Winter Is Here, And So Is Highlander

Welcome back everyone! We hope you're all well rested and are ready to jump back into the action with our seventh season of ozfortress Highlander. During the off-season we've been working hard behind the scenes to bring you a great Winter experience! Below we have a list of changes that will be implemented in the upcoming season as well as some updates to our staff.

Staff Updates

After 5 seasons of hard admin work and providing servers to the community Oldcustard will be stepping down as a Highlander Admin. Oldcustard has been an internal voice of reason throughout his time on the ozfortress staff team. Always remaining level headed and calm regardless of what was being discussed and always provided a genuine and well thought out perspective on all matters. We can't thank him enough for all he's done for the ozfortress Highlander scene and we wish him nothing but the best in all his future endeavors.

With Oldcustard's departure we will be bringing on two new individuals who will be adopting the role of Trial Admins. Trial Admins will be shadowing our current admin team of Kai, hive, Rainy and myself over the course of the Winter Season and assisting where possible. Our two new Trial Admins for this season will be redja and woozy both of which have been active in our scene over the past couple of years. Despite one of them not bringing the AUS to ozfortress, we feel both will make a great addition to our team this season and we're look forward to seeing them in action.

Changes, Rule Modifications and Additions

The following are a list of changes and additions that are being made to ozfortress that will either change of effect how the Winter '24 Highlander league is run and will progress.

Secondary Match Days:
- Secondary Match Days will no longer be in effect. If teams are unable to play their match between Wednesday - Sunday then they will need to be granted an extension via their division admin to play on Monday or Tuesday (Previously secondary days).

King of the Hill (KOTH) Scoring:
- For the Winter '24 Highlander Season King of the Hill maps will now be scored as 1 - 0 in the winning teams favor. This change has been implemented to combat an issue our website has when it comes to calculating scores correctly. Meaning, this change may only be temporary as our developer team is looking into the issue.

New Point Tiebreaking Measures:
- With the introduction of the new way of scoring King of the Hill maps we have introduced a series of tiebreaker metrics that will be used upon a potential tie in points come end of the regular season.
Tiebreaker Measures
1. Team will have all their KOTH rounds they've won throughout the regular season tallied with the highest total being the winner of the tied teams.
2. If the above fails, the direct encounter will be used with the winner of said match being the winner of the tied teams.
3. If the above fails, a Best of 3 tiebreaker match will need to be played. This match will feature the two maps from the direct encounter match with the final map being determined after each team bans 2 maps each. (Teams need to play on opposite sides they started on in the direct encounter).

ABBA week in Regular Season:
- During the Winter '24 Highlander Season Teams all divisions will be playing one week of ABBA in the regular >season. The week in question will only feature one map of Upward. The first team to win 2 rounds of this map will win >that week's match. If you are not familiar with our ABBA works or what it is you can find more information here

Map Pool Reduction:
- This season's map pool will be reduced down to 7 maps. You can find all the maps and the versions being used here

Roster Size Reduced During Sign-ups.:
- Rosters may only sign up to the season with a maximum of 12 players. During the first transfer window the roster size will be increased back up to 15 and will then remain at that number for the rest of the season.

Transfer Windows:
-This season transfers will be processed near fortnightly with the first transfer window being in week one and the following being ever subsequent fortnight. There will be a total of three transfer windows throughout the season with their dates subject to change based on how long the season will be.

Pick/ban Time Requirement
- For this season the Pick/ban process in playoffs need to be completed by 7pm AEST the day before the match is scheduled to be played. This is to give teams a chance to scrim the maps being played if they so choose.

Pick/ban Process Changes
- This season the Pick/ban process will be changed to accommodate to the new map pool size. The new Pick/ban process will be as follows:
Home-Ban, Away-Ban, Home-Pick, Away-Pick, Away-Ban, Home-Pick

Note: Rule changes may not be updated on the websites docs. We will have them modified and updated prior to the season's start.