AU/NZ Highlander - Season 5

Before we get started, we’d just like to welcome everybody back, and thank you for returning for our season! We hope you have all enjoyed the holiday break, and are ready for 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.

Each region will feature only one division, however we are open to splitting the divisions if we get enough teams to justify doing so. As always, the Swiss System will make a return to conduct our Regular Season, with our Playoffs using the Double Elimination system. 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 better idea of where they sit relative to everyone else. By pairing teams based on their season seedings for their first match, it better reinforces the admin seeding placement.

While the prior season’s playoffs brought in a BO5 Grand Final, we will be reverting to a BO3 Grand Final with one half per map for this season. The Regular Season will feature two maps per week yet again, however this time around we are cutting our total amount of maps down from 10 to 9. We are introducing this change to repeat more of the maps you like, and less of the ones you don’t.

We heard your feedback during the season and in the poll, and there are a plethora of changes we are introducing this season. While we cannot fit all of the details here, rest assured they will be linked here and will come in further detail closer to signups closing. But while on the topic of signups closing, February the 1st will be the last day of signups, with 11:59PM being the cut-off.

Continuing with the theme of feedback and changes, we have heavily discussed the possibility of changing the current Highlander roster limit from 15 to 17 (back to the original amount). To give some reference to this situation, we originally changed our limit from 17 to 15 to hopefully prosper a higher level of competition on the top end of our league, whilst also encouraging people to make their own teams, or otherwise be more committed. Whilst we see and understand some of the issues with the current limit, we feel that the current limit is objectively better overall.

However, we dropped the ball when originally instituting this limit, and thus are going to be making a push towards better introducing newer players to Highlander, an area where we feel we have fallen flat. Part of this process will be introducing more guides, improving the looking for team or players processes, along with an announcement. Our first off-season tournament will be focused at introducing newer players to Highlander, and while the details for this tournament are not confirmed yet, rest assured we will be working towards improving Highlander in our region.

You can refer to the Guides category of our Discord to see an updated list of server providers. We would like to thank every server provider, without your generosity 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.

Please remember that you NEED to be recording POV demos, and holding onto those POV demos for at least 3 months after the season. Failure to present the requested POV/s upon request by an administrator will now result in a 6 month ban. Treat this elevation in treatment as the last straw, and we hope this will encourage everybody to keep their POV demos recording.

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 organizations, we have done this to offer further opportunity to other organizations to cast and promote games, as we really just want to help promote you and your organization through our platform, rather than being unaware of it until the last minute.

We would also like to give some thanks to KritzKast, our approved casting organization for Season V. We now consider any organization other than KritzKast unapproved, meaning they will need both team captains to approve, along with admin approval. Approved casting organizations can cast whichever game without the need for team captains to approve. We’ve instituted this change as we feel there are little to no justifiable reasons for not wanting coverage, and by making this change we can streamline the process of getting casts organized.

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