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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9rkF2NzZ9E&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYW4oBZsHxA

I picked up TF2 like, early 08, I made a Steam account for it because my friends were all about it and I wanted in on it. I pretty much had never bothered to play PC games in general before that, come to think of it. But yeah, I mostly just started playing in the early 4chan-related servers like the Weeabootique (which is still there, holy fuck), Idort's Revenge and Fortress of Fapitude of which the community around them eventually evolved into the FA community (RIP in penis). Anyway, a few of the better players from the early FA servers were getting into competitive and to my complete and total surprise their leader, Mailorder, asked me to play with them in their inhouse games, to the derision of a friend of mine because I was fucking awful. I mained medic and got picked up for backup their TWL 7v7 ladder team called Fox 11, made up of a lot of the best players from the community at the time.

Fox 11 (which evolved into The Fighting Bronsons overtime but w/e) really got me interested in competitive TF2 in general which led me to make my own team with some friends from ancient Weeabootique, Team Yandere (we're still friends and I recently dragged them back from ancient history into UGC HL, which has been really fun). Yand played in TWL and STA's 8v8 and HL leagues, if anyone here actually remembers STA. I've kind of dipped in and out of comp TF2 since then but it has introduced competitive video games to me in a big way and I always find myself returning to it, even when I take my periodical sabbaticals from it.

EDIT: Also I suppose it's worth mentioning that the reason I main Scout now is probably because I watched Meatshot Vol. 2 / daniel and slardel back in like late 2009.

I started watching tf2 streams after i got bored watching sc2 streams on justin and i liked the pubs streams. Eventually i found Salamancers stream and noticed he was casting sixes match and noticed the difference btw the sixes format and pub. So i started asking tons of question about sixes and competitive gaming and sal answered me back

So i started playing competitive and sixes mainly because sal introduced it to me.
Also ended up joining extv to help out :)

I started getting into competitive because I saw the Pubs vs Pros 2009 (the one coL was in) I was so amazed by the level of play and I wanted to be just really good at the game. Then I started watching coL and other teams play in ESEA. It was very interesting.

I didnt see this until now, but yes! Those guys would destroy every round. I met wonderland on this server. Played with the likes of deucebox, thenoid, turts, pyyyour, enigma, carni, roland, and a lot more I cant remember. Good fucking times.

met someone on a euro arena server and he got me into competitive

yeah corpse and the black guy were on the first comp team I was ever on, the latter is now retired but the former is a div 3/4 soldier in eu now (???)

also the first comp player I ran into on that server was BUICK, which led to a pm session about 3 days into me getting a gotfrag account:
http://i.imgur.com/yPI85.png

I <3 U KEITH

I was a shitty TF2 pubber that thought highlander looked cool but wasn't good enough to play on a team, so I started my own and played pyro. We played UGC steel s7, then 3 main players and a backup all left 2 days before s8 started and we were forced to drop out of the season to reform. I started a 6v6 team made mostly of the players on the highlander team and we went 4-4 in season 10.

ex highschool friend told me bout this then never stopped-

I was playing intensively on the very popular Finnish Pelipurkki pubs. In the summer of 2011, I noticed a name I knew from those servers on the tournament page for the Assembly Summer LAN: dajackal. Usually he was crushing the pubs singlehandedly as demoman, but he was playing medic for SG-1, (earlier known as Power Gaming and later as Dignitas; with hocz, Punpu, hymzi, cookye and mafu). I found out how to watch the games live, and was eager to see how he'd do. They won--and as a newbie, I merely remember being in awe of the play's fast pace and the dynamism of the rocket jumps.

Afterwards I searched for some more casted games on Youtube, found VanillaTV (as well as eXtv) and started following it closely enough to watch the i43 and ETF2L Season 10 coverage live. Then, I think it was all about Salamancer, and I became very fascinated with Highlander, as it seemed easier to learn. Ended up registering on ETF2L and composing a team for both 9v9 and later, for 6v6.

Hey I never posted in here.

I don't remember how I found out about 6v6, but I do remember trying to organize some PUGs in the QuadAssassinz (sick name, I know) community. Me, Boink, Foster, and Foomp started out in those PUGs. Then me and Foster started a TWL team (Pregame Heroes) with Taters, Sung, Gypsy Davey and ChicagoBread (and ToiletHumor on backup). Boink and Foomp were being nerds and didn't want to join for reasons I've forgotten.

:>

Through ESEA pugs. I have to be the only one who joined comp TF2 through them haha

How I got into comp?

I'm not

;_;

I will hopefully be in comp someday though, and it's gonna be a wonderful and endearing story.

Read pyyyours thread on steam forums (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1735510) when I was on a highlander team. Read up on how to play and then started looking for a 6s team after my first highlander, and fell in love with 6s. Met Chriz_ta_fah, Maik, Marmaduke, Reemix (dFlame), Simplex, Fog, TWSS, Tragic ... etc. Good times.

My friend told me to play TF2 with him, then he told me to play competitive with him. It's a very interesting story as you can see.

Other than that FrozenshiFt frag video, what really got me going was actually playing in pugs. CP Pugs were the pugs I would play constantly every day in around early-mid 2009. Eventually I found myself playing in ESEA during S9 even though I only played 7 matches.

Saw the TF2 Blog post linking Extine's "Newbie Guide to Competitive TF2" and it looked really cool. I started watching his casts and got interested, but never really considered myself good enough to play, so I just watched. After a while I started TF2lobbying (around the Polycount Update)... then got discouraged by low scores and annoying teammates, so I stopped for a while. I kept watching though and began to "main" engy and soldier in case I ever wanted to play HL and 6v6. This past summer I was contacted by a guy who had seen my forum posts analyzing higher level engy play and wanted me on his team. I said I wasn't sure, but I could tryout and see how it goes. After a couple scrims I never looked back.

Played the game in pubs since beta. Maybe a yearish into its lifespan a friend of mine i used to play 1.6 with in CAL told me about some pubclan he was in so I joined that (the Uber Melons, some of u might have played on their Melon Pit server which was one of the highest ranked pubs for a long time). Ended up getting into their TWL 7v7 ladder/league team and eventually 6v6 team when TWL added that format. I joined my first esea team when flame lost someone on his s3 open team and asked me to fill in for the end of the season, then lucked out and found 3 really awesome groups of dudes to play with just by posting looking threads on gotfrag in seasons 4,5 and 7 (no talent, expertise, and THPS).

some guy i met awhile ago in a pub invited me to an mge server, then i had no clue what an mge server was, then later i talked to some people from mge servers, they told me to play tf2lobby, ect then i eventually pugged a lot, and this season i should be playing for a team

My friends were talking about that war update and I wanted in so I ordered the game and watched a lot of commft blight vs coL stuff so that when I got it I wasn't shit. I then stumbled upon tf2lobby through the nom-nom-nom community and played that for like 1000 games until I landed a spot on surGe gaming in CEVO.

got dragged in by a friend which lead to making a team with people who played from the weeabootique in mid 2011
didn't really get super interested in 6v6 till the middle of s11

rip katamari ;________;

I played in one of the GameFAQs 6v9 events, got to play in the Alumni Steam forums 6v9 cause I was the best spy out of the spies who had played on the pubstar team at that point, the Alumni game got me into competitive because I really hadn't seen anyone remotely as good as the people we played against in-game. Played TF2Lobby (this was back when it was new and not completely awful), got hooked.

.

.

Synwyn and all cs:s players are dicks.

I was a part of Pure Gaming when TF2 was released, which had a handful of different divisions. A bunch of people from each division tried it out, and eventually we made a beta scrim team (which famously had Basher if anyone remembers him forever ago). Pure, The Doctors, and The Experiment were the top 3 teams back then (with maybe Turmoil right behind, running off of foggy memory).

Well, the first CEVO tournament happened and we choked it up pretty hard. Pure.TF2 died immediately and pretty much everyone quit except me (though I did temporarily stop playing TF2 to play CoD4 competitively for a couple of months. In before the 9/11 tribute :D). I pugged with Experiment a bunch before and after Pure.TF2 died, so eventually when Dion left, I came in.

methuselah and supers PUGs

I randomly found the VanillaTV website and was watching the championships for i46 LAN.

Before I was even playing TF2 regularly I saw your Viva La Breloom shoutcast recommended to me on YouTube and I watched it. Quickly watched several other competitive matches and knew that I wanted to get in on whatever it was they were doing. ~600 hours of TF2 later, I'm on my first sixes team playing medic. So thanks for that, I guess.

why the fuck would you watch that