Pre-season wasn't much of anything, just one week of play with one map chosen by the home team out of a list. I hope the teams picked a good map and had fun playing the match on their map. The map list was as follows:

• cp_coldfront
• cp_gullywash
• cp_obscure
• cp_mainline
• cp_wildmire
• ctf_mercy
• koth_aurora

Week 1 has also been completed with the week 1 map being freight. I hope all teams did well, or to the best of their abilities and I hope to see some teams come out strong.

In other news, TWL worked out a solution with regards to inactive teams. After removing the inactive teams, some other teams were placed in new divisions by their wins. This has helped TWL since they have been trying to balance out some divisions in addition to getting more teams into the higher divisions. Div1 has a few more competitors which is good news to the Div1 teams since this means more match time and better opponents.

In a recent e-mail, TWL announced that they have been having issues scheduling matches due to some staff changes. They do apologize for the inconvenience and hope to be back on the right path.

This week is gong to be week 2 of matches and is going to be played on viaduct.

Here is a list for maps throughout the season:

• 5/10 - Week 2: koth_viaduct
• 5/17 - Week 3: cp_gravelpit
• 5/24 - Week 4: cp_yukon
• 5/31 - Week 5: cp_indulge
• 6/7 - Week 6: cp_granary
• 6/14 - Week 7: TBD
• 6/21 - Week 8: cp_badlands

That concludes all I have about TWL. I'll be back for more information about matches and news in the coming weeks.

-tehhhn

I started writing about the current issues with ESEA and the tf2 community, a couple paragraphs in, I realized that some people are just a little sick of hearing about the ESEA stuff and just want to read some rankings. So let's forget about the conflict and just talk about tf2.

Coldfront was NOT ready for competitive play. The map was admittedly fun, and I hope to get another shot next season, but it brought a lot of issues to the matches this season. There were constant lag and drop outs during matches, frame rate issues and issues with Texas servers (according to Lopert). I honestly don't understand why freight was dropped so easily.

This week, we get to play a much more familiar map in granary. I feel like this is the first week that I can start accurately gauging teams' skill levels since this will be a map all teams should know and will be in the playoffs for sure. I can't say that about any of the 3 new maps this season.