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.
How did my team start ?: The team eC. started as a community group called [eniGma]. We were originally contrived as a group of public players whom strived on teamwork. The plan was to develop a large enough member base to start our own server and from there a community run solely on donation. After awhile of watching early youtube videos my counter-part and co-leader “The Knife” pitched the idea to go into competitive play, having been interested myself we moved forward and gathered up our community members to make a team.
Then we quit for a year after real life issues, and returned a year later to restart the [eniGma] (eC.) name, we started the same but this time we intended to join the competitive ranks ahead of time. We originally set out with a two thoughts to our team. 1: That our team would always be our team, and that we would never drop a teammate for being any less skilled than the next, because for us a good team can be made, not bought or traded. And 2: That the classes in team fortress were made to be counter-able, and that we would use this knowledge to our advantage. With these goals in mind we branded 2 separate rosters and pushed on through countless scrims after slowly winning all of them we moved up the ladder to low/mid and started really battling the bigger better teams.
No longer using steam groups to find low teams as opponents we relied on mIRC #tf2scrim to find matches and we soon learned the concept of full time spy, heavy, and huntsman sniper wouldn’t save us anymore.
We traded up our childish "full-time" classes, having our spy learn demoman and our huntsman learn scout and pushed forward enrolling in TWL and began conquering nearly every low/mid team we found, with them behind us we figured it was time to give something back so we started a laundry list of community projects namely the [eniGma] Mentor Program, and support for the teams we played and befriended.
Over that time previously stated time span we dropped our community as a whole for the idea of supporting our community with our own money was becoming tiresome in this economy and pushed for a sponsor and landed on Two Fingers Gaming, an offshoot community that drifted apart from their original community The Firm. With fee’s behind us we now numbered at four [eniGma] rosters, nearly eight “friendly” clans that we mentored, and several more teams that we’d actually helped build from the remnants of fallen clans we'd ran into.
Now here we stand in the division four finals of TWL with an undefeated record. Over the next few courses of this article I will explore some past and present issues that our team had to overcome to get to where we are, and where we are going. Describing in detail the approach we took to overcome them and by what means.
Some of the problems we will address from either our own teams experience or just hot button issues that we have personal experience in dealing with are things that tend to make or break a team, and hopefully with the following weekly updates to this series it will help a lot of teams out there in dealing with these issues.
I hope you will all will enjoy the coming articles, I will post the second article directly following this article so to give the community a better feel for the series.
