Hildreth — As is the pattern in Europe, in particular ETF2L we like to switch the gamemode so we play TF2 all year round and have something for everyone to enjoy. Now as it reaches the late part of Autumn, where the leaves are as shallow and lifeless as quad ‘s face and the 6v6 season is reaching it’s pinnacle (spoiler – Epsilon will win) it is time for the Highlander fans to shine. So I say to all you unlock loving, cart-pushing, Pyro / Spy players to sharpen your tools and get ready for what we hope is our best, most competitive season of Highlander yet. Meanwhile someone has donated cash prizes for the winners – to find out more read the rest of the article.
Some say if you see into his eyes you turn to stone and that he had a playboy magazine in his hands when he was born. All we know is he is called Mr X and he has lovingly donated 2,500 Euros in prize money for this season’s Highlander. However Mr X is a benefactor who demands perfection, who demands entertainment and the thought that Frederick “TheSucker” Dahlberg is living off of his money every day feels him with vile contempt and anger, which is why we have decided to appease our great generous donator and spice up the competition. We will still run a 6 team season with 6 weeks of regular season to complete their matches (1 week for wildcards and catchups) but we will also decide the overall winner of the Premiership with a two-week playoff format to run just before Christmas meaning a Grand Final to decide the winner of the €1,035 for 1st spot with €630 plus €405 for the 2nd place and 3rd placed Premiership teams respectively. We will also have a secondary playoff prize pool for the best of the rest, this may well involve Division 1 as well, keep watching the website as more details are announced.
Anyhow we have a 6 team division for the Premiership so lets have a look to see who will competing for the prize money, we certainly have a range of talents and teams:
SNSD
The giants of Highlander, the queens of Korean pop, there is no market this lot can’t conquer…except America but despite their defeat in the showmatch to The Syndicate, SNSD still remain undefeated in officials – that is if you’re skeptical enough to count it as an official – and still the team to beat in Europe. A few changes to the squad for this season with the departure of Beef from Engineer, it seems that Hat is coming back to clean up the mess left from the showmatch - Linus has the details:
There’s 3 major changes in the team lineup-wise. Beef , our engineer from the previous season had to go inactive due to his real life commitments, and with the engineer spot open CUBE decided to switch from pyro. Taking his place is TheSucker , after dropping over 10 ubers during the showmatch…. Hat ‘s going to pick up the medigun once again in his place. The season is looking like a big question mark at the moment, with the prize money I think the 2 new teams to the top division consisting of prem 6v6 players can potentially cause an upset if they actually try… either way, we’re looking forward to a challenging season this time around!
Colony
The last of the great pubstar teams from the days of the Highlander Community Challenge have seen inactivity take its toll for some members, with a couple of well known 6v6 players grafted in, to join some of the other well known talent in their side including Zooob, Nappr and the only non-Finn in the side, the beautiful man that is Furbo. But anyway why let me tell you everything when Colony spy and co-leader SabaSaba wrote a lovely paragraph of information for us:
During season 2, Colony succeeded in holding their premiership spot, but the season wasn’t a total success that we wished for. At least during the summer we arranged our epic scale sauna party where we licked each other’s wounds and prepared for the upcoming season. Colony’s roster has gone some big changes during the summer, as Mrlate (sniper) started his mandatory military service and the well known pubstar J0rmund (demoman) concentrated on his university studies. J0rmund might be seen playing time to time, but nappr has taken the main demoman duties for now. Late ‘s replacements are heavy weight players Septique and MInd who played with most colony members during the HL nations cup. s3 , the original colony pyro has stopped playing TF2 (again, re-re-retirement), firing his last flares in the HL Nations Cup bronze match. Of course, our dream is to beat SNSD. We are one of the two teams who have taken maps from the reigning champions, but we aren’t happy with only that. Of course, the new season brings new challenges with the old and new opponent teams. Particulary interesting are the Max-Play dudes who were pretty much never heard 6 months ago, but recently they have done some remarkable accomplishments in the practice clan wars. At the moment, the biggest enemy of colony is Diablo III. You have no idea how many hours some colony members have put into that game. If we had practiced highlander that whole time.
Colony actually beating SNSD for once - it did happen,
but they couldn't win the other map.
Parrot Gapers
The only team to get promoted that has hung around for the new season, there isn’t much to say about the Gapers, they have a roster with more top level talent on them than any other team, if worms and plastic minnows does indeed play Engineer then I think we could see SNSD’s unbeaten record come to an end. I asked Si^ for more information on this exciting roster…
Hi my name is Simon aka Si^ and I am the frontman of Parrot Gapers a group of talented players who got hit by the a bus of good looks and amazing playing styles. As a result we break dance into every game. Taking names and selling candy canes. At this point you maybe asking yourself how serious are the Parrot Gapers? Well we ask that too and we can only determine our light hearted nature and majestic love of the gape and parrots has been the cause of our rising success. Hildreth at this point says I should mention how I think we will do, well to that Gubbins says we are going to win (big ego eh?). Do not be shocked to see PG at the top of the table leave that to us!
May Contain Nuts
Some things don’t change in European Highlander, whenever we see May Contain Nuts play in ETF2L they always come 3rd place, usually because they can’t crack the shell of SNSD plus one other strong lineup from the competition. This time around Nuts have got most of their lineup from last season, with the only new recruit the experienced Coinz to join his Portuguese compadre Haunter as they have another go at securing the cash in ETF2L. VanillaTV’s newest insight contributor Permzilla gave us his thoughts ahead of the season:
We’re looking to ditch the ‘forever 3rd’ curse that’s been attatched to Nuts ever since it began. We felt we were unlucky not to get a higher placing last season, and we’re definitely looking to improve that this season with some more practice. We know that it’s not going to be easy this season, in my opinion this season will be a lot tougher than Division 1 last season, the overall strength of the teams has definitely improved. I’m confident that with the extra practice we’re going to be doing we can make the playoffs and who knows what can happen from there.
Permzilla against Turbopoop on Foundry.
MacLeod’s Daughters
The second team to land a spot in the Premiership full of top level 6v6 players, MacLeod’s Daughter’s earned their spot through some controversy as the two Russian teams Ilita Power (who finished above them in Division 2 last season) were snubbed by admins for the breach of the hijacking rule. A lot of Ukranians jumped ship to Ilita Power and when their Prem spot was taken away as it was not the same side that earned promotion, MacLeod’s Daughter’s were the second in line although there was a dispute if last season’s bottom side in the old Division 1, Turbopoop should be given the spot as they remained active and replaced some people with Ilita’s exiled Russians but all of this wasn’t enough as MD were given the spot. Naturally their leader skeej didn’t disappoint with his usual massive wall-of-text for us to enjoy, though sadly not the longest in this article:
I have to admit we’re entering the season rather unprepared. We don’t have a complete set main lineup yet, some shuffling of classes will be in order. We don’t have specific strategies or plays, we won’t be practicing every day. In fact, we’re basically not pcw’ing until the 6v6 season is over. This doesn’t mean we’re not taking this serious; nobody likes losing after all. The pure TF2-veteran ratio in our team should help us a lot, just like it did last HL seasons. Most maps in the current pool are well known to us, making it obvious how to play them. For the more specialized classes we dó have our assigned players, who know what to do. It’s hard for me to gauge how well we will do this time; last seasons were quite a breeze, having won the majority of our games with relative ease, but we never played these true top teams before. All I can say is we’re gonna give our best, and have a lot fun in the process. Hell, even German demolitions hero Thy will make his comeback for this HL season, with a superkeen attitude, so we can’t disappoint him!
Max Play Highlander team
WHO? Never heard of them you may say, but for Polish TF2 it is their most successful community team to come out in force and have taken a lot of the older Highlander sides by surprise. With their most recognisable players being 6v6, Division 3 players Nislem and Natty and an absence of some of the better known Poles such as Cube, Gameton and Nor it is hard to imagine them being anything more than an over-hyped pubstar team, however their results plus numerous !acadmin requests from Droso say otherwise, making them the real wildcard team for the season. I asked Nislem to give me a background to their team as they make their Prem debut.
MPHT – Max Play Highlander Team was founded in 2011, few friends decided to add some pleasure into business. With hope to try something more challenging than public matches, they began their participation in the international competitive TF2 scene. Our start was opposite from the level we have now, people came, people left, but after some time we got a small community with experienced, communicative and friendly guys who are fun to play with. Nowadays, thankfully to constant practice, MPHT can play against every team without worrying too much. Finest achievement we got so far is our success in the UGC League. Team’s goal is to give our best in the future challenges we will met.
Only thing left to do is to list my predictions for the final table, I usually get this completely wrong so here is hoping:
1. SNSD
2. May Contain Nuts
3. Parrot Gapers
4. MacLeod’s Daughter’s
5. Max-Play Highlander team
6. Colony
Colony to win the secondary playoffs and finally beat SNSD in their only win of the season!
Originally published on VanillaTV (vanillatf2.org) on 2012-11-05 by Hildreth.
Recovered from the Internet Archive (archived copy) as part of tf2esports.com's preservation of VanillaTV's TF2 coverage. The original site is no longer online. All rights remain with the original author; reposted for historical reference.