For several reasons we slightly had to change the tournament set-up and we also had to adapt to the unusual amount of ten teams. We understand there are a lot of questions about this from both players, visitors and possible spectators. Therefor we’re hereby giving you a detailed explanation of the tournament structure for this weekend.

Golden Tournament

The Golden Tournament will still be our main tournament and as originally planned all teams will automatically participate in this tournament. We will start off with a group stage. Divided in two groups of five all teams will face everyone in their group, thus playing four matches. These matches will be one map.

At the end of the group stage the two top teams from each group will advance to the playoffs. Group A winner will face the number 2 from group B and the other way around. The winners will obviously face each-other in the grand final. The playoffs will be Best Of Three maps.

Silver Tournament

The three bottom teams from each group (Golden Tournament group stage) will participate in the Silver Tournament. This tournament will start with two small groups of three teams each. These teams will play each-other once on one map.

At the end of the group stage the two top teams from each group will advance to the playoffs. Group A winner will face the number 2 from group B and the other way around. The winners will obviously face each-other in the grand final. The playoffs will be Best Of Three maps.

Since our event is no longer big enough to keep WZZRD Enschede just for ourselves, anyone can enter the venue for free. This means that anyone who enjoys Team Fortress 2 or just wants to be part of the greatest TF2 event in history is hereby invited to visit us this weekend in Enschede - for free!

Now there are several visitors who already paid for their ticket before this weekend (which is highly appreciated). These visitors will be granted access to game PC’s all day on the days they bought a ticket for. Do keep in mind that this does not allow them to participate in the tournaments.

After a week of intense discussions, loads of conversations, several negotiations with the venue and a lot of ups and downs we are hereby confirming that The Community LAN ‘09 has received the green light and will definitely take place. This is 100% sure, there are no more doubts.

At this point in time we have 10 teams confirmed and paid (although a few teams need 1 more player to pay - sort that out asap!). The venue and the organization agreed that although the size of the tournaments has to be decreased, there are still so many reasons to do this event - and thus we will!

Keep a close eye on this page (really!) the following days for information on what you should bring to the event, a more specific timetable, together with a tournament structure description and some surprises.

Friday 3rd - Sunday 5th @ WZZRD Enschede, The Netherlands: The Community LAN ‘09

Saturday the original payment period we set for you all passed. Unfortunately there was a simply mind blowing low amount of 3 teams paying for their players. While there are some other teams that have paid for a part of their players, this is a very bad result. It seems there were several teams and leaders that did not know of this deadline and some MGOs struggled because of the UKeSA LAN event this weekend. Therefor we are extending the payment period with some days, until Friday June 26th, 23.59 CET.

In addition to this we have heard that several teams are still uncertain about their attendance, due to several reasons. We ask you, team leaders, to communicate this with the organization, in order that we know exactly what we are up to. If the amount of participating teams drops down to less than 14, we will have some financial issues to solve. Team leaders: communicate your issues, doubts or problems with us, we are very willing to help you if we can or support you in any possible way.

Thirdly there is the issue of individual players willing to attend the LAN. We heard that there are quite enough individual players to form more than one team, but people are unwilling to believe this is the case. Please do post your case on the mix page we made for this. Work together and discuss this at #thecommunity and let’s get one or two more teams to play! It would be a great shame if people are going to miss this event because they believe there is nobody to play with, while actually there are many people like them.

Last but not least this is a message for everyone that wants to come over and visit the event to spectate the games and have a great time. Please buy a visitor ticket through our PayPal account, because we really need to know how many people we should expect and how much money we can make through visitors. If you can’t pay right now or even in time, let us know so we at least know we can expect you!

Let me be very clear on one thing in particular. If we haven’t got enough income (this obviously depends on the made payments, FULLY paid teams and visitors) this Thursday, we will have to make drastic changes to the event set-up. I can’t express how sad this would be, but it is simply impossible to do the event without enough teams and payments. Remember this is a COMMUNITY event and that if we have got no back-up from the community (in this case back-up through paid teams) we can’t do this.

Just so everyone knows, we will use ETF2L’s current rules. This means we will use the standard rules and scores will be based on map results. There were alternatives but we don’t really believe it’s time to start experimenting at a 2-day LAN event!

The map pool for the Golden Tournament is: Granary, Badlands, Gravelpit, Freight and Turbine.

The map pool for the Silver Tournament is: Granary, Badlands, Gravelpit, Freight, Turbine, Badwater and Dustbowl.

Volunteer admins

We could really do with some kind, helpful volunteer admins for running the vent. Your task will be to coordinate the tournaments (Golden or Silver) together with a co-admin. There’ll probably only be a couple of spaces, but if you’re interested and think you fit the criteria, please contact Fruit`Amonsilas or TCM|dunc on IRC in #thecommunity.

We have agreed upon a timetable with WZZRD for the complete event. Although I will not show you the detailed version (according to dunc it’s too complicated for a normal human being), I can give you some rough outlines of what will happen at which day / time:

• Friday, 20.00 CET: at least one player from each team confirms participation
• Friday, 20.00 - late hours: room for practice games and fun tournaments
• Saturday, 11.00: Golden Tournament Group stage start
• Sunday, 11.00: play-offs start
• Sunday, 16.00: prize ceremony

As you can figure out we will use the Saturday to play all group stage matches for both the Golden and the Silver tournament. We will also play the Golden Tournament relegation matches on the Saturday evening. On Sunday there will be 12 teams left to play, 8 in the Golden tournament and 4 in the Silver tournament. These teams will then face eachother in the quarter- and semi-finals and try to make their way to the grand finals. The prize ceremony will start at 16.00. We would like to clearly state that although there are no official tournament matches on the Friday evening, each team will need at least one player at the event at Friday 20.00 CET to confirm their participation.

We are happy to announce that our official coverage partner for the first TF2 Community LAN ever will be none other than QuadV! They will bring a full coverage team to supply our main tournaments with live coverage of the best quality.

This is what you can expect from QuadV regarding The Community LAN:

• LIVE video stream of matches spread over the whole event
• Video’s on Demand on the QuadV website

Afternoon ladies and gentlemen,

We’ve finally decided on some official times for the event.

• Games will start at 20CET on Friday evening.
• The prize ceremony will be at 16CET on Sunday afternoon, meaning all games will be finished by that time.

If you have any specific requirements for attending or leaving the event at a different time, please contact myself (TCM|dunc) or Amonsilas (Fruit`Amonsilas) on #thecommunity and let us know ASAP. We’ll try to take you in to account wherever possible.

Payments - A REMINDER!

We really need people to start putting their money forward now. The absolute final deadline for making payments is the 20th June - that’s less than one month from now.

The link to the payment page is here: http://www.thecommunitylan.com/payment

Once we’ve got a few teams paid the others will flood in. Please encourage your team to put forward their payments as soon as possible.

Some time ago we informed you that WZZRD are now accepting e-mails regarding accommodation. Now there have been some issues with the e-mail contact with WZZRD. According to what we have heard, several people have sent mails to WZZRD, but got no reply. WZZRD has today replied to all e-mails they received over the past weeks, but it seems like there are more than a few mails that did not reach WZZRD at all.

Therefore we have come up with a new “system” that should solve all problems once and for all. If you have had, or still have, any problems with contacting WZZRD about accommodation, please contact Amonsilas in #thecommunity @ Quakenet. To contact WZZRD about accommodation, do the following:

• Send an e-mail to nick@wzzrd.nl
• Make sure your mail has a CC* to wzzrdgamecafe@gmail.com
• If you want to double-check, also CC to amonsilas@thecommunitylan.com

Please note that all of the good rooms are “first come, first served”. All the information you will need about accommodation can be found on our website. The accommodation that can be booked through WZZRD will definitely save you a lot of money, compared to the regular city hotels or Bed & Breakfast locations. If that has not convinced you yet: we can assure you that you will not find any accommodation closer to the event.

*In email, the Cc: command says ‘send a copy of the message to an address other than the main recipient’ (the address that you place in the To: field).

We are just nine small weeks after the official announcement and not even a month after the opening of our sign-ups. We can happily say that we’ve received an encouraging number of fourteen teams signed up for the event. This is, of course, a nice start and pretty close to our minimum amount of teams, but we will not stop right here. We have more than six weeks to go until the event and we are still in contact with loads of teams - all possible attendees. Furthermore we can proudly say that we already have eight of the ten best teams from Europe signed up to the event.

First sponsor

Second of all we have some more good news. SteelSeries have announced their support of the first Community LAN event. They will be providing hardware prizes for the silver tournament. This is great news for the teams entering the silver tournament and also provides exceptional credibility for The Community LAN. We are very proud to announce our partnership with SteelSeries and hope this makes it clear to everyone that we will not stop where we are now.

Mix teams

Two weeks ago we set up our mix page after big demand by the community. This page is dedicated to individuals and incomplete teams looking for other attendees to form a team on the event. As a matter of fact, arranging a team to play with is as easy as making a simple post with some information about yourself. When everyone who asked us about the page uses it, we should definitely be able to get a fairly nice amount of mix teams sorted out. Let me state once again that this is not just for individual players looking for a team, but also for half-formed teams looking for some extra players to complete their line-up!

Accommodation

Moving on to our venue and facilities. WZZRD are now accepting e-mails regarding accommodation. Please note that all of the good rooms are “first come, first served”. All the information you will need about accommodation can be found on our website. The accommodation that can be booked through WZZRD will definitely save you a lot of money, compared to the regular city hotels or Bed & Breakfast locations. If that has not convinced you yet: we can assure you that you will not find any accommodation closer to the event.

Visitors

For anyone that is not actively playing Team Fortress 2 in a competitive way we have also got visitor tickets available. If you enjoy watching matches, like LAN tournaments, want to be part of this unique event or just want to support us by paying us a visit on one or more days, than this is exactly what you are looking for. You will have full access to the LAN area and be able to spectate every ongoing match LIVE, residing just a few meters away from the action. We got some nice deals available for both one day and full event visitors. Make sure you drop by and be there when it all happens! (payment information)

What are you waiting for?

We hope that if you had any doubts left about attending, this post may have served to eradicate them. Do not hesitate any longer. This will be a unique and spectacular event, the greatest Team Fortress 2 event to date. If you are not coming with a team, sign up for a mix team or gather some friends and make one yourself, but be sure to register it. If you are not able to play in any way, make sure you do not miss anything and visit us at WZZRD Enschede. What are you still waiting for? Sign up now!