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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i dont want to play metalworks please fix this

give back the funny spoon

ALT
give back the funny spoon

FOR REAL, THIS IS DISCRIMINATION.
the spoon will always return...