Sun, Dec 18, 2016 by Kumori

Greetings, Mercenaries!

With Season 20 having drawn to a close, here are some exciting changes to look out for going into Season 21!
 

We have sent out surveys to Team Leaders and active players from seasons 18-20 who have their Steam profiles linked on the forums. Players that meet that criteria will receive the survey through email. Please check your inbox! The goal of the survey is to give all players a voice in what maps we play next season and in our weapon whitelist. The surveys will be our guide to the map list and weapon list for Season 21.

The surveys will be closed out and tabulated on Monday, January 9th. A rollup of the survey results will be made available in the forums.
 

This coming season we will be running 3 divisions in North America: Platinum, Silver and Steel.

Last season we merged Iron into Steel because the two divisions were very similar to each other. Many new teams were forming into Steel and not Iron, causing the skill disparity to become heavily blurred between the two divisions.

This season we will be merging Gold into Platinum. Having a larger Platinum will help ease new teams into the division and foster growth of those teams. Because Platinum is expected to be larger this season, we will not be doing Round Robin and will be using Swiss tournament scheduling. We are looking forward to these upcoming changes, as teams will be paired against others of similar skill.
 

With Gold being merged into Platinum, we are changing the placement guidelines for Silver. The following changes will be amended to the Rules shortly.

Former Silver guidelines:
Silver - Is the seeding division for Gold. Rosters are expected to be a mix of players with experience on mid to low Gold teams, established Silver teams and high Steel teams. Teams are permitted to have no more than 3 Gold players (or 1 Gold player and 1 Platinum player) from teams with established records (3+ legitimate wins) in the past 3 completed seasons and current season. ESEA-I and ETF2L Premiership players are not permitted to play in Silver. See rule 3.2 for more information.

New Silver guidelines:
Silver - Is the seeding division for Platinum. Rosters are expected to be a mix of players with experience on mid to low Gold teams, established Silver teams and high Steel teams. Teams are permitted to have no more than 3 Gold players (or 2 Gold players and 1 Platinum player) from teams with established records (3+ legitimate wins) in the past 3 completed seasons and current season. Teams are permitted to have no more than 1 ESEA-I or ETF2L Premiership player rostered. See rule 3.2 for more information.
 

Season 21 will see the introduction of some new features, as requested by our top players, regarding rosters.

New roster rules (applies to all TF2 formats): Effective Midnight (EST) of Week 1
1.) Players may join 1 team in each format per 8 day period. The 18 hour roster cooldown timer still applies to roster joins.
2.) Teams may accept no more than 3 players to their roster in an 8 day period. A player that left your roster and wants to rejoin will still count against that limit of 3 per 8 days.

Exceptions:
1.) Prior to the effective date, players may move around freely and teams can accept as many new players as they want. These new rules will be in effect starting at Midnight (EST) of Week 1 default match day and will remain in effect throughout the active season.
2.) Teams sitting in one of the Regional *New Teams divisions are exempt from all aspects of these rules while they reside in that division.