AU/NZ Highlander - Season 4

Welcome back everyone! We hope you all have enjoyed the 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 for over a year now! 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 4 sees some major changes, another new map, multiple divisions, 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 page). We would like to take this chance to welcome in cp_warmfrost, a classic pinnacle 5CP Highlander map!

Highlander in AUS/NZ will now feature two divisions, Premier and Main. The two divisions will only be active if we reach the minimum amount of teams, this minimum being 14, 16+ teams is the ideal amount we would like to reach this goal was not reached, so we are proceeding with one division. Premier and Main will now feature different tournament systems, Premier will be using Round Robin, with Main using the Swiss System. Until we know we have enough teams, everyone will need to sign up to the Main division. League Administrators will work with trusted community members to appropriately seed teams this season.

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.

Thanks to much of the feedback we have received via our end of season poll, we have been able to make some Highlander specific changes. One of the big feedback points we kept getting was that we should stick with Highlander as our main focus. Because of this, we are making some crucial format and rule changes to improve the commitment for weekly matches. The biggest, and perhaps most controversial change we are making is introducing a second map for each weekly match. To keep this similar in terms of the time requirement for each match, both maps will only be a 1 half scenario, meaning Payload and Attack Defend each team only Attacks and Defends once. For CP, it will remain a First to 5 and 30 minute timelimit, KOTH will now be a First to 3. We hope by making this change, along with the improvements to our scoring and bracket systems, that it will encourage more commitment and more competitive play.

Starting this season, we have assigned specific staff members to be Divisional Administrators. A list of all staff members can be found at the bottom of this page, but your Divisional Administrators can be seen below:

Division Administrators:

• Eternal
• Kodyn
• Michael

You can refer to the Server Guide page linked at the bottom 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. On that page, you can find a list of our configs, and at the bottom of that page you can find help with Server Administration and some common questions.

After much review and feedback from our community, we are loosening Mercenary Rules, but lowering the overall Roster Limit. Please ensure you have enough Substitute Players to last you for the entire season; each team can have a **maximum of 15 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