First things first. "Why is this coming out five hours earlier?" I won't be able to do what needs to be done then, so I need to do it now. Hence why the article's being released.

Now. This is the last article of the season. There will not be a Week 8 article, partially due to what I'll chat about in a second, and partially due to reasons beyond my control in regards to next week. So let's go over some thanks.

Firstly and foremostly, thank you to mana and the teamfortresstv staff for allowing me to do this. It's been an incredibly positive experience, and I would do it again in a flash if I could.

For roster information and the such, thanks to the following people:
'92 Dream Team - Space Ghost's Coffee.
Acoomuma - Giraffe.
Ban Paals - Metawe and The Melon Lord.
Burnham And Root - Digresser and Mario.
Chill Penguins - Hard Ass Johnny, monkey66, and Daynife.
Corn Ducks - Daynife.
Curse Of Knowledge - Karl.
Dedoris - Alto.
Memento Mori - Triton.
Secret team - Lennon.
sheen and the ultra lords - Pellovley and Jackster.
The One Moment - Digresser.
The Pyongyang Pyonggang - Tiptoes.
Wartortle Warriors - Gamemaster

Now, for a different tone. There's a lot of moving parts to this, a lot of things I just want to blurt out and say first. But here goes nothing. This will be the final of this series of articles that I will be releasing on this site. I wish I could be less specific than that, because that statement is far too open for what I'm trying to convey. The straight of it is, there will be no further Highlander coverage on this website going forward.

At the risk of sounding entitled or obnoxious: Don't get mad at anyone, please. This decision was not made against my will, and nor was I blindsided by the information. I am perfectly fine with how the decision was made, why it was made, and how it was conveyed to me. I have had projects on the backburner for about 1.5 seasons now that can only come to fruition now that these articles are being laid to rest.

I don't know if I'll be continuing any sort of Highlander coverage content on the UGC forums. I suppose we'll see when the time comes. The end of this series is obviously sad, at least for me, but the world keeps spinning.

With that said, I'd like to thank a few people especially for the continued support they've given me over the time I've done this. Mana and enigma obviously, for allowing me to post Highlander stuff on what may have been perceived as a board with a distaste of Highlander. I'd like to thank Digresser, brick, Grizz, Katsy, Sekibanki, Turbo Cop and Kresnik for all contributing actual parts to various articles, or even just looking it over and offering opinions.

I'm glad I was about to have this experience, and share it with you all, and I'm glad I could interact with so many fantastic people both as a direct result of this article, and due to the doors it opened going forward. I hope that I was able to bring you enjoyment or insight, and hope that going forward, we can see more people stepping up to contribute, be it here, ETF2L, UGC, ESEA, wherever. This whole rollercoaster ride started with a TFTV PM to mana asking if I could write about Highlander and post it here. You'd be surprised how open this community is to people wanting to help.

That's about it. Thanks for having me.

Does wartortle now have more players without gold/plat experience than with?

Defeat can sometimes be a bitter pill to swallow. Yet, after how we played tonight, it should be anything but. Each and every one of you showed everyone tonight what it meant to be a Wartortle Warrior. We may have lost in match points, we were not defeated morally. The rounds that were taken off us were not given to the other team. We made them fight and grind out each and every step towards our final capture point. Just the same, we fought them to their last time and again, including the two rounds we got off them.

The game, as close as it was, could have gone either way. A reality in which Squirtle Squad was victorious was very close to being real. And, by refining our strengths, and settling our weaknesses, it will be a reality in future weeks.

First IM and Open coverage is removed, and now highlander...wonder what enigma has planned.

Thanks brooky for these always great write-ups! The quality of them has definitely improved greatly since you started and I'm glad to hear you are going to be working on more great things. Hopefully some sort of summary will continue on the UGC Forums with the end of this series, would be sad to see no more HL coverage anywhere.

Highlander is the most popular gamemode. It sucks that we're getting less coverage. Don't get me wrong, 6s is a good gamemode and all, but Highlander appeals to bigger audience. I appreciate the writeups you have been doing. I've read them every single week. I wonder what the real reason was to dis-allowing these writeups to continue.

a bit silly that theyre cutting all discussion of an entire competitive format, but whatever i guess

good writeup, you will be missed :(

Sad to see you go. I really enjoyed reading your articles. Hopefully, someone will pick this up next season on. Thanks for all of your work.

let these keep getting posted here where the admins dont delete everything

why intentionally shrink the coverage of comp tf2?

Rumor has it that Spades Slick is playing in place of hungry for the rest of the season on qaK...

Rumor has it that Spades Slick is always going to be a meme.

Without speaking for enigma or tftv, I believe the idea behind removing Open, IM, and HL coverage is that all of the energy of the tftv writers can be increasingly focused on Invite/Prem, which means more of the beat articles about roster transactions and more *cough* consistent *cough* articles about Invite, etc. That's more esports-ish which is good, but it's less community focused which is less so. I'm honestly not sure whether I personally agree with it or not, but that does seem to be the long term plan. Make of it what you will.

So are they having the people who wrote the highlander/open/IM articles make the Invite/Prem ones? Because otherwise I can't see how getting rid of these articles will make more Invite/Prem content be made.

are people allowed to post unofficial self-written updates as regular threads, even if the ability to post them as news articles is no longer available?

im assuming they mean that it will make the invite writeups seem more hype, since before open and invite got the same amount of attention (if anything open got more since theres more teams and the rankings are more flux)

If this is their train of thought, it is demonstrably useless to do so. HLTV, the csgo community news/forum page (with over 800,000 registered accounts) covers more than just T1 CSGO (~invite/prem 6s) and is immensely successful.

I can say that something like that is indeed correct, at least for me. I'm looking into possible ways to continue HL coverage in some fashion, though.

I'm confused Brooky, are TF.TV cutting all HL coverage or not?

On TF.TV we can't even get a newswriter to write about Prem week in week out, I wanted to this season but stuff that is more important to me got in the way. I like writing and if I had the time I'd do write ups on every league, every division in every gamemode but I cannot.

Newswriting aside, maybe TF.TV should focus on newer and better methods to create news content, perhaps look to produce more live shows or make videos? Resources are scarce enough I doubt that can be achieved without some $$$ behind it.

I am also obviously against restricting coverage of an entire format, I always found Enigma accommodating when I approached him about covering HL, if there is a U-turn here, whatever the motivations are it's wrong, considering TF.TV was made to be the "Central Hub of TF2".

My understanding is that they are cutting it. The Highlander subforums are gone and I believe that highlander & everything that isn't Invite and Prem 6s no longer is allowed articles. Not sure about casts, but given teamfortress.tv's relationship with EVL lately, I don't suspect those casts will be highly featured.

I think brooky was referring to the possibility of him doing writeups on UGC, or maybe /truetf.

It's a really unfortunate decision and, as you said, means that competitive Team Fortress 2 no longer has a central hub.

I thought I made it pretty clear in our conversation I made it pretty clear that the Highlander forum was merged into the General forum @Digresser

How is that different from what I said?

Sure wish there was a place where intelligent discussion of the Highlander format was welcome. Or that there was ample intelligent discussion of the Highlander format to begin with...

Sad to see these write-ups go. It's gonna be even harder for me to keep track of the scene now...

After a little talking with various people, some form of HL content will continue by me, although on a different medium.

Considering I was kicked from WW's roster I'm probably not their main pyro.