VanillaTF2

Darkdwarf — This time around, we’re taking a look at mapmaking geniuses  Arnold‘s and  ScorpioUprising‘s latest maps in production. They’re both very different from those that make up the map pool of season 11 of ETF2L, and quite interesting to play – and spectate.

First is Cp_Croissant, winner of the 5cp section for the recent (a)symmetrical mapping contest over at TF2maps.net – since then the map has gone through a number of iterations from community feedback and is now in it’s eleventh beta version. Next we have Standin, a unique map similar to the “domination” modes one can find in Call of Duty. The map has recently had a massive rise in it’s profile thanks to it’s inclusion into the recent ESEA season’s map pool.

Read on for more info about the maps and their makers’ opinions about them.

Edit: Vods up!

CommanderX – Tonight, is the night, that two become one!  Something, something Greg, something, something Kaidus. Something, something ETF2L results . Something, something ETF2L fixtures. What I mean to say is that it has been a quiet week but we’ll still be on for a bit to discuss what action there has been and take a look ahead to the games that will be postponed next week. I’ve not asked anyone about this but I’m CommanderX and I’ll do what the fuck I want, what I mean to say is we might be a bit short on topics this week so any suggestions for topics or things you might want  talked about, post here or PM me and we might give it a blast.

Same time as always: 22:30cet

Mumble - fakkelbrigade.eu:64740
Live stream @ Twitch TV
Join our IRC #PirateRadio on Quakenet

And for all previous episodes links to the links are on ETF2L.

Update: Changed to tomorrow 30/01 same time, same place. Also tune in to find out or secret competition and win yourself a steam mobile beta key!

Double update: kaidus is some sort of pussy so instead we get TF2 player/caster/fanatic/legend  Admirable

Fog — Hey everyone, sorry about the lack of a Week 8 Power Ranking, but I had no time to write the article due to various personal reasons. Hopefully this roundup makes up for the lack of power rankings

After a very exciting final week of the season, the LAN spots have been decided! After the week 7 matches finished up, the final LAN spot was still very much up for grabs. The teams played on the classic favourite cp_granary for Week 8.

Granary is a standard 5CP map that along with Gravel Pit, are the only maps used from the launch of TF2. The map itself is known for it’s generally flat terrain, and it’s easy rollouts to the middle point. There have been some changes made to the map from the game’s launch in 2007, with the biggest recent change being with the addition of the second entrance to/from garage. Granary is also known to be a slow paced map with clear choke points and limited possibilities for flanks. Teams will have to rely on their heavy classes to put out lots of damage and also have to rely on their teamwork skills to be successful on Granary. Now it’s time to go over what went down in the 8th and final week of the regular season before LAN.

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. 

Faint — The winner of the AntLion Audio ModMic is  Rinta for the couple of nice haikus she wrote, although it should be mentioned that  Sonny Black’s entry may have won if it wasn’t for 6 syllables in the first line (damn technicalities!). Ty to all those who entered, and gratz to Rinta!

CanFo — Tonight Team Infused and Epsilon eSports will battle out who gets six Sparkle GTS 450 1024MB 128bit DDR5 One Slot graphics cards, in the final of the invite bracket of the   Excello Sparkle TF2 Winter Warmup Tournament (I challenge the casters to read out this sentence without mistakes). I would like to take this opportunity to thank all teams that participated in both the open, and invite bracket, and made this tournament the biggest TF2 tournament at Excello so far with 52 teams participating. But now back to the final!

VanillaTV will be casting tonight’s match with  ThePledge and  nvc on the mics, with nvc running the stream as well. Casting will start shortly after 21:00 CET!

Epsilon eSports F2, KnoxXx, GeaR, stefan, wltrs, randa

21

Team Infused flisko, cookye, numlocked, Greg, dunc, Mike

Excello Sparkle TF2 Winter Warmup Invite - Grand Finals

(71 comments)

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TIME

• Thursday January 19th
• 21:15 cet
• 15:15 est (na)
• 05:15 est (aus)

CASTED BY

• HiScore.tv
• VanillaTV Livestream
• VanillaTV Mumble
• TF2World.Ru TV

SOURCETV

• relay.vanillatv.org:27100
• relay.vanillatv.org:27101

Who will win this match?

• Epsilon eSports (65%, 105 Votes)
  
• Infused.Tt (35%, 56 Votes)
  

Total Voters: 161

 Loading ...

MAPSSCORE

DEMO

VIDEO

cp_badlands4-5VanillaTV

cp_granary6-1VanillaTV

cp_gullywash4-3VanillaTV

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Faint — Tonight sees the start of the Invite bracket of the Excello Sparkle Winter Warmup TF2 Cup.

With the winner of last night’s open bracket   Karnage eSports gaining the 7th seed, they face off against  Infused.Tt. This gives the newly formed Karnage a chance to show what they can pull off against a top prem team.

Elsewhere  Crack Clan gets a chance to show themselves back in form against exotic, and  Epsilon eSports face  Team Decerto which should be a simple game for the former of the two (in theory at least).

The last of the quarter-finals features  Broder against  Yoyotech, which should be a cracking game and will give the newly promoted teams another chance to battle it out.

CanFo — Tonight at 21:15  Karnage eSports and  Team Decerto were supposed to fight for the last invitation to the invitational bracket that will take place tomorrow. However, CKRAS and  relic are taking a break from TF2 for a while and will therefore not compete in the tournament which leaves two more open spots, making it a total of three.

Karnage-eSports leojan, Thy, quad, antyjc, crouton, WAR

20

Team Decerto r7an, Norrla, Poop, oronoc, Daleth, Skeej

Excello Sparkle Cup, Open Bracket Finals.

(12 comments)

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TIME

• Sunday January 15th
• 21:15 cet
• 15:15 est (na)
• 05:15 est (aus)

CASTED BY

• HiScore.tv
• VanillaTV Livestream
• VanillaTV Mumble

SOURCETV

• relay.vanillatv.org:27100

Who will win this match?

• Karnage eSports (71%, 80 Votes)
  
• Team Decerto (29%, 33 Votes)
  

Total Voters: 113

 Loading ...

MAPSSCORE

DEMO

VIDEO

cp_badlands5-3

cp_snakewater7-2

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Luckily, when we asked the upcoming team  Exotic that has been on the invitation list anyway if they want to take a slot, they happily agreed. For the last two open spot this means that both Karnage and Team Decerto are guaranteed to get one of the last two. To keep a bit of tension for the open final the winner of this match will get the #7 seeding and the loser will get the #8 seeding.

Koeitje — You probably all have noticed that ETF2L has published it’s map pool for S11 after two polls that didn’t include all possible map choices. I’ll run through all maps that can be considered candidates for being played in competitive TF2 followed by a small survey (or just click here to go straight to it) containing all the maps I would consider to be candidates for a possible map pool. But first the official ETF2L S11 map pool.  The most surprising maps are, of course, Cp_Freight_Final1 and Cp_Foundry being a decider map while not being in the map pool.

cp_badlands
cp_gullywash_final1
cp_granary
cp_snakewater
cp_freight_final1
cp_gravelpit

The 7th map, cp_foundry, will be the decider map in any and all Season 11 playoffs. This means that during the map-pick/elimination phases, teams only need to pick 2 maps rather than 3.

CanFo — So far 46 teams have signed up for the open bracket of the Sparkle TF2 Winter Warmup Tournament, including big names such as BLAST, Quarantine, Karnage and Team Decerto. That is absolutely huge for the Team Fortress 2 scene – if all of these teams check in and show up! We would like to remind you that in order to participate all team owners have to check in from 19.00 to 19.30 CET on the excello site. On the spot at 19.00 CET the “SIGN-UP” button in the right menu bar will change into a “CHECK-IN” button. By clicking on that button you will be checked in. Sounds easy? It is! You may as well check in on the tournament page. See a picture of the button here.

If your team owner can not make the time for whatever reason (and only then!), you may contact an admin in our IRC channel #excello.tf2 and ask to be checked in by an admin. We also recommend you to have a representative in #excello.tf2 at the duration of the tournament to get in touch with your opponent and be updated about any last minute changes. The result always has to be submitted by the losing team or posted in our IRC channel.

The number of probably more than 32 teams will mean that the teams with a high seed get a “bye” in the first round and will start playing at 20.45 CET. The teams with the lower seeds start playing with cp_foundry at 20.00 CET (note: this only applies if more than 32 teams check in). Please note that there is currently a bug on cp_foundry that will cause the timelimit not to kick in after 30 minutes. Be aware of that and stop playing after 30 minutes! Complaints regarding this matter will require an uploaded demo from the match.

Fog — The article is a bit late, but Week 7 is now underway. I’ve decided to stick with just Power Rankings for the rest of the season, so no more predictions or roundups (unless there is a good response for the roundups).

With only two weeks left to go before the end of the season, teams are going to be making the final push for the remaining 2 spots for LAN. At this point, Classic Mixup and Quantic Gaming have already secured their place for LAN (which team will be first or second is still up in the air). The race for the final LAN spots have heated up, with Area 51, High Rollers Gaming, The Experiment, and Mighty Ducks being in what is the closest race for 3rd and 4th that I’ve ever seen. This week, matches are being played on the recently made official map cp_gullywash_final1 made by Arnold.

Gullywash has seen many changes during it’s many revisions, the most noticeable change from the last Release Candidate to the final version is the addition of the drop-down at the middle/2nd point connector/choke. This opens up some new possibilities with flanks for soldiers and scouts, opening up the narrow corridor which slowed the game down a bit. Another part of the map that teams will have to watch out for is the passage to the last point from underneath, which also provides a massive point for players to flank and potentially backcap the final point with the team at last. The last point has 4 viable options when pushing into it, however, the last point is also notorious with being a hard point to push. With the rest of the maps for the regular season being the standard 5CP, maps should play in a similar style. Now lets get into the Power Rankings, which will be short and sweet due to my limited time.

Leftism — With regular writer Torden unavailable due to work commitments, it’s been left to baddies like me to provide some form of post. According to m0re, a TF2 tournament at winter assembly looks to be off the cards. With this news, top level TF2 has lost one of it’s iconic teams: Team Dignitas, formerly Power Gaming, have folded – we’re unsure as to whether the lack of a winter LAN in Finland is the main reason behind it although as these articles are interactive and a constant development I’m sure some comments can help enlighten us on the situation.

The teams Scouts, cookye and longas, are in the process of finding a new team with the Finn having joined newly promoted Broder and the Spaniard making a recruitment post on ETF2L. Longas also confirmed in IRC that the remaining members of Dignitas, hocz; hymzi; kyynel & Haza, have no intention of playing TF2 anymore. He also confirmed the lack of a winter assembly was the sole reason behind the team folding.

Team Dignitas announcement

Although unconfirmed (from a reliable source, anyway), news of CKRAS is making it’s way down the grapevine – keep us posted on this development.

Update #1: M0re responds:

I’ve never said to anyone that I’m leaving ckras/tf2, neither that we would fold.

So there you have it, directly from the source!

Update #2: It would appear cookye has found himself a new full time spot at Infused.Tt alongside Greg and replacing pistol extraordinaire  quad. The main reason behind this change is that the Dane is unable to attend the upcoming insomnia events, i45 and i46, due to real life issues and the team wish to run a player they can take to LAN with them.