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SuddenlyStarMia — What better catalyst is there for a new article than fresh drama? With Highlander interest in the EU reaching higher levels (article to come out later), and Prem being a hotbed of upsets this season while we are only three weeks in! It has rejuvenated my motivation for writing gossip articles, and it’s time to recap it for the first half of the season. I apologise in advance for unintentionally upsetting any players or teams with my awful puns.
Who will divs?
I don’t think any of us could have predicted a season like this. A mere three weeks ago, these were the predictions for who would take home the €500 (and nine Tt gaming mice):
How odd that these predictions now seem almost laughable. The team that was predicted as the most likely to win was the The Electric Tempations, after many saw them blitz NA UGC Highlander Season 12. Many also expected Kill Switch to maintain their crown as the champions of EU Highlander, even with a few seemingly menial roster changes. Lastly, players expected Division 1 winners, Tourettes Chessclub to do well, after spending the past year tryharding. Let’s take a look at how it’s all changed…
Alive Switch
First of all, while it’s fresh in everyone’s minds, let’s take a look at Kill Switch, the Prem champions. After losing Viaduct to Prem debuters (and arguably the keenest team in Prem), things came to a head in a scrim vs Sweet Harmony, where apparently the atmosphere turned so poor after a loss that Demoman-of-the-season nominee, Emilio Estevez, left and was soon followed by teammates jumping on the bandwagon. A source from the Kill Switch team told me that their recent scrims have been rage and frustration at their lack of dominance over EU Highlander, with Hegee and it’s Mint being dubbed as irreplaceable in their synergy with the team, with rumours of personality clashes within the team.
After several attempts on the carcasses of the roster, with Candle intially backing-up for itsallgood and Jamal rumoured to be following him as kKaltUu‘s replacement, it looks like Pancake, leader/manager of the team since Div 6, had managed to eloquently persuade members to return:
|ks| Pancake |PB’s|: -___-
|ks| Pancake |PB’s|: idiot
|ks| Pancake |PB’s|: join up
|ks| Pancake |PB’s|: all are playing
Candle: wat
|ks| Pancake |PB’s|: u kids
|ks| Pancake |PB’s|: yes
Kudos to Pancake for keeping the shitstorm short and resolving it within the space of twelve hours. Now let’s look at teams who weren’t as fortunate…
It’s All Good if we use a merc?
I previously mentioned that jamal was projected to join the itsallgood as main Heavy. In a few weeks, Highlander admin and Heavy kKaltUu will be having arm surgery, rendering him incapable of playing for the remainder of the season. As if their roster issues weren’t already bad enough with no rostered main demoman and taking advantage of the one free merc rule by using Steel-stacker JoeNufc from The Breakfast Club on Demoman. There has been dissent from more than a few players in Prem though – with voices from various teams (who shall not be named) echoing disapproval in pug channels and steam chats for what is viewed as the exploitation of vague rules, to the point of bringing the subject up to admins. Even with their roster issues, they still managed to cause the first major upset of the season in their first official vs The Electric Temptations, much to the astonishment of Hildreth, who had been solidly backing them up, and Kip in a Blackout TV cast.
The Relegation Temptations
That brings us onto our next topic. Many predicted the Americans to do exceptionally well this season, to shock and awe the EU with their tactics from across the other side of the Atlantic. Perhaps it was bad luck that their first two officials were against the teams that finished third and second in Prem last season, but it has led many to question why they were put into Prem in their debut EU season. Although, I did grab a few words from Argo when asking him for a PCW:
λrgo: Um we don’t usually have a lot of time to scrim for ETF2L. UGC prep takes up most of our time. I’ll let you know if we’re ever looking though.
Mia: Ah okay
Mia: So you guys don’t invest a lot into ETF2L?
λrgo: Well we’re trying to start taking it a bit more seriously considering we lost both of our first games, but between 6s and UGC its hard to devote a ton of time to it scrim-wise. Euro times are right in the middle of our work/school day so we can pretty much only play on the weekends.
Mia: How comes you guys signed up then?
λrgo: Well we still really want to play and want to be as competitive as possible. We do our best to win our games. We just can’t devote as much time to scrimming as the Euro teams.
λrgo: But considering the amount we scrim for UGC, its not like we don’t get plenty of HL practice in. As we get more comfortable with the 200 ping and get more of our starters to show up for the matches, I think we’ll play better and better against the other Prem teams.
Perhaps they will fare better against the weaker teams in Prem for the remainder of the season, UGC is higher-valued in the NA and would be their focus, similar to how Highpander are now focusing on ETF2L as it is the more dominant league in Europe, right?
Pandering to ETF2L
After a surprise upset during week 2 of Wireplay Highlander Season 12, in which Chessclub overcame predictions and took Viaduct 3-2 and subsequently Croissant 2-0 over Highpander, a week of deliberation and the realisation that they will now more likely win a questionably reliable 20-man server for their efforts in Wireplay, they decided to drop from the league.
This was not without it’s own dose of drama though. On the same evening of the Wireplay week 2 fixture, Tourettes Chessclub had consecutive officials – their Wireplay official and then their UGC official vs Steve‘s mix team, Hentai Brotherhood. After sending ignored Steam messages to Highpander‘s Pyro, Scissors was astounded to discover a default match report filed against Chessclub 25 minutes after default time, stating that TourettesChessclub (who were the home team for Swiftwater) did not turn up. After a prolonged dispute, both teams were ordered to play the match by an extended deadline and Hentai Brotherhood chose to give a default win to Chessclub.
A Splendid start to the season!
Back onto ETF2L, let’s look at the second upset of the season: Splendid-Gaming‘s 6-0 over Stacked on cp_steel.
After Season 4 champions, DAROUTOUTOU, dropped two days after final divisions were published, so that Awsomniac could better focus on the ongoing 6v6 season, there was a debate as to what to do. A decision was made to move a Division 1 team up, which would also resolve all the other roster disputes in a domino-effect down divisions. Now the question was, which team? PremTech put themselves forward as a replacement for DAROUTOUTOU, but kKaltUu, whose wise decision-making proved invaluable as shown in the provisional divisions this season, went forth and asked Flood if Splendid-Gaming would be interested in the open Prem spot. After being dubbed “Prem by default” by Tutorial, their defeat of Stacked strained cracks in the team that had been brewing. Post-cast, in the stream chat, TF2Centre admin and Splendid’s Heavy, Marty chose to provoke TF.TV’s huhy, resulting in huhy blaming the loss on certain members of Stacked and quoting his damage numbers. The drama proved too much for upcoming talent of the season, tracker, who that same night left the roster and chose to no longer participate in Highlander anymore; whilst Mista also left, to rejoin his Osmoz’ brethren in Dance with Chimpanzees in Division 1. Finding a replacement Sniper has been hard, substitute/legend rouHe has been filling in, but has declining interest in the game and is therefore unsuitable in the long run, so b33p tried his Irish luck with kcot when the word that Kill Switch may have been possibly folding, spread.
2legit2quit?
And now we have come full circle back to Kill Switch, and time for this article to end, with an update on Kill Switch‘s current team status since the narrowly-avoided fold:
Mia: How are kill switch doing now?
-: We’re losing to shit teams that we used to roll so much
-: We’re shit
-: Basicallly
Mia: Ah.
We’re only three weeks into the main season and EU Highlander is looking more interesting than ever. What will happen in the next few weeks? Watch this space.
Originally published on VanillaTV (vanillatf2.org) on 2014-03-29 by SuddenlyStarMia.
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.