The good folks over at UGC are certainly busy these days.  Not only are they kicking off pre-season matches for their fifth season of Highlander, but word from Bubby is that their seventh season of 6s is about to go live!

Do you play 6s?

Do you love 6s?

Good!  Then check out UGC's 6s league and see what's in store after the jump.

Greetings fellow highlander enthusiasts! This is Kitalpha from UGC.

We are about to launch our 5th season of highlander! The official start date is Monday, September 19, however we will be accepting late comers until September 26th (probably later if you ask real nice).

A lot of people have been asking us about this upcoming season and the two main things they want to know, aside from "where are our medals from season 3?" is whether we there be any weapon bans and what maps will we be using. For a complete list of maps and weapon bans visit our website. Oh, and I guess one or two of you may be curious about whether or not we will award any prizes to the winning teams at the end of the season. YES! We have something fantastic and unique in the works right now and I am confident that it will be a BIG hit! So, don't miss out on the fun this fall! Dust off that rocket launcher and wrangle up your team for some good times with the UGC Highlander League!

Kitalpha
UGC Admin

Ash Forte, organizer for Community Jackpot Tournament Teamwork Exposition, likes two things: long names and teamwork.  He's got the former, and now he's gunning for the latter.  But let's not indulge that fetish and instead call it the TF2 Expo (like the sane URL).

Sign-ups are live and the tournaments buy-ins are metal and weapons.  That means most anyone can enter!  Hazzah!

Interested in playing?  Head on over to read more and sign up!  And tell Ash that his name fetish is wrong.  He's a sick man.  He needs the medicine.

From the LANified! site:

LANified! has worked tirelessly to assemble the next installment of our LANparty series. Additional Pylons will be our largest event yet, with greater prizing (up to $2175 in CASH prizing), larger tournaments, live broadcasting of our event, plenty of casual gaming, and our great concession! This event is a BYOC event (Bring Your Own Computer) held in Calgary Alberta Canada and all participants are welcome to enter any of the tournaments.

Tournaments will start at these times:

Heroes of Newerth: 1800hrs (6pm) Friday (Max 16 entrant teams of 5 players)
Team Fortress 2: 1100hrs (11am) Saturday (Max 16 entrant teams of 3 players)
Starcraft 2: 1600hrs (4pm) Saturday (Max 96 entrants)

We ask that entrants please be ready 30 minutes - 1hr before the start of the tournament they want to enter so registration can go smoothly.

Our pledging system enables you the participant to increase the prize pool for the tournament you want to enter. When enough pledges for a particular tournament happens the prize pool increases for that tournament. To pledge simply log-in, prepay for the event, then click on the pledge button beside the tournaments you want to pledge for. You can pledge for as many or as few tournaments as you want! We currently only offer pledging for Starcraft 2 and Team Fortress 2.

The pledging pools for this event are:

Team Fortress 2:

• Default - $450 - 1st $300/2nd $150
• 21 Pledges - $675 - 1st $375/2nd $225/3rd $75

Starcraft 2:

• Default - $650 - 1st $300/2nd $150/3rd $125/4th $75
• 40 Pledges - $1000 - 1st $500/2nd $200/3rd $175/4th $125

Heroes of Newerth:

1st $400 + 7500gc/2nd $100 + 3500gc/3rd 1500gc (gc are in game gold coins)

LANified!'s events run on a professional-grade power infrastructure and a fully gigabit network. Internet will be provided for the duration of the event and we ask that you do not use Bit Torrents and limit big file transfers from the internet. However as it is a fully gigabit internal network we suggest you take advantage of it and transfer files amongst yourselves. We also provide a public mumble server at voice.lanified.com (default port).

This is an event for all ages. Past attendees have enjoyed our allowance for alcohol on site, but due to the location change we do not currently allow alcohol on-site.

Key points for the TF2 tourney (as explained to me by BloodyIron):

- 3v3
- 1 player per class
- KOTH
- 25 minutes per round; if a team gets 4 points, they win immediately
- smaller format, a.k.a. not 6v6, used so that teams are easy to assemble
- broadcasted live with commentary from the event (more info HERE)

Sounds like a great event! Stay tuned for more information.

Ladies and gents, this just in from my man in the field, Stinger from Performance Anxiety.

Global Warfighter League has just opened not one but two new TF2 leagues to run alongside each other: standard 6v6, and a Highlander (9v9) sign-ups are now open and free! Stinger's been kind enough to drop the link bombs on me.

One league?  That's for babies, says Global Warfighter (which, when condensed down to an abbreviation, becomes GloWarf--ho, ho!).  Two leagues, now that's how real maniacs do a league up, GloWarf style.

More details after the jump!

The single elimination stage of the CommFT-Zalman 6v6 tournament began on Tuesday after I released the 32-team bracket. The first round of matches, to be played by September 11th, will be on cp_warmfront and pit many veteran teams against one another. The match-ups are as follows:

Team Config vs Sunday Funday
Banned from eHarmony vs Team Stompfest
simpLicity vs Boyz n the Hood
Ass Pounders vs Volcanic Kitties
Kawaii Kingz vs Dropaholics
Classic Mixup vs Superior Posterior
Vector Gaming vs Amish Driveby
20 MINUTE TOAST vs MeatRod
The Experiment vs Raw is War
eMg vs SSizzle Pop and Gang
The Weight Shakers vs tA eSports Organization
PLEASE DON'T YELL AT ME, PLEASE. vs Fragnetic Gaming TF2
Oedipus and the Motherfuckers vs Sugarcube
Modern Mixup vs Paramecia
Area51 Gaming vs 2 plus 2 equals Fruit
John Couch's BBQ Sauce TF2 Team vs TEAM FORTRESS TWO FORT

Stay tuned for information on casts throughout this stage of the tournament!

From the eXtv Press Release:

eXtelevision is proud to announce that we will be covering the LAN finale of this season’s ESEA Invite division. The Team Fortress 2 portion of the event takes place Saturday September 24th and Sunday the 25th at the Sterling Hotel in Dallas, Texas. Matches are scheduled to start at 10AM Central each day, with the action continuing until ~6pm.

The tournament is double elimination, with each match-up being a best of three series. This is the best of the best in North American TF2, going up against each other in a LAN setting. No cheats, no lag, yet inevitably there will still be pauses.

eXtv will be streaming the entire event via http://www.twitch.tv/eXtvESports with potentially a second camera running on http://www.twitch.tv/eXtvESports2 Spectators are also welcome to join our cast via our mumble server provided by EoReality.net: dal.eoreality.net:64760

eXtine will be on site, delivering reports from the field via Phone and our YouTube Channel. The cast will be eXecutively produced by TheDuderMan with assistance from King Dashner, Blackstar, shdwpuppet, and many other potential guests.

...

Ladies and gents, amputators and amputees, welcome back to Screaming Eagles.

My name is Free and I'm full of vengeance!  Vengeance and aches!  I need my blanket!  And a nap!  Where's my very special pillow?  Where's my damn Sleepytime Tea?

But Free, you ask.  Why for so much vengeance?

Time, you fools!  There isn't enough of it and I barely have enough to put on my pants in the morning!  Some mornings I do not.  Those mornings I venture forth in thick mental fog to do business with the dispensaries of the world.  Cashiers and clerks know to fear me on those mornings for I don't make sense and often command a swarm of invisible ravens.  Those are my death ravens, I tell the sales Manager at Best Buy.  Please make me happy or face their unquenchable thirst for blood.  I don't have time for laws and rules, I holler!  I have a 6s team!  I have a Highlander team! I'm doing the CommFT adminy and there's MFU to Lord!  Away, peasant!  Fetch me High-Definition Happiness!

Guess what comes next?

Over at eXtelevision.com, the veil of secrecy has been pulled off a project that has been months in the making...

This unique tournament will feature four of TF2’s top medics of all-time, Casey, Harbleu, Pyyour, and SeanBud, as team captains. The captains will be tasked with drafting a winning team from a pool of 25 selected players. The entire 4-team tournament, from the draft process to the finals, will be broadcast live by eXtelevision.

The opening round will take place Tuesday, September 13th at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific with both matches being played simultaneously, covered via http://www.twitch.tv/eXtvESports and http://www.twitch.tv/eXtvESports2...

For the tournament, we are hand-picking Low+ -> Mid+ players to have a fun diverse game. Our list is looking pretty good right now, so we aren't looking for more players at the moment. We'd like to eXpand on the event and improve our process, though, so feel free to leave feedback on what you'd like to see as this event develops. Official rules + prizes will be up soon. For more information, check out the full press release over at the eXtv site and Pyyyour's thread on the CommFT Forums.

September is upon us and we have been fundraising for The Experiment's trip to the ESEA Season 9 LAN for more than a month now. We have raised an impressive total of $1242.97 as of this posting ($1942.97 including Nahanni's personal donation to the team). It is without a doubt that the competitive TF2 community has stepped up and displayed its generosity in an amazing fashion.

I think now would be a good time to update donors and the community at large of the status of the donation money. Four plane tickets have been purchased and only one ticket remains to be purchased (the final player is driving). There should be enough donation money for the fifth plane ticket and the team is waiting to see if that ticket's price will dip any lower before purchasing it. Likewise, it looks like there is leftover donation money from Nahanni's donation for hotel rooms, shuttles, meals, and gas. Thus it seems that we are set, or nearly so, in terms of costs.

Since all boss LAN teams have boss T-shirts, I've gotten some boss T-shirts made for the team. Although we had trouble figuring out the best design (and there was some confusion about which designs were preferred by the various members of the team), we ultimately ordered some with the below design...

Readers will notice that the front is a rendition of the original The Experiment logo, except bolder and with different colors, while the back features a CommFT logo, the player's name/class, and a special thanks to the donors (with donor names listed). Each T-shirt is a different color and the players each chose a color that suited their fancy. In total, the shirts cost $178.50 but I purchased them so donation money did not go towards their cost.

I will keep everyone updated on the team as the LAN approaches (it is the weekend of September 24th/25th). Currently all we need is a person at the LAN to cover the event so if anyone lives in/near Dallas, please contact me on the forums via PM. Otherwise, feel free to toss me a buck or two to help with the T-shirts and be sure to comment here on the T-shirt design!

After two weeks of group play action, the CommFT-Zalman 6v6 tournament is getting ready to move into its single elimination stage. Of the sixteen groups in the event, eight have finished their matches and the other eight will be wrapping theirs up by a final deadline of Monday, September 5th. Upon the completion of the final group play match on Monday, I will post the single elimination bracket here on the front page and in the tournament forum.

Now, as we wait for those matches to complete, I would like to start giving out the hats and T-shirts that we received from Zalman as giveaways for the tournament. In a previous post, I mentioned that these giveaways would only be given away to those players who played their group play matches. We will stick to this plan and I will be announcing the first six randomized winners of the hat and T-shirt giveaway today in this post (each winner will receive both a hat and a T-shirt). Check below throughout the day to see if you have won a giveaway from Zalman!

Winners:

1. Darius of Commonwealth Gaming
2. BluePhoenix of SSizzle Pop and Gang
3. Mayor McCheese of Sunday Funday
4. S@m of Team Echelon
5. Snow of ProTF2
6. Spyro of 2 plus 2 equals Fruit

Listed winners must contact me via forum PM by Thursday, September 8th to claim their prizes.