The first and most important step to the start of a team is building a team itself!

Recruiting can be the hardest, longest and most painstaking process to account for and the pre-requisites you decide to be important are what will craft your future team. You want to make sure that you ring every bit of information out of your potential recruits that will matter to you. Without first establishing a set of expectations for your team that really sums up what you want you team to do and be, the candidates that come your way will be infinitely disappointing. For my team my initial pre-requisites and requirements were as follows:

Availability: Availability will decide not the overall skill of your team but the development of skill and the progress your team will make as a whole. If your team overall can only manage to make 1-2 scrims a week then chances are your team is going to develop at an alarmingly slow rate. If your team plays 10-15+ scrims a week chances are you'll litterally see progress with your team in a days time. 

Much like the older series started by community fortress writer Alar Ensis this is a series detailing a team breaking into the competitive scene. The principle reason for this series is not only to entertain the high echelons of tf2 with humorous perversions of skill but to educate new teams starting out and low tier teams by listing the processes, actions, and events that have occurred and will occur to our team that have strengthened us.

To start we will go over some standard questions who am I, how did my team start, and why did it all start. Because my team at its present state is fairly well known, clearly not top shelf, but good enough I will describe past events in this article called “Some History”

Who am I ?: I am Adam “Forsaken” Melo, I got my start playing games via console and then within weeks got a pc. I’ve captained teams, clans, guilds, and outfits on the following games: Socom 2 & 3, Everquest for Playstation 2, Everquest for Pc, Everquest 2, LOTRO, Guild Wars, Counter Strike: Source, Planetside, and many other games that I cannot even remember to count. I’ve organized group numbers of 5 to over 5000 (Planetside & Graphic’s Design Communities) and being in the captains seat has always been my thing. I started playing team fortress 2 after a brief stint of cs:s and i've never looked back.