I'd wanted to try 6s for a while so I started lobbying with Sizzling Calamari - the rest has been a painful and good time.

I think my first match of any kind was a 6s game on Pro_viaduct when eXtine was hosting lobbies one night. Took me thirty bloody minutes to figure out I wasn't supposed to put the compressed file in the maps folder, and instead just download it from the server. Finally got in and played soldier and bottom-scored on the server, and the match ended in a 2-2 tie I think due to the server time kicking in on the Golden Cap.

I'd always been a fan of TF2 competitive before i even started playing the game, but hardware and internet issues held me back from getting into it. Eventually I posted a thread on the UGC Forums looking for team as scout or soldier about a year and a half ago because I saw that a lot of my friends in the ]TPG[ gaming community were getting into competitive, a few months after got added out of the blue and asked to ring for a match.

I got picked up after ringing, and although I had a hard time in Iron, and the season after, Steel, I stuck with the remnants of the team for about 3 and a half seasons before moving on. The team that I'm currently on is really my second team ever. Jakey Poo was the first person who added me to play competitive, so I guess he was the guy who got me into competitive.

I saw this frag video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuaJ8r_aE-U

I thought it was amazing and knew right off the bat there was more to this game than pubbing. At this time, there was no real way of knowing how to get into competitive TF2 without getting lucky and befriending someone who played competitively. Well, lucky me. I ran into YouMustRecover on a Goldrush server. I was playing medic because I thought it was one of the funnest classes in the game (lol) and ended up healing him. He did work and I was amazed. I asked him about being good or whatever and somehow the conversation got on topic about the competitive scene.

I added him after that. If I remember correctly, I didn't worry about playing competitively right off the bat. It wasn't until I realized I was a pub star that I should give competitive a shot and then asked him further about it. I think that's how it went, but I could be wrong.

Either way he lead me to the appropriate places and here I am. Now if only he would come back and lead me out of Open.

Watched PYYYOURs Medic POVs, wanted to be like him :D

(Also, threads like this one already exist :/ here and here. Use the forum search function!)

I wanted to pubstomp, so I started looking for ways to get better.

Man I got flamed a lot in MGE.

a friend kept talking about it occasionally so i got interesting

i basically played mounds of tf2lobby before i played real competitive

http://teamfortress.tv/thread/10403/
I guess that thread is who, but whatever

Met Taimou on a pub dm_duel server and he grabbed few of the regulars from there. That was almost 3 years ago now I believe.

Played some granary 6s.

And I completely regret that...
-Nah just kidding, but I still remember that bind you used every time after killing their scout when you rang, "Get splashed nignog"

I personally got into comp through jumping / playing on the iT servers, I learned about ESEA/UGC and decided to try it out

i already competed in 1.6 way back when tf2 was in beta, so a ton of the people i played with in tf2 were already competitive players

we had a very active pug group and had cameos from a bunch of good players

all the pub servers (tf2f and [-Q-]) i went to were made up of a lot of the people that still actively play 6v6 today

i just started tagging along with teams for the sake of competition since 1.6 was getting stale for me at the time and just kept going

saw season 10 lan wanted to be mackey and still fucking up @ that

I stumbled upon a video about comp tf2 on youtube, I was interesting so I politely asked in the comments how I can get into competitive TF2. Someone was kind enough to respond back and gave me an answer. That answer was

Did a bunch of lobbies, then one day saw someone in chat recruiting for an iron hl team. I tried and made it.
My team also occasionally talked about 6s, and thats how I was introduced to it. Did a bunch of 6s lobbies and then decided to make a steel 6s team with my friend.

shout out to jack_frost for picking me up on that hl team and basically inspiring me to continue playing comp tf2

Started doing TF2Lobby back in like 09 or 2010 and I haven't improved since

I got familiar with the game and wanted to see what a really "good play" looked like so I searched "top 10 plays TF2" in youtube and discovered eXtelevision and their 6's VODs.

After some 6's lobbies I gathered a team from friends and people from pub servers

good question. i think cali showed me tf2lobby and I grew interested from there.

I started playing highlander with some close friends in like 2012, then I quit for a year or so then came back, met redban and newspeak in a lobby and they got me back into it

March-ish 2012: I loved playing spy in pubs. My favorite pub was a fish server than I got like 30 ping to. After playing spy there for constant months, I was asked by Brandon_411 (<3) to back up for their server community HL team thing. I didn't even know comp existed. Now that I knew it did, I got pretty bored of pubs so I started to play spy in #tf2.pug.nahl (this was before mixnahl was a thing). I got shit on hard and also never got picked. This was around the time I realized spy was a dumb class and started playing soldier, August 2012.

After switching to soldier I played jump maps for like 6 months straight, just trying to get my mechanics down (if I had known MGE was a thing I probably would be a dm lord now). I heard about 6s from Sal's videos and learned about newbie mixes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ghwe1u0kwc lol) from a post on /r/truetf2 and after that I started playing #tf2mix. I didn't really have time spring 2013 to play on a team but I backed up for Deer's team over the summer. During this time I learned a lot about the game and really realized how bad I was. I made the switch from soldier to medic because it seemed like a lot more fun. I joined my first ESEA team August 2013.

hooli, extracrispy, and Marxist's uploads to youtube all helped me learned a ton about the game, so shoutout to those dudes.

i used to watch a whole bunch of videos before i got tf2 and found comp but never really got into it, then i started playing tf2lobby (i remember my first one was scout on harvest highlander) and then i met jayyson in a 2fort pub and started a team with him and n01 in steel 6s.

Saw the community mixup highlander thing Valve does and thought it would be cool to try out highlander. It was shit then I heard of 6s and here I am teamless and still shit at the game.

Watching Sal's casts, leading to me eventually doing lobbies, etc. I'm still shit though, I never have enough time to dedicate to tf2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQqb89QpSA0

this video changed my life

Reptile frag video, played a bunch of soldier + medic in pubs. Ended up scrimming a few games with an 8v8 team called COOL CATS. First game was on cp_well. I had no idea what I was doing, but it was a lot of fun.

Back in 08 my pub community friends watched Reptiles frag movie and were awestruck at skill and game type. We made a Cevo team but my pc died so I couldn't play (they ended up playing against pandemic).

Come back to playing 6 months later and decide to play nothing but soldier. Pubbing and ammomod galore. August of 09 I get asked by my friend sNoB to play in a highlander pug with Axl's tf2 regulars. Start playing in his 6v6 pug group. Then I moved on to play in CPpugs and found my first team there.

i pooped and then i peed

some time ago around 2009-2010, i pubbed with european friends of mine on arena servers and eventually met up with someone named caneD, he added me and a friend of mine on steam and asked us if we played comp tf2 or anything of the sort. caned and i spoke for some time and realized we had both played the ps3 version of tf2 before actually getting the pc version (lol). he then asked if I was interested in playing competitive tf2 and I ended up saying yes, so I actually ended up playing in etf2l first before I entered esea. so here I am, still in open, haha, yeah...

if anyone wanted to know, my first NA team was GGG, thanks spookyman 4 picking me up off one lobby.

Back when the game came out in 2007/2008, I was part of a pub community called Havoc 2.0 and they were an old school TFC clan. We started playing competitive 8v8 in CAL before I left the team for bigger and better things.

chaaz (formerly DROP DEAD N RUN) and I were on the same team for about 1.5 - 2 years.

celtic lady made me

I enjoyed watching frag videos and shoutcasts and wanted to play as well as those guys. I was getting a bit bored of pubs and wanted to try something new. It also looked like a lot of fun! Like that was an awesome airshot, and that Scout killed half the team by himself, or that Medic just dodged everything that was trying to kill him and kept his whole team alive... I was hooked.

I just got into the whole comp scene around late last year so I'm still scratching the surface of what it is and learning a whole lot.