It's not December 2017 anymore and on the homepage of the event they're saying that i62 will be in less than couple months. So yes, a 2 year old source is wrong currently.

Already loving that Heavy to mid with Steak, Fists of Steel and Natascha combo

Or have this instead which is the official statement from Valve
http://store.steampowered.com/news/22883/

Although money gambling itself is a slightly different thing when it's not tied to a string of pixels that make a cosmetic in-game item so that would be fine, but personally I'm not sure at all who would bother to go and do something like that anymore now.

Are you even aware of why it got closed in the first place?

As long as you have TFTrue installed then you're pretty much set with whitelists, at least both ETF2L and UGC configs use the command "tftrue_whitelist_id" which will fetch the most up to date whitelist automatically from whitelist.tf when executing configs, so I would assume that it does the same with ESEA too, but I could be wrong on that part.

It's been on my mind for a good while to do this change as there was a really noticeable difference with how the fixtures are generated towards the end of the season and how teams potentially could unfairly get to playoffs due to default wins or bye weeks (Very unlikely however due to Tiebreaker score giving teams with default wins the worse score), more so than in Mid or Open tier even.
The low signup numbers for High did force out for us to do something different than a regular Swiss System but instead of making them all into 3 High groups that would run in Round Robin, and to make playoffs within those really hard to do, we opted to rather divide the top High and regular High teams apart from each other to give teams an incentive to climb the divisions once again like in the past.

But to answer your question, we would have done this change at some point in this year anyways for sure, but the low signup numbers for High now gave us a chance to release it out earlier.

There have been no wildcards for Premiership either in the past 3 years, so neither are there any for Divisions. Instead of wildcards, teams have been requesting admins to allow extensions to their matches but we have wanted to keep this as something that only Premiership teams could do within actual reasons to be unavailable to play. Exceptions may occur, but do not expect anymore to play your Week 2 officials while other teams are playing Week 5 matches.

This is also because of Lego requesting for it while redpandas.tf also requested to be moved up, we will still go through the rest of the tier change requests later today and publish the finalized tiers as soon as we can.

As for the whole naming thing, we can definitely consider on how changing it up to match the previous regular names. Division 2 could easily be called as High again, but the problem comes around when we would need to come up with a name for Division 1. While it could be called as Top High by some people, it still doesn't fit enough properly in my opinion along with the current names.

There's also the thing where people remember Divisions actually having the round robin system played in them, which reflects well enough for how Prem, Div 1 and Div 2 will be ran in this season now, while Mid and Open are known for having the swiss system played in them.

Windifference 3 would be better in this case so that matches would still continue at 5-3 when the losing team can actually still put up a fight for a golden cap at least, but would already end at 5-2.

Is drinking alcohol allowed at the venue?

While I do agree that the system yak proposed is definitely better than what we had planned, it would not only be a second time we have changed the entire bracket system in a really short time to confuse a lot of people out playing in the qualifiers but also happening in only about 6 hours before the matches themselves would start, not everyone has the time to keep up with sudden changes such as this when people might as well only now have heard of SVIFT dropping out of the season, for example.

It would be even more dumb right now to tell some of the teams and the TFTV production team taking part in making the qualifiers today a pleasant watch only to know that their matches that they have scheduled and organized by themselves will not be played after all the preparation put in just because some teams in the qualifiers gave the admins none to bad results during the sign-up process as we always have highly recommended for teams in qualifiers to do.

With all that said, the feedback that we have received so far for the entire qualifiers is not completely going to waste, I do now agree myself that putting both of the two lower bracket teams against each other on the first round is a big disappointment and will very likely not happen in the future anymore.

I don't think there's an issue that there is a Highlander LAN existing in Europe again, but! The bigger issue here is that people were awaiting and hoping for this to be another similar LAN just like the Swedish one back in November after hearing about all the rumours of this happening in Denmark. And to have the theme of the event unveiled to be around HL exclusively is just a disaster for a really big amount of people.

At least now I don't need to feel bad about dodging this one.

It's legit trash now if you ask from me, you still have 15hp less with it and now you also only get slowed down if you even get hit by a ball so you are still well able to attack and shoot back against the scout, instead of getting stunned completely which was the biggest problem of Sandman before.

Would want to try ESEA again, preferably as sub but I don't mind either

Got 2nd and 1st place in ETF2L high in Season 26 and 27, and also played in prem last season

I don't like how the class is getting buffed constantly one way or another without any recent nerfs being actually present to it