artwork by core & Patrick

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Congratulations to all of the teams who have made it to Playoffs. We would like to thank everyone who has and is currently participating, we hope to collect everyone's thoughts on the proposed changes for Season 35 after the cup has finished.

PREMIER

1. Witness Gaming
2. Goon Squad
3. (° ͟ʖ °)
4. Filet Minion

INTERMEDIATE

1. fever kids
2. Gushes Goons
3. altombo's kittens
4. le fish

OPEN

1. Insisting on a Phisting
2. Meat Your Match
3. RTBA
4. Woolies Chicken Rissoles

Quick FAQ / Clarification

We have a few things we want to clarify and answer for Day 3.

• Mercenary rules for Day 3 are exactly the same as Days 1 & 2, you can find this in the FAQ section of the Experimental Cup page, but we'll reiterate it here as well.
  • The mercenary rules are the same as the regular season, you are limited to two mercenaries per match and only able to use mercenaries within four of your matches in this cup. This means you could use eight (8) different players, or the same two mercenaries four times, but you cannot use mercenaries in more than four matches. You must get approval from the captain of the opposing team like in our regular season fixtures.
• An unknown server issue present on the ozfortress servers seems to be affecting whitelists executed by the Experimental Cup configs. We ask that players observe the whitelist, which can be found linked on the Experimental Cup page, for the duration of the cup. We have been unable to solve the issue, but it appears executing the config a few times does seem to work. We'll make sure this issue is not able to affect the regular season configs.

Pick Ban process for Playoffs

• Home team Bans
• Away team Bans
• Home team Picks
• Away team Picks
• Home team Picks (Decider - will only be one map left)

Thank you all for your diligence in sticking to the schedule, the only delays during this cup have been on us, and for that, we'd like to apologize.

artwork by core & Patrick

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Schedule Update

The Premier division will be playing Day 1 alone, with Intermediate & Open playing their matches Day 2. All divisions will be playing Playoffs Day 3.

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Final Placements

Seedings are listed in order, along with the format being used underneath the division name. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out via #sixes-support.

PREMIER

Round Robin

1. Witness Gaming
2. (° ͟ʖ °)
3. Goon Squad
4. Filet Minion
5. Final Destination
6. My new Team Fortress Two team

INTERMEDIATE

Round Robin

1. fever kids
2. altombo's kittens
3. Gushes Goons
4. le fish
5. 26
6. AUUGHHH!

OPEN

Round Robin

1. Insisting on a Phisting
2. Woolies Chicken Rissoles
3. RTBA
4. Meat Your Match
5. MR. Corp

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Player Restrictions

The following players have been restricted from playing the listed classes within the cup.

INTERMEDIATE

• ALT restricted from Soldier & Demoman.
• Elmo restricted from Scout & Soldier
• smazza restricted from Scout.

OPEN

• inStinct restricted from Soldier.
• akim restricted from Demoman.
• luna/max restricted from Sniper.

We're working on a range of different projects internally within ozfortress, and you may have noticed a bit of a change in the staff roles over the last year. We have been working towards being able to bring larger tournaments on a much more consistent basis, and are working towards bringing you things you haven't seen from ozfortress.

Departing staff

We've been building a team to help us work on these projects, but would like to also thank a few administrators who aren't sticking around with us. Over their time with us fez, LiquidAlchemy and Platinum have been an important part of our team, and we would like to thank them for their dedication and time.

The new kids

With their departure, we sifted through our administrator applications for new candidates, and we believe the resulting new pickups need little introduction. We would like to welcome thelampshade22 (snazzy), who would like to shout out the towns of Warrnambool and Swan Hill, along with long-time community veteran raina. We are excited to have them working with us, and you'll get to see a little from then in the upcoming ozfortress Experimental Cup 1.

The promotion

We've been looking at the staff team structures of other leagues internationally and in an effort to give me
(core) some more time to work on larger projects and oversee progress, looking to delegate and promote people into new roles. It is with this that I would like to both congratulate and thank a team of ants in their prime for stepping up to the new role of Sixes Head Administrator. I have full confidence in ants to bring a fresher perspective to Sixes, and I hope to work more closely with players on exactly what they want from ozfortress as a whole.

Help needed!

We are still looking for staff, so please feel free to reach out or submit a staff application. Additionally, we're looking for anyone with experience in charity work for something in 2023, if you have some experience please DM core#6440 on Discord.

Cheers,
ozfortress Staff Team.

It's here! ozfortress is returning from the off-season to bring you a first for us - an experimental cup. The Round Timer plugin debuts for the first time in ozfortress. Many of you will have likely seen the recent Insomnia 69 TF2 LAN where this plugin was featured. Yeah, we're hopping on the train, following previous ventures into this plugin internationally.

The primary purpose of this cup is to test the plugin with our local ruleset, and look at possibly implementing this plugin into Season 35 and beyond pending feedback.

Signups

You can sign up for the ozfortress Experimental Cup 1 from Monday the 5th of September, up until Tuesday the 13th of September. We aim to have seeding out early Wednesday the 14th of September, with the cup running from Thursday the 15th of September to Saturday the 17th of September.

This time we are modifying our usual signups process. Typically we allow teams to sign up right up until the cutoff time, but for this tournament, we will be closing signups six (6) hours earlier, meaning we will be "closing" signups at 6:00PM AEST Tuesday the 13th of September. Teams will still be able to sign up all the way until 11:59PM AEST Tuesday, but will need to reach out to an administrator. We are using this time to ensure enough time to complete seedings, and monitor later signups.

For more information on the tournament, including the round time being used for the cup, scheduling and additional signups info, please see the cup page.

SIGN UP HERE

Experimental Cup Scheduling

Like Ultiduo 16, we are bringing back the three-day runtime, with the first two days splitting the top and bottom divisions. Top divisions will play their Group Stage games on Thursday the 15th of September, with the Bottom divisions playing their Group Stage games on Friday the 16th of September. Both divisions will play their Playoffs games on Saturday the 17th of September. There are two main reasons for this split:

• The primary purpose of this cup is to gather data on whether or not this plugin will be used in Sixes S35, along with its implementation, timers, etc. We believe that teams in the top divisions are far more likely to grasp the changes fairly quickly. Because of this, the two-day split allows the bottom divisions to watch the casted matches and STV demos to get a better grasp of themselves, scrim and practise so they are more familiar with the format before playing. This could be one of the biggest fundamental changes to Sixes in ozfortress history and we want to make sure it's something that everyone wants and understands. With that in mind, we'll be making a #experimental-cup-scrims channel in the recruitment section of our discord to find some scrims leading up to this tournament. For information on booking a server, using the configs, and the discord - ozfortress Experimental Cup leagues page.
• To ease the server requirement, and also give teams further opportunities to scrim by not saturating the server pools. We would like to yet again thank Qixalite, they literally power the competitive scene with their bookable servers!

On the ozfortress Experimental Cup leagues page there is a "time sheet" for the entire cup, along with indicators for which Playoffs matches are a Best of 1 (BO1), and a Best of 3 (BO3). All Group Stage games will be a Best of 1 (BO1). As we don't know how many divisions there will be at the time of writing this, we want to make it clear that the Top divisions will play Day 1, the Bottom divisions will play Day 2, and all divisions will play their Playoffs matches on Day 3.

On the league page, we have included a Signup Agreement dropdown which contains a template we ask teams to use when signing up their team. Information on how to use it and where to put it can be found in that dropdown. We are asking teams to do this to give us a better idea of what players intend to play on their teams.

We hope you are just as excited for this as we are, and we only hope to deliver. If you have any questions, issues or concerns, please feel free to reach out!

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The following config files should be used for the ozfortress Experimental Cup 1:

ozfortress_ec_6v6_5cp.cfg
ozfortress_ec_golden_cap.cfg

Please note that these files are required on any non-bookable server. These are not to execute the config, the commands to do that are below and dependent on where you book the server from.

Control Point (5CP) Maps

These are the only maps featured within the cup. Because of this, the config setup is pretty simple. You can execute these configs using the already setup aliases - simply put rcon ozf-ec-standard in your console and press enter to execute the config! If you need to execute the golden cap config, you can do so using rcon ozf-ec-golden and again, press enter to execute it.

Both aliases/commands above are the same on both ozfortress and Qixalite.

Control Point (5CP) Win Conditions and Format

This information can also be found on the main page, but for the ozfortress Experimental Cup 1, 5CP maps need to be played to a thirty (30) minute time limit, and a round win limit of five (5). Win difference should be off as it is set to zero (0). If the round scores are tied after the thirty (30) minute time limit, then the Golden Cap config should be used. This will set the win limit to five (5), with no time limit.

Round Timer plugin/s QnA

Why is ozfortress not using the version of the plugin that adds 1 to the current highest round score from either team after the time limit reaches zero?

Yeah, there is a bit to unpack here. Currently, the original plugin by the same author has been used more, and the new plugin which features the changes to round scoring is relatively new, so we opted to use the older plugin for now as it observes the thirty-minute time limit we have set, which is more ideal for this cup.

Wait, there are two plugins?

We had the same reaction. The new plugin seems to only be functionally different in how it is enabled and the added round scoring functionality. Otherwise, both operate mostly the same and achieve the same result in regards to the round timer.

Will ozfortress ever use the new plugin?

We'll look into it, it definitely needs further testing.