AU/NZ Highlander - Season 3

Welcome back everyone! We hope you all have enjoyed the small break, and are ready to jump back into another season of Highlander. Respawn would also like to take this chance to thank everyone who has participated in our league thus far, without the support of this incredible community we wouldn't be able to do this. As always, if you've been around a while or are completely new to Competitive TF2, we've got you covered!

Respawn's AUS/NZ Highlander Season 3 sees some map updates, a new map, a heap of rule changes, website fixes, bracket modifications and more. An updated list of our Maps for each format can be seen on our Map Schedule page (link at the bottom of this post). We would like to take this chance to welcome in koth_proside_rc3, a Pro Version of the popular KOTH map Lakeside! This map has been authored by gobitoe, and we feel it is an interesting take and change on a map we all know and love.

Each format will feature one division, however we are open to splitting the divisions if we get enough teams to do so. As always, we follow the ever famous Swiss System to conduct our Regular Season and Playoff Season. You can expect to be up against your Sister Team for your first match this season (1st vs 2nd, 3rd vs 4th and so on). We do this to provide a fair entry into the season, and it gives teams a good indication of where everyone is at, not to mention it tends to more fairly dictate the rest of the season as it isn't solely reliant on the seeding we give each team.

Starting this season, Highlander Grand Finals will be a BO5 map scenario, with 1 half per map. We have seen the criticism with BO3 maps and BO3 halves per map, we feel this gives teams more opportunity to play to their fullest potential by allowing more of each team's favoured maps. Along with this, a few matches within Playoffs will be changed to be a BO3 instead of a BO1 map, BO3 halves scenario, these changes have been introduced to promote a fairer level of competition at each stage.

As a note: we will be randomly requesting POV Demos during this season to ensure players are recording demos. Please, please make sure you are recording them, if you are not sure how to, there are hundreds of tutorials, or feel free to ask in our Discord.

Starting this season, we have assigned specific staff members to be Managers for each region and format. A list of these people can be found on our Staff List, any staff member will be able to help you resolve any issues, we have just spread the load a bit.

You can refer to the #how-to-get-a-server channel of our Discord to see an updated list of server providers. We would like to thank every server provider, without your generousness we wouldn't be able to continue. In that channel, you can find a list of our configs, and at the bottom of this post you can find a Server Guide which can also help with Server Administration and some common questions.

We will be tightening up Mercenary Rules again, so please ensure you have enough Substitute Players to last you for the entire season; each team can have a maximum of 17 players on the Active Roster.

We have also changed our rules and conditions around Match Casting, a link to the post can be found below. You will typically find all match coverage on our official channels. We have not tightened this up purely because of specific organisations, we have done this to offer further opportunity to other organisations to cast and promote games, as we really just want to help promote you and your organisation through our platform, rather than being unaware of it until the last minute.

Helpful Links (click on them)

Map Schedule | Key Dates | Match Casting | Whitelist | Competitive Rules | Community Rules
Transfers | Player Pool vs Active Rosters | Roster Lock
Server Guide | Staff List