MaRin is such a beast

some lovely stuff out from Niels, but not to be for the team, way too many mistakes

At least my pick 'em is looking good right now. Tomorrow should be a good one

Man, that was so disappointing. It was looking so good for OG there. Hopefully they can bring it back #believe

should be some good games coming out, got tickets for the quarter finals in London so definitely keeping a close eye on who gets through.

surprisingly swift (and good!) result out from C9 there today

If you have rental PCs upload your demos somewhere tonight. Once you return the PCs you will not be able to get the demos back. It'd be appreciated if invite teams certainly kept their demos due to interest in making frag vids. These plays are too good to be lost!

pls nerdrage <3

You can view which teams have currently signed up with what players here (click TF2 on the left, then teams). It won't tell you any other information though (like classes). There are still a lot of teams missing also as they need to sign up still.

We're providing mumble servers. It's up to the teams what they want to do although quality-wise I can't see discord being a preferred option.

Less than a week to go! woohoo

A tournament schedule can be found here. Please note this is subject to change before and during the event.

Please can I remind everyone to register their team for the tournament before the event as you can see the sign ups will close early on Friday. If your team does not have at least 6 players on the roster at this point they will automatically be dropped from the tournament. I cannot create and re-add full teams after this time.

A reminder from my earlier post if you want to keep up to date with what's going on when at the event...

Event Communication
We will be using discord as the primary service for the event. If you don't know what it is yet then don't worry, all will become clear. It's basically going to be like using IRC, but nicer. Please only join this if you are attending the event.

1) Create an account https://discordapp.com
2) Click https://discord.gg/0SV05JPHBUVmNbNb

Your team will be set up with a channel on here in due course, and you will be able to see a general channel for announcements and discussion.

A Steam group has been set up as a secondary form of communication, mainly for general announcements. I recommend that most people join this if you want to keep roughly up to date on general scheduling.
Group here

Spread the word!

Ultiduo tournament
Sunday, 8 pm, for funzies and ice cream
Double elimation, random seed, BO1 throughout, final BO3, max 16 teams [estimated run time of ~2 hours total]
Weekend spectators are allowed to play in this if you can find a kind person to loan their computer to you :)

Due to the team limit i'd recommend signing up now. Please only sign up if you intend to play. I will keep a list of reserves if teams do not turn up. Your registration will be confirmed by turning up at 7.45 pm in the community games Steam chat room. I'll post nearer the time with that.

Sign up here and i'll transfer them over to the community games tournament sign up.

Current planned end approx. 5.30 pm (starting @ 2 pm)

I don't think it's odd to avoid being one of the first as it's a position of risk. I'd be more inclined if this wasn't a once-a-year event under the biggest spotlight. I think we should be adapting, which is why ideally i'd have liked to have seen more play up to now but that's not really happened. I'm just listening to the chorus line and if that avoids the crazy snowballing that this enables then i'm happy enough.

The medi-gun ruling will be forced by plugin (...unless sm starts breaking everything) so that's going to stop that currently (using tf_dropped_weapon_lifetime).

Is there a way to allow pickups other than the medi guns? If so, it's what i'd prefer to do but i'm not sure there is currently (?) - you probably know more than I do.

Largely because teams haven't been. There's less than a month now and I was hoping to really have a wider range of experiences and more play to review but certainly on the upper end there has been very little trickling through. Allowing it was looking to be a very unfavourable thing and given the time, money, and effort into this event it doesn't quite seem worth upsetting things.

Medi gun pickups will be banned for this event.

Upper bracket finals were map picked, it's the round before it (UR3) that wasn't (and where you played froyo). The upper and lower rounds were on the same map sets or picks, it's just after your loss you're into round 4 then which had picks. I'm considering map picking for UR3, but not lower 3, as it's only two matches to keep tabs on there and they should be big games. There is an overnight break before UR3 this time so it shouldn't cause any delays and messing around.

I don't want to have all play offs as set maps as I don't think that will go down well and as said, luck can play a bigger part with the draw. Too many games and too time intensive to do picks from the start though. The number of games drops significantly after round 3, and theoretically none of the big teams drop out before round 4 which is why it was run as it was last year. But yeah, UR3 sounds like a decent shout for picking.

Basically, all that whining and complaining about a 10 am final has resulted in this. We've been given our own freedom here, in exchange for not being on the big event stage. There are the only two elements you should notice: timings, and the finals being located around our production area and not on a big stage. Everything else will remain the top notch stream of awesomeness you're used to by now ;)

I will be putting a rough schedule out soon but the main features will be that all group games are Friday + first two rounds of elimination (BO1). From Saturday onwards all games will be BO3, but stopping fairly early on Saturday to enable potential finalists to have plenty of rest and make any preparations they would like. Consolation final on Sunday morning followed by the finals Sunday afternoon. A BO5 is possibly on the table but it may only go ahead with certain finalist combinations as we're stuck with time where players have earlier flights back.

We're looking at a finals time of around 14:30 BST currently (although again, that's subject to change).

lmao