Personally, I cannot approve this blatant attempt to help the comptetitive TF2 community to get closer to a unification point with Valve with the undeniable intention to pave the way for TF2 to become an E-Sport.

Our ETF2L staff has, for years, been devoted to finally put an end to Team Fortress 2; especially the gamemode that is commonly known as "Highlander". Ever since our overlord and saviour Permzilla - may he find peace in his exile - (happy birthday) joined the admin ranks on a warm spring friday on 25th may 2012, it has been our mission to follow him in his quest to kill comp TF2. In these almost 7 years we have put countless hours of hard work into sabotaging the league and thus the community from the inside. I mean: we added ctf_turbine in Season 18, we played koth_reservoir in the Highlander Prem Grand Finals (god bless KkaltuU, possibly the best soldier we ever had)... But people would still sign up and enjoy the games. >.<
That's when we decided to cancel our sponsorship-deal with Tte-SPORTS, hoping the top talent would simply lose interest in competing. Sure, as of late our attempts have become more desperate and obvious, like the promotion of not one, but two weebs to Head Admins or simply rigging public polls in order to kill the best map to ever have lived: cp_badlands (press f)... But we still truly believe that we eventually - through more "progressive" mapchoices and especially through the absolutely random bans we are dishing out - will succeed and earn our place at the holy table of our predecessors Permzilla and SonnyBlack.
How dare you hazard this Greater Good after all that we have accomplished. We are soooo close, and here you stand, suggesting individual freedom, creativity and - worst of all- change, sigafoo?

Shame on you. SHAME... ON... YOU!11!1!!

who

Consider Danish prices though

Well, our main goal is to make sure people can play both in the HL tournament and the 6v6 tournament. Which means we can’t schedule games for both competitions at the same time.
As for server/stream and other technical issues, we are meeting several times before LAN (already have had one) in order to test run everything. Our staff will also be on site from Monday-Wednesday to make sure everything (and there is a high priority on gameservers) runs like it’s supposed to run by the time the matches start. It is an ambitious goal, but we are confident that we can achieve it. Planning has started as early as August, although nothing was even announced at the time.
As to people being late, we hope that our buffertimes will be enough to account for that and that the players will take this more seriously when they see how much effort we are putting into making sure everything works from our side.
Of course, in the end, there will be delays. Like you said: there hasn’t been a lan ever where there weren’t. What we can do is keep them to a minimum. Having a German in your tournament team helps with being on time ;P (Like my German DNA dictates, I loath delays/waiting)

We did come up with something very similar to this, don’t worry.
I wasn’t saying that everything was perfect and we are not going to chance anything. I was just saying that it’s possible there are no overlaps and delays (referring to Starkies concern) from a scheduling point. But you will agree that most points you mentioned as reasons for the mess last year were out of our control (ddos, player illness...).
We are not immune to criticism and feedback and will make (have already made) the necessary adjustments. (:

Only delays we had last year were from people showing up late for the first games on each day and from attacks on the network. Otherwise running the tournaments like this was not a problem.

We will have more timeslots this year for HL in our schedule to make it worth for people only playing 9v9

Cu@!

I know Americans aren't that great with countryflags, so I will have you know that Aoshi is from Belgium, not Germany ;-)

Just because people are picking this up and take it seriously: it is not true. I do not think I have ever even messaged Bluebunny in my life.

Not all heroes wear capes!

Apart from multiple logically flawed arguments you are presenting, the metaphor of the cactus up your arse is straight up not supporting your case. We did not tell you to do anything at all. On the contrary: we told you to simply do nothing. Here is the conversation you and I had, using your metaphor of choice:

Jedi: Hey Stinson, will it hurt if I shove this cactus up my ass?
DCS: Yes, Jedi, it will likely hurt like hell. You probably shouldn't do it!
Jedi: I will take my chances, I am shoving it all the way up there!

Aaaand then he complained that his anus hurts.

I can assure you our entire staff is highly un-triggered. The only thing that we feel from time to time is exhaustion from the fact that we have to deal with individuals, whose only intend seems to be to provoke/create and spread false rumors about / harass players and admins of the league.
We took almost a month to make a decision regarding this Jedi case. We surely were not triggered for 4 weeks straight.
Most of us are simply eating popcorn while reading this or have this thread open, occasionally pressing F5, while watching the latest episode of their favourite anime... :P

^These quotes are true.
Just to clarify a couple of things:

Jedi approached us, straight up asking if he would get banned if he re-uploaded this video, which was part of a harassment case from a couple of weeks back. I told him that he will very likely get banned, which he responded with: "I'll take my chances, the video is up btw." and then linked me the video in question.
He got told by another head admin (after we took quite some time to think about this- we did not ban him the next day) that he will be banned until he takes this video down.

So in summary: he was warned and well aware that his action could be punished with a ban, he got banned and he has the power to lift his own ban. By no means is this a permanent ban that we forced upon anyone. He chose to ignore our warning and he chooses to stay banned.

Cheers, DCS | ETF2L.org

\o/

In a world where this rule is a good and positively perceived way to tackle this "problem" of a superteam, I am not even sure if this would solve the issue.

Correct me if I am wrong, but over the course of the 16 mentioned ESEA seasons only one player has been on the team for every single one of them. From what I gather by scrolling thru this thread there are 20something players only from last and next iterations of ESEA, RGL and i63 on froyotechs roster. All of which won titles, thus can indubitably be counted as "one of the best players in North America". The only player (as far as I am aware) that won all of these seasons with ever-changing teammates is b4nny.
Most players from Froyo will simply opt to not play in the season, because they cba playing with - in their minds - B level players (or the for them unbeloved format), leaving b4nny to form another unbeatable team.
b4nny himself by being "too good" is the problem. But fortunately he can't and shouldnt be banned for that, so they are trying this approach

(All of this was written assuming having a superteam is a problem.)

(PS: Se7en is safe.)

The following reflects my personal opinion, not the one of ETF2L or any of its staffmembers:

I have been struggling with banning these two players up until fairly close to when we published the post. I am aware that it seems arbitrary to ban these two players for something that happened on twitter.
For me, what really pushed me over the edge is that not only did they not apologise, pred kept taking the piss on the previous thread. Degu, while posting a statement, also did not show a hint of remorse for his actions.
For the people thinking degu "only posted a picture": he also liked pred's tweet, showing that he did not only post a meme, he also openly supported the racist insult of his friend (acquaintance?). He made a conscious decision when he did both of those things.
Degu's ban is 2 months. One of which is the off-season. So we are effectively banning him from the league for one month, aka 3-4 weeks of ETF2L gameplay. He has been dropped by his Highlander team "Strong Opinions" before we even made our decision.
Pred's ban is not even 5 months long. I do not understand how some people think he is banned for 12 months (seriously, he is banned "until the end of the year" and it is august), which basically means: you are not allowed to play Season 31.
Pred has been labelled as a "leader" in "the bin"s roster. As such, although he is not actively playing most of the matches, he has the power to schedule matches, accept or deny mercs (for our NA friends: ringers), request demos.... etc. The team that gives a man like him these kind of powers cannot complain if they are held accountable for his actions. Of course I am aware that there are people on the team who do not support the way he behaved, but we also didn't scratch 100% of the earnings. From what I understand at least muuki (a teammate), if not others, still do not see how any of this warrants an action from our side.

Is this treatment harsh? Yeah. Have we not treated similar or related cases like this in the past? Likely. We do not deny that this case is a matter of setting a precedence. Sometimes it takes an additional shove to second-guess yourself. However, just because we made mistakes in the past, it doesn't mean we should keep doing them in the future. And it's not like we have deleted the two players forever: they have a chance to redeem themselves after 2 and 4 months.

The goal has to be to learn from our past mistakes. And this case, for numerous reasons, marks a change in the way we are looking at these behaviors.

Our statement:

http://etf2l.org/official-statement/

I don’t think it’s necessarily about expecting a massive show. It’s about the common sense to actually bother enough to answer people who are literally willing to put hundreds of bucks of their private money on the line to basically enslave themselves for 4 days at LAN + preparation. It’s about respect for the person on the other side, who has experience in helping at events like these and give enough fucks to say „Yes, we are gonna need your help, appreciate it!“ or „Nah man, we good.“
I feel ya, Getawhale

Toxicity, racism and even disrespect is intolerable.
That being said, punishing people for a comment, a post or a match on third party websites or even a public server is harsh. Of course it depends what kind of comment it was, but up until a certain point, you gotta have a thicker skin.
It is 100% correct to keep your website clean in order to preserve the experience for other users. And yes, people who trashtalk in pubs tend to do that in lobbies as well. But myeehh...

That being said, TF2Center is a good website and a good service... it's what we as users make out of it that makes it cancer. If there are no decent games because gamers are just trolling, guess what: its not TF2Center's fault. MN as has a "distinct" character, his admins are a bit... antsy... when it comes to punishments, especially bans. But you know that and you can just not be an ass to people. Want to use his website? Fine... Don't want to use it? Your call. But don't complain about the system if you are one of the people disrespecting it.

Unpopular opinion.