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It's been some time since we've had a bigger set of rule updates, and this one is no exception - but there are some important changes to mercenary rules, and clarifications for casting that are important for those it affects. Otherwise, its all pretty palatable, reasonable changes/updates.

Global Ruleset Updates

• 3.3.1. Account Transfers has been updated with basic requirements for account transfers to happen. We found we have been performing a high amount of these transfers of late, so we want to ensure all account transfers are for a significantly valid reason.
• 4.1.1. Team Alias & Profile Guidelines updated to clearly note it is the team's responsibility to choose an appropriate, rule abiding name/alias, and that punishments can and will occur in breaches.
• 6.2.3. Contesting Mercenary Denials has been changed to lower the amount of reasonable mercenaries denied from three to two. This has been done to allow teams/captains to come to staff with mercenary issues earlier.
• 8.4. Distinct Aliases updated to properly define what we mean by Distinct Aliases:
  • Aliasing is allowed in official matches. However, all players must have distinct aliases. ozfortress defines Distinct Aliases as aliases different from each player's alias, meaning no shared aliases. In addition, players should not be aliasing as their teammate - each player needs to be their own recognizable entity.
• 9.3.2. Banned Players Casting Official Matches updated to note the casting organizations responsibility in platforming banned players. To be clear, banned players can appear on stream, but their actions on stream will reflect also on those platforming them, reviewed on a case-by-case basis. We understand sometimes it isn't possible to control everything on a livestream, but if a person is a known risk, platforming them is not wise.
• 9.4. Casting Organization Responsibility added to make clear what responsibilities and guidelines both Approved and Unapproved Casting Organizations must follow.
  • Guidelines/Responsibility:
    • Organizations must not interfere with the play of an official match, with exception to Approved Organizations being allowed to dictate when a match starts. This includes manipulation of the game server, deliberate or malicious interruption of gameplay, or unneeded involvement or interference in Staff and Captain discussion, mercenary processes, or disputes. If you are seeing a problem in the match, contact staff. You are not staff.
    • Be aware of who you are platforming - if their on-stream conduct is consistently in poor taste or breaches our Community Guidelines, punishments may arise. For example, platforming banned players.
    • Criticism of ozfortress is fine, fair criticism of players and their play is fine, harassment, bullying or continued focus on specific players in an overly unfair or negative light, is not.
    • If you are casting ozfortress matches, we want you to be as professional as you want to be. We don't require professional esports production, but effort reflects well on you, us and our scene. We want to work with you to promote you, your brand, your content, regardless of status.
  • We are working on a basic casting guide for ozfortress to release soon, which covers some basic do's and don'ts, how to get things setup, and tools you can use.
    • For example, we've launched an ozfortress Casting Essentials Alias Tool.
• 9.4. Player Stream Delay changed to 9.5. Player Stream Delay to allow for the new 9.4. Casting Organization Responsibility.

Penalties Updates

• 1.6. Player Integrity has been updated to split it into two separate penalties, Misleading Players/Captains, and Misleading Administrators. The Misleading Players/Captains penalty is remaining the same, but the newly added Misleading Administrators penalty is much more severe.
• We will be working to provide a better hub for listing suspensions, bans, infractions and penalties.

General Ruleset Updates

• "Match Bans" as a term have been renamed to "Match Suspensions" to make clearer the distinction in rule policing in ozfortress between bans and suspensions (eg. blocked access to services vs. simple round suspensions).

Behaviour Infractions Ruleset Updates Coming

While not here yet, a list of significant updates to this ruleset will be hitting your eyeballs in the next few weeks pending a meeting. We'll reveal more details once we have things locked in, but something mentioned above - a person's infractions will soon become public. More to come on this.

General ozfortress Updates

We're continuing to make changes in the background to processes/systems to reduce repetitive workload, delegate work off to other staff, and automating/improving systems (like making it possible to update docs.ozfortress.com, or updating ozfortress server files much faster - which is now a thing).

We have also made some small changes to our Team Captains Discord for this season, those are:

• There is now a @League Admin role, and is now the only ping-able role for League Administrators. This ping will combine both Sixes and Highlander staff, and has been done to allow Captains to get support for their match disputes much sooner than in the past.
• Also, expect some changes to end-of-season Awards this season as well.

ozfortress is going to be having a big year in 2026. While we're not sure on the specifics yet, we're looking to celebrate 25 years of ozfortress, among a heap of other changes.

Also, I just want to put a personal note (from core) in here:

Our team works hard on seedings, and while we cannot satisfy everyone, we do try to do overall what is best whilst minimizing negative impact where we can. If anyone truly believes that our team is not doing their best to advocate for everyone, within reason, then leave. We're looking to make improvements to our internal tools (and introducing more tools) soon, but none of it will magically make everyone happy.

For those who are generally good people, please never get it twisted, we appreciate the hell out of you - we try not to let it feel like its an uphill battle for us staff, sometimes it does feel like it though.

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Final Seedings

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Here are our Final Seedings for Summer Cup. If you are not already in the Team Captains Discord, please ensure you join immediately. Once we have done the back-end paperwork, you'll have your roles - provided you've followed up the #setup in the Captains Discord after joining!

You can find Player Restrictions here.

Seedings

Division 1

1. BRIANLANDER
2. whitetiger
3. LBFG
4. cheese sandwich

Division 2

1. Clavicular brutally frame mogged by ASU frat leader
2. SEMI SLEEPERS
3. Eludicator
4. Last & Found

Division 3

1. gabagool
2. kourema skli
3. ( redacted team name )
4. Ozia
5. Genuine Killstreak Blunt Rotation
6. funny people

Division 4

1. DJ Amba
2. finlay side plot
3. 6 Reasons Not To Play TF2
4. Missyubibiko

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Preliminary Seedings

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Please keep in mind these are not final, and we, like always, are open to feedback, suggestions and criticism of these seedings. If you want to voice your concerns, please use our ticket system found in #admin-support in our Discord.

You can find preliminary Player Restrictions here.

Seedings

Division 1

1. BRIANLANDER
2. whitetiger
3. LBFG
4. cheese sandwich
5. Clavicular brutally frame mogged by ASU frat leader
6. SEMI SLEEPERS
7. Eludicator

Division 2

1. gabagool
2. kourema skli
3. ( redacted team name )
4. Ozia
5. Genuine Killstreak Blunt Rotation
6. funny people

Division 3

1. DJ Amba
2. finlay side plot
3. 6 Reasons Not To Play TF2
4. Missyubibiko

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A Midsummer Night's Sixes Cup 2026 - Preliminary Seedings

Hey @News, we've released our first public iteration of seedings for this weekend. Please give it a look and poke us with any issues via a ticket (found in #admin-support).

:newspaper: A Midsummer Night's Sixes Cup 2026 - Preliminary Seedings

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Preliminary Seedings

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Please keep in mind these are not final, and we, like always, are open to feedback, suggestions and criticism of these seedings. If you want to voice your concerns, please use our ticket system found in #admin-support in our Discord.

You can find preliminary Player Restrictions here.

Seedings

Division 1

1. BRIANLANDER
2. whitetiger
3. LBFG
4. cheese sandwich
5. Clavicular brutally frame mogged by ASU frat leader
6. SEMI SLEEPERS
7. Eludicator

Division 2

1. gabagool
2. kourema skli
3. ( redacted team name )
4. Ozia
5. Genuine Killstreak Blunt Rotation
6. funny people

Division 3

1. A7 Esports
2. finlay side plot
3. 6 Reasons Not To Play TF2
4. Missyubibiko

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Leaf it to us

The start of Autumn ’26 comes straight off the back of Summer Brawl 2026 and an exciting play-test of Team Comtress 2 in our Summer Cup. With a trunk full of action, this is the perfect time to sign yourself up for a season fall of action, get into it while the leaves are still fresh. We’ll have some staff changes to announce soon (with perhaps a few fresh sprouts joining the crew).

Signups

You can sign up for Sixes Autumn '26 from Friday 13th of February 2025, up until Tuesday the 24th of February 2026. We aim to have the seedings out by Wednesday 25th or Thursday 26th of February 2026. Round 1 of Season 45 will start Sunday 1st of March 2026.

SIGNUP NOW · SEASON PAGE

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Map Pool

Sixes Autumn '26 will see two maps replaced with newer/returning maps. Want a chance to have your say on the maps for this season? Vote in the Map Survey in our Discord!

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Staff Changes

emgee Stepping Down

While a short tenure, emgee was pivotal in keeping Sixes running last season, and has been just as invaluable as a League Admin. We'll miss emgee, but know that Sixes is in good hands, as inStinct will be staying on as Sixes Head Admin solo.

New Staff Wanted!

With the shuffling of positions, this has opened up some room for new staff members to join the ozfortress Sixes team! We are looking for people excited about Sixes, looking to help and put in the time to help others when needed. An admin position is a selfless one, you need to be able to put others before yourself (in the ozfortress space) while remaining level headed, and deal with match disputes that often leave you unpopular with some teams or individuals. If you're hearing this and not immediately heading for the hills, we want you! You can submit a staff application via the link below.

Staff Application

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Getting started with Team Comtress 2!

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Team Comtress 2 is a rare glimpse at a potential future for TF2 for those playing Summer Cup, but getting yourself situated on a new client can be difficult. Luckily, this process is actually incredibly easy! Below is an install guide, a brief list of the bigger improvements, an FAQ we'll continue to update, and a server reservation guide!

Installing Team Comtress 2

Getting Team Comtress 2 installed could not be any easier! This mini-guide will cover installing TC2 on Windows, for other operating systems you can check their website.

1. Head over to the Team Comtress 2 website, and click the Download button front and center. This will download the TC2 launcher which is pretty small. Make sure to put this somewhere you can easily open this later, as this launcher is how you launch TC2 (it doesn't install as a program).
   1. Windows may ask you for permission to run it, or Smart Screen may prompt you to "Run anyway". Your browser (in particular Edge or Chrome) may also warn you about the download. You'll need to Keep the file. This is only because signing a Windows program through Microsoft is not cheap, but as long as you know where you are downloading it from (that being the official site), it's fine to ignore.
2. Once you have the launcher downloaded, run it, and you're good to start setting up your launch options if you use any. Click the settings button bottom right and there you can configure the installation directory, launch options and what release branch you're on. For cup day, you'll want to stay on the Stable branch, so make sure Pre-release is unticked.
3. You're done! Now you'll just need to bring your configs over if you wish, otherwise we suggest using the improved in-game settings menu, it covers a hell of a lot and already has modern default settings for things like FOV set!

Improvements in TC2

There are many, many improvements in TC2, so we won't try to cover them all. Instead, here's a brief but slightly outdated list from serveme.tf with some stuff we've thrown in.

• Networking Upgrades
  • Sub-tick support like seen in CounterStrike 2.
  • Improved lag compensation.
  • Reduced network interpolation delays.
  • Fixed hitbox desync at high speeds.
• Gameplay Fixes
  • Fixed backstab and melee hit detection.
  • More consistent bullet spread.
  • Improved distance-based damage.
  • Enhanced weapon responsiveness.
• Performance Improvements
  • Optimized rendering and particle systems.
  • Better performance in large team fights.
  • Reduced overhead from game systems.
  • Smoother framerates overall.
• Quality of Life
  • New Casual MVP screen.
  • Improved competitive mode for competitive and league matches.
  • Customizable hit markers.
  • Modern default settings (90 FOV).
  • Enhanced visual effects.
  • Match Pausing improvements (please don't pause your match just to see them 😠)
    • Players can now join when a match is paused. 😱
• Recent additions for Summer Cup
  • Logs.tf native replacement.
  • Enhanced Match Timer natively integrated.
  • Multiple other SourceMod plugins we rely on for league matches have been integrated natively!

Reserving a TC2 server from au.serveme.tf

Reserving a TC2 server couldn't be simpler! Like you would with a normal TF2 server, you would head over to au.serveme.tf and reserve a server, but first you'll need to opt-in to TC2 server access, which can be done here. Once you've successfully opted in, you can now reserve TC2 servers, but do make sure you reserve "ozfortress bookable TC2" servers!

Getting your server set up for your match is also as simple as a regular season! Grab the RCON details, or use the Web RCON, and type one of the following map aliases depending on what round you're in.

rcon process
rcon sunshine
rcon snakewater
rcon product

Once you've set the map, you'll need to execute the server config, depending on if the map is 5CP or KOTH.

rcon ozf-sc-5cp
rcon ozf-sc-koth

And bam, you're done and ready to play your match! If you want to play another map, you can. Just be aware that not all server configs work or are tested on TC2, so best to stick to the Summer Cup specific ones!

TC2 FAQ

Q: Can I copy my custom folder over?

A: Short answer: No. Long answer: Somewhat.

Using a custom HUD with TC2 can and likely will break or hide a lot of things, and may make the main menu unusable.

Custom files that replace other game files should also be avoided.

Custom config files should work, just note that some things may have changed. We recommend only keeping your uber binds, resupply binds, utility sort of stuff. For actual graphics, it is probably best to make use of the heavily expanded settings menu in-game!

Q: What about hitsounds, damage numbers, and general game settings?

A: TC2 comes with a heavily expanded in-game settings menu which covers a lot of settings! Also, it sets a bunch of enhanced defaults for things like FOV too!

You will likely need to turn on Fast Weapon Switch and a few other things, but otherwise the defaults are far better than normal TF2.

Q: Do I need to redownload maps?

A: Thankfully no!

TC2 scans your base TF2 install already, which is how it's download and install size is so tiny! So TC2 will look for your existing maps folders, and make them usable in TC2. This also means that all maps should be 100% compatible with, and work in TC2.

Q: How long will ozfortress TC2 servers remain up after the cup?

A: At this stage, until the season is underway.

We will likely drop the amount of servers after the cup to around four.

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Player Restrictions

It is unclear yet if we will need restrictions. If so, they will be listed here.

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Intermediate

gabagool

mgm Restricted off Soldier.

kourema skli

voxii Restricted off Scout.
jkc_S Restricted off Soldier.

Ozia

striker Restricted TO Medic.

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Open

finlay side plot

Cymboll Restricted off Soldier.

DJ Amba

yuzu Restricted off Scout.
qb Restricted off Scout.
Coldie Restricted off Scout.

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