Commemoration of the Early TF2 Era: EU 2007-11 w/ Byte interview

The Early Community

As highlighted by the total number of teams and of division levels in ETF2L by season, competitive TF2 started off as a close-knit community growing linearly and steep. With no predecessor with the same engine and mechanics to inherit from, players were still trying to figure out the game format and basic meta more than a year in, and with the relatively small size of PuG and scrim (“PCW”) pool, it is not hard to imagine that the skill gap between divisions were much closer. Perhaps an extreme example, but a Div4 player could be rostered by a Div2 team mid-season.

Multiplay UK’s #mpuktf2.pickup IRC* server was the major PuG system before the web-based and GUI-supported ease and popularity of tf2lobby (the predecessor of tf2center), which made it impossible to attract enough people to IRC by 2011. In 2010, the channel could only be joined by an invitation from someone inside. There was also #mpuktf2.pickup2 for high skilled players, which worked the same way. Voice chat via Ventrilo was mandatory. Quitting half-game without finding a merc was punished. In a way, these rules made it easier for lower skilled players to learn from the higher ones.

Like every technology before the monopolization of its few, big compartments, the internet also embodied more variety and authenticity. The world wide web had video players and uploads on various domains, not only YouTube. PLDX.com was the website to visit for high quality and well-edited TF2 frag movies. PLDX also provided a free tool to record high quality video footage from TF2 demos. The web site was acquired by Alienware Arena in 2011.

On the casting front, old was not necessarily gold. With the lack of an accessible live video stream service like Twitch, or due to the technical limitations, matches were cast voice-only on Mumble while the audience was its own cameraman in the STV servers. This situation would change drastically in 2011.

Competitive coverage was done by multiple local community web sites. In terms of the English ones, Cadred.org has been essential and was manned by Admirable for TF2. VanillaTF2.org, which came out in 2010 and was led by Torden (known for wotr and broder), made competitive TF2 coverage almost a daily phenomenon. It was “rather a few bad posts, than none at all“, as they said.

With the lack of Discord, Reddit not being the sole contender of foruming, and the “Casual” mode not being introduced to TF2 yet, individual communities arising from forum web sites and “pub” (community) servers were numerous, populated and represented. SpA, the team of the SpecialAttack.net community, was one of them, playing nothing less than Div2 in Seasons 6 and 7. Their most renowned player to be remembered still today, cookye, was recruited by Power Gaming, before Season 8, after a group of raging people put so much effort in flaming cookye with a fake frag movie* *.

The demographics of the community could be summarized as the usual Finns, Swedes, and the occasional Germans. There had been two ETF2L Nations Cups: the first in autumn 2008, with the second one a year after that. Both of which were won by Finland, with Sweden finishing in top 3.

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