve this issue ties will automatically be sorted within the table by round difference (rounds scored subtract rounds conceded). This applies to all ties, including ones that affect any playoff positions. Tiebreakers will therefore no longer be used.
Playoffs would now take place in all tiers. This system makes it much easier to run playoffs in all tiers, just one look at some of the playoff trees from Season 19 should make it clear.
Season 20 Schedule:
Signups: January 7 – January 23
Publishing of Provisional divisions: January 24
Publishing of Final divisions: January 25
Pre-Season Playoff Week: January 25 – January 29
Main Season: February 1 – March 19 (7 Weeks)
High/Mid/Open Playoffs: March 22 – April 2
Premiership Playoffs: March 29
You can still sign up your team after January 23. Teams signing up later than January 23 will be placed on the waiting list and added into the next available week.
Personal opinion:
I'm really excited personally for this upcoming season, I have played in 3 last seasons already by now but finally I got a chance to play with another team. However, by the looks of what are the Premiership teams going to be for now, the season will be both amazing to watch and to play in.
I already got used to the previous system where you had wildcards to be used and you could plan to play on any day you wanted and liked it more since as far as I know, ETF2L was the only league anymore to still do that, but I do believe that with the change to Swiss-System will be better since many other leagues use this system as well to know which teams are the best in their own divisions.
The unlock list has expanded a lot with different classes, so it's interesting to see how would those turn out to be like during the season, as many people disliked the use of Direct Hit and Ambassador for example, while they are allowed in NA leagues and aren't that bad over there. The rest of the unlocks aren't that bad however, you can look at the list here. http://whitelist.tf/etf2l_6v6_s20
I don't think players who are not from European region would do well in this season, considering that all of the matches can not be played on the weekend, so you would need to play really early before the evening or really late at night. It still doesn't mean that you can't play however, but feel free to try if you'd like, remember that participating for the whole season will make you and your team eligible for a medal in-game!
So? What are you waiting for? You still have time to join in, so have fun as much as you can!
http://etf2l.org/
http://etf2l.org/2015/01/12/announcing-season-20-staff-changes/