News

(Graphic by dezi)

After two action packed grand finals the Winter '25 Highlander season is done and dusted. Congratulations to the respective Premier and Main Champions Leap of Faith Deluxe and Five Nights and Silent's. Like the last season we'll be including some trivia at the bottom of each divisions awards with a big thanks to both treemonkey and more.tf for gathering the data.

Below are the Final Rankings and Awards for the Winter '25 season of Highlander. At the bottom of each Division's Awards is a link to an additional thread with additional information on classes and players (Trivia)! The Division based Trivia will only pertain to the regular season's results, playoffs and beyond has been excluded to ensure everyone has as similar amount of matches played as possible.

Finally we also have 2 post season surveys for all competitors of the 2025 Winter Highlander Season. The first, focuses on a map vote and only contain 2 multiple choice questions. The second, provides spaces for multiple areas of feedback such as the progression of our regular season, how we run our playoffs and our current weapon whitelist. So please don't shy away from giving us your thoughts and opinions!

• Winter '25 Map Survey (2 Questions Long!)

• Winter '25 Post Season Survey

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Congratulations Premier winners Leap of Faith Deluxe!

Placements

- Leap of Faith Deluxe
- crylander
- Significant Otter
- Seal Grease Syndicate

Grand Final Map Scores

Match · VOD

• Ashville: 3 - 0
• Upward: 1 - 2
• Product: 3 - 0

Bronze Final Map Scores

Match

• Vigil: 2 - 0
• Steel: 2 - 0

Awards

Best Scout: krollic (12), time (11), Susu (10)
Best Soldier: Raelen (17), mashiro (14), sarkreez + matttt (6)
Best Pyro: brodie escobar (18), Styxs (8), robor (7)
Best Demoman: doge.exe has stopped working (18), turris + BONKITUP456 (8), Glitchy (6)
Best Heavy: JP (16), typo. (13), Trash (10)
Best Engineer: redja (12), silvo (11), Mikcow + Square Bread (10)
Best Medic: remorse (18), lau (13), golden (7)
Best Sniper: maz (18), Flow (17), kaldoz (10)
Best Spy: Andyroo (18), henwe (15), Speedy (7)

Most Improved Player: Paray (16), Pipelin12 (10), mort (9)
Most Valuable Player: maz (9), Flow + krollic (5), brodie escobar + robor + JP (4)
Most Improved Team: Seal Grease Syndicate (14), crylander (10), Demon Slayer Corps (DSC) (9)
Friendliest Team: Seal Grease Syndicate (10), Leap of Faith Deluxe + crylander (8), Significant Otter (7)
Best Dressed Team: Leap of Faith Deluxe (10), crylander + BRIANLANDER (9), Significant Otter + Demon Slayer Corps (DSC) (7)

Best Caster: tal (16), thelampshade22 (8), capy (7)

Premier Season Trivia

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Congratulations Main winners Five Nights At Silent's!

Placements

- Five Nights At Silent's
- The Menagerie
- IHOP
- rat gaming

Grand Final Map Scores

Match · VOD

• Ashville: 3 - 0
• Vigil: 0 - 2
• Eruption: 2 - 1

Bronze Final Map Scores

Match

• Upward: 2 - 0
• Proot: 3 - 0

Awards

Best Scout: mildor (14), April (13), Ramsp + lilybit_0 (6)
Best Soldier: klebs (12), whitefang2360 (7), snowy (6)
Best Pyro: froglvvr (16), bluehat (7), Mercicrux (6)
Best Demoman: juliangonzales2009 @yahoo.com (12), wrath (9), Zando (7)
Best Heavy: Jameshasconnected (12), Rayno (9), ARISSS (7)
Best Engineer: Sulu (11), Sir_Cloud (7), Alice Hikari (6)
Best Medic: MR_MEOWY (9), juna + SpicyHipJesus (7), Emily the Goldfish +peteydog + June (she/her) (6)
Best Sniper: abid (13), malice + rill (9), exquizit (7)
Best Spy: Captain Sigma! (16), Karly (13), RainnFoxer + Hobby_sr (5)

Most Improved Player: Wooper (9), Dede (7), Ramsp + Zando (6)
Most Valuable Player: abid (9), trippycd, froglvvr, good small horse, juliangonzales2009 @yahoo.com, zepi (3)
Most Improved Team: Lake Fairy Crew (12), rat gaming + FELLOWSHIP OF THE SANDVICH (10), The Menagerie (9)
Friendliest Team: Lake Fairy Crew (15), FELLOWSHIP OF THE SANDVICH (13), rat gaming (6)
Best Dressed Team: Lake Fairy Crew (12), The Menagerie (8), 9 Reasons Not To Play Tf2 (7)

Best Caster: capy (15), evelynn (12), redja (9)

Main Season Trivia

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While this may not seem like the most exciting news post ever, please stick with it, because it is genuinely exciting for us and opens up a lot of possibilities for further integration for our services and any third-party/community services.

DISCORD LINKING!!!

Yeah, it's in the title, but we are (I am) excited, ok. You can now link your Discord account to your ozfortress.com account. For now, this will display your Discord account ID and a clickable link on your profile/user page, but we will be working to bring more features in the future. Currently, the biggest feature for anyone who has used our Captains Discord in a seasonal league or off-season event, automatic role assignment.

Captains Discord & Automatic Role Assignment

When asked to join the Captains Discord (or if you've been a captain in recent seasons), you will now be able to go to the #setup channel for a clickable button to begin linking your Discord account to your ozfortress.com account, or you can follow our guide. Or, you can just wing it; it's in the User Settings page, under your username dropdown top-right. Once linked, anytime a new season or event is set up in the Discord, your roles will be applied. It's really that simple. If a season or event is already active, you can run the /sync command in any Discord channel in our Team Captains Discord to have your roles assigned.

Discord Linking & The Future

Our guide has a brief FAQ that will be expanded, but there are likely going to be questions regarding what we plan to do with this feature moving forward, if we plan on putting any restrictions or requirements in place, etc.

Future Possibilities

We won't ramble too much, but here's some of what we could do:
- Use this feature for Discord verification in our public Discords.
- Integration with our public and private Discord's (maybe role-related features).

I'm sure there are far more possibilities, just as I am sure you could find possible ways to integrate it into your own service if you're a pug group/website. If you don't already have an API key, please feel free to reach out to me on Discord to get one (@coreobs, just be aware we only hand them out to those with legitimate use cases.

Requirements?

Many of you may already know what we could do with this feature, so we'll come out and say it. Eventually, we'd like to make Discord linking required to access some of our services, mainly Discord services. To be clear, none of this is coming anytime soon, and we'll announce any major feature addition to Discord Linking well ahead of its deployment. We just wanted to ensure we float our ideas, so it's clear what we'd like to do in the future.

As for any possible restrictions or requirements in the future, all we can say is we are thinking about prevention and protection methods to combat the usage of alternate accounts, but we'll leave out the details for now until we know what, or more importantly, if it's something we'd like to do.

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Discord linking provides us with an immense amount of possibilities for future integrations, and we'd like to thank our development team for bringing this to fruition.

START LINKING YOUR DISCORD | Linking Guide

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PRELIMINARY CUP SEEDINGS

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Alright you Snyder cut mofos, 14 teams are expected in this event. Everyone needs to be on their best behavior, no surprises. Below you will find our Preliminary Seedings and Player Restrictions for Experimental Cup 4. If you have any concerns, please reach out to the Highlander Administrators via our support channel in Discord.

Player Restrictions can be found here. This time around we tried restricting players below division 1 within reason. However, we let some players who in a regular season would warrant competition "slide" as to create better balance and competition within the divisions to ensure closer matches and optimal map testing.

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DIVISION 1

Leap of Faith
projected rank silver 2
9 men 1 child policy
Demon Slayer Corps (DSC)
one million zinger boxes
The Ozfortress Incelosphere

DIVISION 2

The Beatles
AsiaFort Dropout
Household
Highlander Experimental League Lovers

DIVISION 3

Morb Fortress 2 - Morbheads
9 Reasons Not To Play TF2
Lake Fairy Crew
TNP

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4 Team Divisions

As we intended, both divisions 2 and 3 will contain four teams. This means team will have round repeats resulting in each team playing each other twice within the first weekend of competition (once on Saturday and once on Sunday).
This also means all teams will progress into playoffs on weekend 2 and will have at minimum one match on the Saturday and either a Grand or Bronze Final on the Sunday.

Division 1 with 6 Teams

For Division 1 we weren't able to accommodate a fair 4 team division due to the number of teams that signed up. Therefore each team will only verse each other once throughout the first weekend of competition with one less round to play on Sunday. This means that no teams will play Govan on the first weekend however we will leave the map open to be picked in playoffs matches in the following weekend.

ABBA & Playoffs

Throughout the entirety of this cup all stopwatch maps (Bumblefumble, Cerana & Divulgence) are to be played under the ABBA formatting. This means teams must win a total of 2 rounds on the map to be declared the winner. This will remain the same throughout playoffs and is Non-negotiable. We are doing this to further encourage the global standard that ABBA has become as well as to give teams a chance to experience the formatting before playoffs if they have never experienced it before.

For playoffs, the following Pick/Ban method will be used:

• Home Team Bans | Away Team Bans | Home Team Picks | Away Team Picks | Home Team Picks

This is the same as the last cup with the only difference being implemented is that of permanent ABBA fury!

As for Playoffs, Divisions 2 and 3 will be making use of the typical Page Playoffs system used in our previous regular season (Winter '25). However, for division 1 we will be utilizing the Expanded Playoffs system instead where all 6 teams will be progressing into the 2nd weekend of competition.

No Forfeits

Finally, as it was in the previous experimental cup no teams are permitted to forfeit any match for any reason throughout the Experimental Cup. If teams forfeit a match at any time, their roster will be disbanded and removed from the competition immediately, meaning no players from the roster will receive in-game medals or any monetary rewards.

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