One of the best highlander games I've seen. Great job to both teams. Thanks for playing and hope to see you both back next season for a rematch!

I have had zero influence on our 6s league. Even marxist knows that. Quite frankly, I have zero desire to be involved with it anyway. Highlander is my cup of tea. Even with that I have been barely active for over a year yet the conspiracy theorists like morphiend still think I am the puppet master pulling strings. Do a little research before jumping on the bandwagon. Maybe ask the league owner who makes the decisions? He'll certainly tell you it's not me. Forn, Blazingboy, Snowblindfrog, Redrum, et al. have been running things for the past year or so.

In lieu of the despicable (and unforgivable) happenings with ESEA it seems like folks should take another look at UGC. I think if the ESEA community elected someone to speak for them and come up with a reasonable set of things you'd like to see UGC implement, our current active admin team would be more than happy to sit down and open up some dialog.

Maybe something will come of it? We already have most of the infrastructure in place. If an agreement can be made, why reinvent the wheel?

edit: http://www.gameservers.com/ugcleague/
We do have an extensive server list available to everyone in our league.

Pre Season games are not "meaningless" as the original poster contends. They serve several purposes, many of which have been discussed in this thread.

For one, they allow many of our newer teams to learn how UGC's match scheduling and reporting website functions work. This gives them a bit of practice before regular season games start and minimizes on the number of questions and problems arise down the line. Believe it or not we receive about 20-30 emails per day from teams with questions.. anything we can do to lower that amount is worth a lot in potential manpower savings.

Pre season matches also allow both new and established teams to finalize rosters, test new players in new positions, test newly bought servers and mumble channels, etc.

Pre season is also a time where we can introduce new maps to the league. We don't make a big deal out of this. We don't market it as "UGC's official map testing game" or whatever. It's entirely possible that at some point there won't be any maps to test. Right now we have a thriving highlander mapping community and we are trying to pick maps that are currently being worked on by an active author, etc. First we had newer maps in the regular season and people complained. Now we have newer maps not in the regular season and people are still complaining?

Lastly, pre season games help the admin team. They give our newer admins who are taking on division management positions practice with their new role. This helps us approve and post results in a timely manner, as well as get schedules up as soon as is possible. We need practice too.

Bottom line is if you want to play pre season matches they are there for you. If you don't want to play.. then don't. After all, I would hope we are all here for the same reason... to play TF2. After several months break from the previous season it seems like a good thing to have one practice game before the stats start getting collected. I really don't see what the problem is.

Oh? What on earth happened to the highlander forum?

you can find some on here:

http://live.ugcleague.com/

Glad to see highlander finally getting the attention it deserves. Game on.

:)

Great to see another league pickup Highlander. I've always been a fan of the ladder format. Best of luck to you!

What would be best, IMO, would be for UGC, ESEA, CEVO to combine resources, work together, and throw a large online tournament for 6s and highlander. Between the three leagues there are enough resources available to do something awesome. ESEA's infrastructure (Anti Cheat Client, servers), UGC's huge player base and community outreach, CEVO possibly expanding to highlander finally, and then of course all the community leaders who cast, write predictions, etc. I guarantee if we did this right we could get valve to support it in one way or another as long as it's not-for-profit. LANs are extremely expensive, tons of cash is lost in overhead, and then of course there are some serious liability issues that make it impossible to run one on our own unless it's under a blanket company w/ insurance. An online tournament with the goal of making competitive tf2 accessible to the masses is the only way to go.

Let's stop thinking that the pinnacle of competitive TF2 is raising ten thousand dollars and sending 6 players to an EU lan for bragging rights. Let's try and setup something big on home soil that energizes the public player base to get more involved in comp, whether it be 6s or HL, it's all good.

I've got a question for some folks here that I've thought about for some time. I'm not trying to troll so please take this seriously. I am generally interested in what folks here think would happen given the following hypothetical situation.

Let's say hypothetically TF2 wasn't out yet but was set for release tomorrow. All the current weapons/items were in the game at the point of release. Be honest.. do you think ESEA/ETF2L (6s) would come up with the same exact ban lists? I'm sure some things would be banned.. but can anyone honestly say the lists would be exactly the same as they are today? How would "vanilla" be defined?

UGC started a couple highlander leagues in new geographies over the past year or so: Asian, South American, and Australian/New Zealand. We are familiar with a lot of folks in these communities and would be happy to pass some names along to TF.TV if they want to cover those areas. Main problem would be the language barrier obviously.

Wombraider = small potatoes

Too bad it continues to be eurocentric. Go for it! We would love to see another league take on global highlander in a serious manner rather than favoring a few countries. It solidifies our hard work making highlander a competitive format. Goodluck to any NA teams trying to compete there right now w/ this guy as your admin. Talk about a home town ref! And yes, your guys (meaning not you) did a great job with the community challenge but take a look at the timeline. Our first highlander season was in 2007. Your community challenge was in 2010. Good to see you euro's taking our great idea and expanding upon it :) My gripes aren't w/ ETF2L though. They are a solid league when you are not involved.

Again, attention overlord pretends he knows so much yet in reality knows very little. Sure your endless forum hours let you know which player was on which team on which day but you have no clue how things work in UGC. I am the most vocal, but there are many other admins who are part of the team. The whole esea "offer" and tragic's personal financially gratifying business proposal were all dealt with by fornaught & several of the other admins before I was even involved. Feel free to chat with him if you'd like, he'll give the same reasons plus more why those two ideas were not mutually beneficial to UGC. He doesn't have the desire or interesting posting on these clearly biased forums. Probably some good advice I will start taking. Enjoy!

Who are you? Sorry, but I don't have to prove a thing to you. Instead, how about you present some qualifications for your continued lectures on how to run a TF2 league.

lol you should talk about being greedy. offering us 30$ for a full league sponsorship Woulda been a great financial benefit to you though thats for sure.

So upset Hildreth, but I'm not going anywhere ;) You have no clue who's done what in UGC so best stick to your euro centric TF2 league. How are those HL numbers this season?