We have received a few questions internally from other staff members, along with community members as to the schedule and what is happening for Playoffs. Playoffs will follow the Double Elimination standard, essentially meaning that there will be an Upper Bracket, and a Lower Bracket. To qualify for entrance into Playoffs, you will need to end up in a Top 8 seeding at the end of Week 8 of the Regular Season.

Badges

Anyone outside of the Top 8 will be done for the season, and will receive a Participant Badge at the end of the entire season. If you are skillful enough to be in the Top 8, but do not finish in the Third, Second or First places, you will also receive a Participant Badge at the end of the entire season. If you do finish in the Top 3, you will receive your respective Placement Badges at the end of the entire season.

Double Elimination

Double Elimination explained simply is just an Upper (Winners) Bracket and Lower (Losers) Bracket, where the initial Playoffs match decides which bracket you are placed into. In terms of who you are up against, we take your Team's Seeding at the end of the Regular Season and ingest it into the following format to create matches:

Schedule

Week 1
Upper Bracket Round 1 (can be played Monday - Friday)

Week 2
Lower Bracket Round 1 (can be played Monday - Wednesday)
Upper Bracket Round 2 (can be played Monday - Wednesday)
Lower Bracket Round 2 (can be played Thursday - Saturday)

Week 3
Lower Bracket Round 3 (can be played Monday - Wednesday)
Upper Bracket Round 3 {UB Semi Finals}(can be played Monday - Wednesday) / Best of 3 Maps, 1 Half per Map
Lower Bracket Round 4 {LB Semi Finals} (can only be played Thursday - Saturday) / Best of 3 Maps, 1 Half per Map

Week 4
Upper Bracket Round 4 {Grand Finals} (can only be played Monday - Friday) / Best of 3 Maps, First to 2 Halve Wins per Map

Maps + Picks & Bans

You and the opposing team will have a list of maps to pick and ban.

You will have 8 maps from the Regular Season to choose from. For Upper or Lower Bracket Finals, this will be a Best of 3 maps, so you will be following the picking below:

Home Team Bans
Away Team Bans
Home Team Picks
Away Team Picks
Away Team Bans
Home Team Picks

You will have 5 maps from the Regular Season to choose from. For other Playoffs matches, there will only be one map picked out of a list selected by us, and the Pick & Bans are as follows:

Home Team Bans
Away Team Bans
Home Team Bans
Away Team Bans

Administration during Playoffs

If you have any issues during Playoffs, you need to contact us immediately, failure to do so in certain scenarios will result in penalties. If you know your team cannot participate in Playoffs for any reason, contact us prior to the first round.

Administrators will be following each and every match closely, ensuring Match Details are confirmed and the results are submitted correctly and truthfully. Certain Playoffs matches will be casted by our Official Channel, so please follow our rules when participating in one of these casted matches, and change your name to your username on the league website.

Welcome to Week 7 of Respawn League Season 1. Please make sure you're checking your alerts and using your match comms to communicate with the other leaders.

The map being played this week is Ashville (koth_ashville_rc1).

If you have any problems or queries regarding this week's matches or the league in general, you can visit our Discord on the right of the page and seek admin support.

• You can download the map by clicking here.
• You can see the map schedule here.

(If you're having trouble setting up a server, you can use this guide for a guideline.)

I just wanted to put a quick disclaimer here. Citadel (built by ozfortress' /dev/zero) was intended as a platform for leagues to build their format off of, and does not have native support for everything and anything in regards to Competitive Formats, so there will be modifications coming in the future that will affect the way Points are calculated for teams, including new variables such as Map / Round points. This is still in the works and is not something easy to wrap our minds around, so we will do our best to improve the way we do scoring for Regular Seasons.

How Points are Calculated Currently
Just to clear up any further misconceptions, the way the system currently works is you gain 4 points for winning the entire match, regardless of maps / halves won, 2 for a 'Draw' which is there as a technicality, with it making no impact on matches, and 0 points for losses. As for how we run forfeit points, if you have been forfeited against, say the enemy team didn't show up, you are not penalised. You can reschedule your match with 4 hours notice prior to the official without penalty. If it is a mutual / technical forfeit, you will gain 2 or 0 points, depending on the situation. If you have forfeited against a team, you gain zero points.

With that out of the way, we have brought a series of new and interesting features and changes to Citadel to better improve its functionality for multiple regions.

Significant Changes to Citadel:
- Added Timezone support, courtesy of 200 for allowing me to commit
these changes.
- The bracket line display on the Season 1 page has been adjusted to
only show lines on hover, to avoid this insanity:
(image courtesy of 200, I believe its NA Ready Steady Pan).
- Added Logs.tf link to player profiles.
- Added ozfortress link to player profiles.
- Added UGC link to player profiles.
- Changed the 'captain' tag to be capitalised, it is also now Yellow.
- 'About & Contact' has been truncated to 'About'.
- 'Help & Resources' has been truncated to 'Help'.
- The 'Rules' page under About has been updated to reflect changes.
- The 'Credits' page under About has been updated.
- There is no longer a need for https://getstarted.respawnleague.com/,
as we are incorporating this into our new Support Center under Help. The content in this area is WIP.
- The 'Server Administration' page has been changed to 'Server Guide'
and has been updated with more information.
- The 'Map Schedule' page now has our FastDL / Maps archive linked.
There will be more updates coming for Citadel in the near future, with more new and exciting features.

A Quick Update on Badges
Badges for Season 1 AUS / NZ are being added to the game, hopefully before the end of the season, but we are at the mercy of Valve on this one. Big shoutout to Eric Smith for his help with this process, and providing us all the information we needed.

Continued Poor Behaviour, Disrespectful towards Administrators, Inappropriate Usage of Discord accounts

theyhatemebuttheyhatedjesus#0448 - 390474359665328129
Mute_God#5795 - 489014427199209473
30/09/2018 - 29/09/2019

The user above has shown continued poor behaviour throughout the community, not just in the Respawn League. As such, Mute God is being barred from all Respawn League services, for a period of 12 months from the date of their Discord bans.

Should ANY team OR user be found housing or aiding this user in circumventing this process in ANY way, they will receive the same punishment. Respawn League will not tolerate continued poor behaviour or toxicity, and while we understand that there is a considerable amount of unhealthy banter / chat that is considered as normal within our region, we believe that making these steps will ensure a positive change and growth.

Mirrored Ban: Inappropriate Account Usage & Historical Cheating

Lazz on a Vacation - STEAM_0:1:97884043
Lazz - STEAM_0:0:242256317

The user above was found on an active roster without seeking permission to play by the Administrative team due to their existing ban on ozfortress, their use of an alternate account and a VAC ban on their primary account. As such, we are mirroring the full length of the ozfortress ban, which after this period their ban will be reviewed. This ban covers League Participation only, with no other affect on their access to other Respawn League services.

Aim on Point will not receive any penalty for housing this user, as their Captain was unaware of the user's ban status. Should ANY team, whether in Player Pool or Active Roster, be found housing this user for the duration of their ban, will incur penalty onto all other players on the team.

Avoiding our Bans system is something we do not encourage, as you can see above.

Map Pool / Schedule

In order from Week 1 - 12
pl_upward
koth_product_rc9
cp_gullywash_final1
pl_swiftwater_final1
pl_badwater_pro_v12
cp_steel
koth_ashville_rc1
pl_borneo

Playoffs Bo3, with Maps chosen from Regular Season Map Pool.

Yup, we did it. We are officially marking the commencement of our first ever season, RLHL Season 1 for the Australia / New Zealand region. So as you can expect, there is going to be a lot of information here, so please make sure to read this as it will answer many of the common questions we have been receiving. We are using Citadel to run our league website. Citadel is a framework built by ozfortress' /dev/zero, which allows for simple and elegant league websites with high reliability and uptime. Without his amazing contributions with this project, we wouldn't be able to bring you something as quickly as we have. We are open to any and all suggestions, and we intend to cater towards hardcore veterans, newcomers, 6v6 players and returning Highlander players.

As of this announcement, we have 15 teams ready to play in Week 1. There will be one division, our Open division. In future seasons, if we have roughly 20 - 24 teams total, we will split the divisions based on team skill, however for now we are content with one division.

You will be able to book servers from our Discord later in the season, as our booker bot is still in development. Once it is available, you will be able to do /book in the #book-server channel. More information on this will be released as it comes. For now, if you need a match server, the following providers have our configs. If you need help with Administration, please visit our Server Administration page.

• Qixalite
• ozfortress
• CPU.TF

While signups are now locked, you can still recruit players and join teams. If you are looking for a team, you can check our Forums or go to the #lf-team channel on our Discord. If you are looking for players for your established team, don't fret, you can still get them on your Player Pool by inviting them, then you can request a Transfer. Admins will approve your request at their earliest convenience. All transfers are accepted and those players can be used in the following weeks, but not the week of the request.

Please ensure you have enough substitute players. The minimum required players is 9, with the maximum limit being 15. We feel this is a good enough amount without allowing too much roster riding.

All Semi Finals and Grand Finals matches that can be streamed, will be through CappingTV with a combination of experienced casters from both ends. I doubt this will change, but eventually we would like to start a casting organization for Highlander.

Seedings, Week 1 Matches and other Fixtures are released Sunday morning. If you have any issues with this, ping us in #support.

Good evening all,

With signups closing in the next hour or so, I wanted to make a post with more information regarding Week 1, Pre Week 1 Seedings, and what not.

Seedings

Seedings are not important until Playoffs as they do not dictate anything until then. This however does not mean you will get in with 8 losses. The criteria to get into Playoffs is documented further on the Rules page. The TLDR version is Wins / Losses along with some other criteria.

Match Generation

Matches for Week 1 are generated Sunday morning. To start organizing your matches, you will need to use Match Comms, and put screenshots of any communications that pertain to the match details, from other chat clients, in the Match Comms as well.

We're going to be busy

With Week 1 just a few days away, we want to reassure you that we are committed to doing anything and everything in our power and ability to solve any issues in a timely manner. If you find / have an issue, please send it through the #support channel, or to an Administrator. We want to remind you that some of this is new to us, and as such we ask that you are patient when trying to organize or resolve anything.

30 slot Mumble servers @ Patreon for $3.50/month

Finally, if you want a 30 Mumble server to be used for anything, not just teams, or you don't like Discord much, we are providing 30 slot Mumble servers on a dedicated box for $3.50/month through our Patreon. This works as a subscription based service, and also helps support running costs of the league. Since it is a subscription service, if the subscription is cancelled the server is unassigned, no data or content is lost, as we do not reuse servers.

Update on Badges

Finally, we are part of the way through having the badges added to the game, we have received a response and are being advised as to what we need to do to assign badges to participants after they are added to the game. With this in mind, I would like to announce the Respawn League Founder's Badge. This badge is given out to everyone who participates in Season 1 of Highlander, for both regions. This means that Asia will get the badge in their first season, along with the other badges.

Cheers,
core.