ozfortress x Respawn League + ozfortress Highlander Season 1

core League Director

HIGHLANDER

So, not what you were expecting? Don't worry, we weren't expecting it two months ago when we dropped our annual April Fools. So, how did this happen? Well, as some of you may know, Respawn League was the brainchild of myself (core), started in late 2018 as an alternative to what was available at the time with the hope to improve on the Highlander scene within the oceanic region. There are numerous reasons behind this merge, but it is hard to overlook the plethora of benefits that come from consolidating the two active leagues under one banner.

SO HOW IS THIS GOING TO WORK?

Respawn League (RSL) is being dissolved and merged with ozfortress. This includes the Highlander format, much of the existing ruleset, the staff and other services. What will not be making the jump, however, are the team pages and roster history. This is a technical limitation, and our solution to this will be to add a "Legacy Highlander profile" link to user profiles.

Whilst speaking about how this will work, it is important to mention who will be working to make it possible. Please give a warm welcome to the newest additions to the ozfortress staff team:

bird (Highlander Head Admin)
Platinum (shy) (Highlander Admin)
Thyme (Highlander Admin)
LiquidAlchemy (Highlander Admin)
Bakes (Highlander Admin)
Rainy (Highlander Admin)

Those high IQ gamers amongst us may be wondering, two Head Administrators? Not quite, over the next month or two, we also plan to announce our Sixes (6v6) Head Admin. We are restructuring our staff roles to better delegate the workload for seasonal leagues and allow us to plan more tournaments and events for you!

So, how can you reach us with issues, and who do you go to? Good questions, hopefully, we have equally good answers. We will be splitting our existing #admin-support into two channels, #sixes-support and #highlander-support. We will also be adapting our ticket system to better differentiate between leagues for support tickets. As for league administrators, we will also be separating them into Sixes Admins and Highlander (or HL) Admins. Functionally, everything else should remain the same, but we will let you know if we find a better way to handle something.

Player behaviour is an area we want to continue to improve on, and it will remain as it is currently for ozfortress. What this will mean, is that slowly over time we will be expanding our Behaviour and Anti-Cheat panels as we feel we need, and by having entirely dedicated panels to review cases separate from staff, we aim to continue to lessen the workload on any one person, increase impartiality, and response time.

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?

As we mentioned earlier, there are a number of factors in this "merger", and there are a plethora of benefits. Many of these factors are internal, from website maintenance and management to a lack of purpose-built roles. By merging Highlander under the ozfortress banner, we will be able to better market Australian Team Fortress to potential sponsors, and work closely with other organisations to plan tournaments and events at a larger scale than before, not to mention more off-season tournaments and a wider range of tournament formats. The benefits for you the player do not end there, but it is worth us noting some of the benefits for us internally. By leveraging the existing Behaviour and Anti-Cheat panels ozfortress has (and expanding them as needed), we will be able to tackle more issues, more cases, and more projects - in a way that wouldn't have been sustainable for us before.

But that is enough trying to sell you on it, we'll let our actions do that. If you have any questions throughout the next few weeks, please feel free to ask!

THERE ARE SOME CHANGES COMING

As you would expect, we have some documentation to update. The existing "Rules" that link to our Competitive Ruleset for Sixes will be renamed to "Sixes Ruleset", and the Highlander Ruleset (modelled and based on the Sixes Ruleset, with Highlander specific rules from the RSL Ruleset) will be its own, separated link. Other documentation like the Transfers page, Newbie Guide, Server Configs and more will be updated to reflect the changes correctly. We do ask that during this period of time you allow for some teething problems when it comes to the documentation and general splitting of resources, as this is the first time ozfortress has hosted a second seasonal league.

There will undoubtedly be some changes to the news and announcements, both in Discord and on our website. What these changes will be and how we will go about delivering news content to you in the future is something we will work on. Speaking of Discord, we will be working to make some changes to split channels for both seasonal leagues, along with being able to hide specific formats, channels, or news streams depending on your own preferences.

HOW ARE WE HANDLING BANNED OR INFRACTED PLAYERS?

The Behaviour Panel accompanied by some admins will review currently banned and/or infracted Respawn League players. Players who have been banned for usage of third-party clients, exploits or anything not covered by infractions on either league can be reviewed upon request by that person.

OZFORTRESS HIGHLANDER SEASON 1

Much more info regarding our first season of Highlander will come when signups open, but for now here's the bare essentials:

You can sign up for ozfortress Highlander Season 1 from Monday the 30th of May, until Thursday the 9th of June. We aim to have seeding out by the 11th of June with the season starting on the 13th of June. This gap between the closing of signups and the start of the season is to give the administration team time to seed teams with community input. ozfortress Highlander Season 1 will begin on Monday the 13th of June.
Tiebreakers are handled the same way as Sixes, which happens to be identical to how RSL ran Tiebreakers.
Max roster size is fifteen.
Transfers are handled on a weekly basis.

If you want to read more, there is a post on the Respawn League website.

Thank you all,
The ozfortress staff team.