VanillaTF2

Disclaimer – This article is long and about Highlander, if you don’t like or watch Highlander then this isn’t for you to read.

 Hildreth – Yes ladies and gentlemen, well…mostly gentlemen, it’s that time again where Highlander pops up on this website, the game format being akin to the weather after the main news has been delivered, getting that little chunk of time at the end of the programme, although for a lot of people the weather is the most important part (plus the weather girls are more attractive than the newsreaders). I have started to write this commentary on the dawn of perhaps the greatest TF2 achievement of all time made by arguably the greatest, most dominant team of all time – I have put emphasis on the words ‘perhaps‘ and ‘arguably‘ to avoid comments comparing the merits of achievements. If you are however not aware,  SNSD have come away with yet another title, winning the 3rd season of ETF2L Highlander Premiership division and taking a hefty sum of €1,035 divided by 9. This makes it their 3rd season and 6th tournament win undefeated, with only 3 map losses (plus a round loss on Gravelpit this season to May Contain Nuts) during the whole time, giving them an unbeatable 39-0 record in terms of matches (including default wins and bo3′s). It would be a 39-1 record if you included the showmatch between American champions   The Syndicate and  SNSD, but that brings the topic to another area, an area that asks why no-one has been able to defeat  SNSD, why the only teams that have touched them have been just sneaking rounds/maps off them occasionally over the course of nearly 3 years and why European Highlander is not an established scene like the North American scene who as of this season sees UGC boast 350 teams in their North American divisions whilst ETF2L has half the numbers. What has gone wrong with European Highlander? What has gone right with North American Highlander and why was the 2nd best team to challenge  SNSD a group of high level 6′s players who rarely practised? For me, a person who has invested a lot of his personal time trying to create a scene in Europe, the frustration of the position of our scene today feels like to me I have wasted my efforts – we in Europe have perhaps the best infrastructure in terms of a league, a community with coverage and organizations to deliver the best TF2 experience in the world yet we have failed to do so – so why?

Beta —  Well, what a weekend and what a turnout.  Though my body is starting to recover from the lack of sleep, my lack of voice has been noticeable to most on work calls today.

Like some, I did the full 4 day stint from Thursday to Sunday.  You’ll probably be surprised to know that of all that time, the most time I spent at my own PC was writing the charity raffle.  Let’s keep with that thought and talk about how it turned out – Read on to find out more!

Please note, my views and opinions are my own, these don’t represent anyone from VanillaTF2 or VanillaTV.

Trell —  WAR has started doing his own demo reviews (see after the jump for 2 samples), and would like some feedback.

I really missed these demo reviews, I felt they were incredibly helpful for a developing player to get an understanding of what they should be doing in some situations, so I have been going through my own for the last few weeks, I plan to do at least one a week, hopefully uploading comms as well in the future.

The main issue for me going forward is the feedback, as they are not very popular I haven’t actually received any criticism or comments about the videos, I’m not sure what the content is like, how the quality is or if what I’m talking about is relevant, so I’m posting this in hope that I can get some constructive feedback to the masses for people to give me some advice.

Any help with improving the quality, tips on using xsplit (I want to use that whiteboard thing so I can draw over the maps but I don’t know how to use it) and the length of the videos and content.

All my videos can be found on my YouTube channel and below is a small taster, I stream these first on my TwitchTV channel as well, I don’t have a steam group as I normally announce my reviews on the Nervous Energy newbie mix channel as that is who it’s aimed at.

 Hildreth – It’s been a couple of months since the end of ETF2L’s inaugural Highlander season but this week it all starts up again with 6 weeks of 9v9 action to go between Season’s 11 and 12, making it a busy period in the TF2 calendar. So far we have over 200 teams signed up for season 2 at the moment with SNSD the current holders and still yet to be beaten although Colony cut it close with an exciting finale in the first ever Experimental Highlander cup. To add to this ETF2L have a cash prize pool of up to £1000 (courtesy of an anonymous Highlander loving donator) for the winners and second placed team in the newly formed Premiership for the top level teams, to add extra incentive to those to practise and beat SNSD – I don’t want to see another gold medal parading on  TheSucker’s chest, do you?

CUBE —  It’s been a while since I’ve written an update regarding the VanillaTV YouTube Channel, so here’s a news post to let you know what we’ve been up to and what we’ve got planned for the coming months.

Fragmovies of the Month

For any of you that haven’t seen, a couple of days ago we released a new series called VanlliaTV Fragmovies of the Month, which rates and reviews TF2 Fragmovies from the previous month and provides links to the full movies. The idea behind this is to help editors gain more exposure for their fragmovies and also to hopefully increase the quality of the fragmovies by giving new editors an idea as to what people look for in a fragmovie.

I want to give a massive thanks to  BoneS and  Skyride for helping me review the videos and since releasing the video, I have also been approached by decap and  FreezeR who will now be joining the panel to help rate and review in future months.

We’ve had some great feedback since releasing the video and will start thinking about which movies to review for February very soon, expect to see the February video around mid-March.

More updates after the jump…

Hildreth — So I have managed to write two parts of a three part series of articles in about 5 days, then work took over and I needed three  weeks to complete this part 3, YET it has taken  Torden a good nine months, and counting, to finish part three of the Unicorn man series. Not a criticism of the man, I just want to know what happened to the Unicorn man, it is like a TF2 children’s book to me. Having been informed by  CanFo about a potential spot in the eSports Yearbook for my article, I owed it to the man to keep it professional and eliminate all my  TheSucker being bad jokes. Unfortunately I failed on the professionalism part in the first sentence of the article, so we’re stuck with bad puns and more Sucker truth bombs.

So anyway we’re back with four more months of TF2 coverage, from the lonely hills of Telford, Shropshire to the heat and humidity of Dallas, Texas the big TF2 LANs kept rolling in. Meanwhile the most active and competitive period of the year – the Autumn season had officially kicked off in Europe.

TL:DR Disclaimer – This article is long, I can sum it up by saying ‘stuff happened’ and also, those of you with a sensitive disposition to TheSucker I advise you do not read this article. Thank you. 

atmo — For some time now, gamers with a curious predilection for real headphones have been rather limited for choice when it comes to microphones. There are certainly plenty of standalone microphones out there, but ones worth buying are few and far between. These few models range in price from €10 to €100, depending on your budget and purpose.

AntLion Audio’s ModMic sits just a shade below the halfway point, priced around €35 or £30 shipped from   eXtine’s hometown of Portland, Oregon. At this price, the main alternative would be the Giant Squid Audio Labs Mono mic which ostensibly uses Panasonic’s WM-61A capsule electret. However, this was found to perform beneath its capabilities without additional power, something that neither the 5V of a standard 3.5mm nor a USB soundcard were able to supply. How will the ModMic stack up?