[DD]: Vindicate point with disembowlment device

Hello everyone! It’s high time we gave you an update on the adventures of the Specialattack Beta Bunnies and the Specialattack Community Highlander team, and our escapades in the ETF2L Highlander Challenge League!

NoNoice is more qualified than I am to give you the full Bunny lowdown, but I’ll furnish you with the basics anyways. The Beta Bunnies have been playing 6vs6 competitive pickup games together for a while now, somewhere around a relaxed div 6 level – the sort of team that the Highlander league caters perfectly for. Expanding their roster to include enough players to comfortably fill a nine-man (and lady!) team, they were eager and raring to go; as proved by the veritable mountain of practice matches they played beforehand. However, the group that they were placed in was one of four teams instead of three. In other words, they had one more team to compete with than most other people in the tournament. To progress to the next round, they had to come out on the top spot – already they had to fight an uphill battle. Sadly, a mixed bag of match results was not enough to see them through to the playoffs, and amidst controversy over their opponent using a banned weapon, they have slid out of the competition. Nonetheless, they finished a respectable second place in their group, and scored some impressive results, including beating Polish Fun Team so hard that they rage-quitted halfway through Granary.

Commiserations guys - sorry to see you go so early, especially given how eager and organised you were from the start. We need a SpA|com vs SpA|beta rematch to cheer you up, and we’ll make it a proper one this time :D

Now for the Specialattack Community team – a tag that was pretty much stolen from the SpA|com group when we saw that the team would be a mix of both SpA’s and community members. A team cobbled together by myself and Hofven, we aim to kick ass and chew bubblegum have fun. So far, the ass-kicking bit has been pretty successful, but it was a slow start. We had only got in one practice match together before our first league game, and we came out with an overall tie as a result (highlights: holding the final cap of Badwater for approximately forever, and the epic 20 minute battle that was the first round of Granary (we proceeded to win it 4-0)). It was all a bit hairy. However! We put in loads of practice and got our act properly together, and I can say with confidence that we’ve improved a lot since that first league match. As a result, we returned to play the same team on the same maps in the group’s tie-breaker, with resounding success (highlights: holding the second cap of Badwater for approximately forever, and our 5-0 stomp on Granary, which we now call our favourite map (sadly, it won’t come up again until we reach the semi’s/the finals)). The other group game we played was a… thorough, shall we say, steamrolling. As in, us capping the whole of Dustbowl first stage in 51 seconds, and them not managing to take the first point. To their credit, they were very good sports!

And with that, we’re out of the group stages and into the last 256, although we’re sad that our pals in Beta couldn’t join us. What’s next for the community team, then? Well, to give you an educated guess, we’ll probably be playing the next league match sometime roundabout the weekend of the November 14th, with a practice/ladder match or two between now and then. Hopefully we’ll be able to provide you with Source TV IP’s sometime before we play so that you can come and cheer us on; we’d love to have your support.

To finish this off; firstly, thank you to everyone that has merced for us, especially those who did so on a very short notice, and I’m sure that the Beta guys will echo those sentiments. We really appreciate you taking the time to help us out, and we hope that you had as much fun as we did. Secondly, I’m pretty sure that I’m not just speaking for myself when I say that we love this highlander stuff. Playing TF2 this way is, quite simply, where it’s at; given an organised and competitive edge, yet with more fluency, openness, accessibility and more sheer fun than 6vs6 has ever provided. We hope to keep on rolling (haw haw) for a long time yet!