Gonna just write this out for myself to record it somewhere

Got the game Christmas 2007 with Orange Box. First memory of the game is playing drunk on Christmas Eve with real life friends. Memories of all sorts of weird maps that I've never seen since.

Might have played it a bit, then in fall 2008 I moved away to college. So from 2008-2009 I couldn't play because I was in residence with shit internet.. couldn't play Xbox games, let alone TF2 on PC.

2009 I came back for a while, and played in a pub community called The Lost Continents, a community which is known for having a big part in playtesting cp_steel (see the poster in that and other maps with our name on it) and also for bringing us some old school comp guys like Warpy and Orzo, as well as djc. I played pubs and pickup Highlanders in that community until I moved back home in 2011.

Then I moved in with a girl, lived there from the end of 2011 til the start of 2013. Didn't touch TF2 during that time. It was worth it - women are cool. But I did miss the glory days of comp during this time, regrettably. Wish I could have been there.

Spring 2013 I came back to the Lost Continents. Joined my first comp team, played in UGC a couple seasons. Started playing pickup sixes as well with some guys like slardel, kent, trisk, gls, whoever was around the community then. Figured in September that I could apply my broadcasting skills to the game I love, went ahead and did it and now through hard work, here I am.

Still growing, still working hard, still lots of room for improvement. I've done a ton of learning about historical players and teams during the time I missed, and would still like to do more.

http://i.imgur.com/BqQUwNA.png

AKA far too long.

I couldn't buy things on the Internet before TF2 went F2P so I kept watching TF2 promos, Chozo raging and Criken's Prop Hunt video until it did. Around the time of the Pyromania update I started shitposting on /r/tf2, and it was there that I saw a Sal cast. Over a few months I slowly transitioned from watching Sal to watching TF.TV (when Fully Charged migrated here) and lurked obsessively on these forums before finally registering.

Highlight: I watched almost the entirety of i52 live. It was glorious. (Until the curb stomping of Epsilon in the finals, even though I usually root for b4nny's team.)

I still haven't played a single lobby or pug to this day; I don't have the time and my Internet is always acting up. Say hi if you happen to see me on a (European) Valve server trying to play with 150 ping when I should really be getting 70-80. muh airshots

Joined TF2 in 2011 when I was 12. Started playing 6's in 2012, thought it looked cool when I watched the Muscle Milk Moolians. Didn't play at at in 2013 but now I'm back :)

I started playing TF2 in 2009 and was told about it by a no longer friend of mine. He had a high lander team and let me join as a scout. Highlander wasn't fun btw but I've been playing off and on ever since.
I've met a lot of people along the way.
Shoutout to ian aka tsfun aka botmode aka whatever he changes his name to these days

i started tf2 when a lot of my 1.6 pals/old teammates switched over and they first implemented ads into 1.6, so this was like a few days into the tf2 beta

i pubbed with an online community and got into playing competitively because all these "highly skilled" players (at the time it was the experiment/doctors/apoc + pokey + emperor and friends) played in my pub quite often and i was able to dominate them, and that made me want to try playing more seriously

the community i was a part of held private pugs that had people like dlman/jaeger/stultus/tri/many other players popped in from time to time and a bunch of us ended up making a team for fun, where i sniped full time until i started playing in tf2.gather where people told me to get off of sniper or else

i watched s12 lan and stuff since my friend showed me it and i played like miencarft then and disposable heroes was a team in open and somehow it related or something i don't know

my friends were into it and i had sort of wanted to get into it for a while

around summer of 2013 i finally joined a ugc team

i watched s14 lan thru this season

but i didn't play the game till like 2013 haha

i used to be a filthy sniper main who frequented the RAGE (then a lot reformed to the Y2FC) arena server where i met a lot of cool dudes i still talk to. nonis at one point told me about his team needing a player for some 4v4 reddit koth tourney and that began my demoman adventures around 2010.

i pretty much backed up for a friend's twl team and played on a scrim team with a bunch of good friends until season 8

then i stopped playing demo at season 11 when i realized it's hard to both be retarded and play demo

TF2 i started with closed beta...my TFC team (and a few others) competed in the first Cevo Open tourney for the headsets as the prize (PC350's i believe??). I actually still have all my demos from those matches...though none of them work sadly. I've been lingering around ever since in ESEA whenever RL allows me time to play.

Edit: to blatantly copy ukm...there ya go

http://i.imgur.com/cXmVTcO.jpg

Been playing TF2 for a long time
Made a scrim team with fellow pub stompers and later joined a cevo team for a part of a season
Then played my first season of ESEA in s9
:>

Got TF2 just after the scout update. I've been mapping since just after that. I joined competitive TF2 when I jokingly told my buddy Thintri that we should start a 6's team, and the next day he had the roster and we sucked so much cock it was unreal in UGC season 11. I can't play TF2 anymore because of my internet situation but god damn do I miss it. Someday...

Just over 5 years

Got the orange box back in like 2008 for the xbox, got tf2 for the pc in 2010

started comp around december 2012/jan 2013

got orange box in 2007, pubbed for a couple weeks didn't really like it at the time

heard about organized play through tf2lobby in ~09, tried a lobby and (please someone correct me if I'm wrong) there was a rule where you had to play a certain amount of games on medic before anything else
so I got flamed to shit by elfkiller for not knowing anything about the game and didn't play beyond one pug - I got the (very wrong) impression that a lot of people in comp were assholes

rline + slardel really made me want to try out comp play from frag movies and watching s14 esea lan so my first season was esea s15

seriously though was that a real rule or did someone make it up to get a medic in a pug cause that's fucked up

In 8th grade, a ton of kids in my school were playing it. I was like, "What is this TF2?"

I got my first computer in 8th grade, then I got a Steam and installed TF2. One of my friends told me that he wrote a little bit for CommFT (his name was steelfirez) and that kinda got me into it. I actually bothered to start learning about ESEA and all the players and stuff after stumbling upon squid's stream about a year later.

So yeah it's been a solid 3-4 years.

dec 07

I've played in pubs since may 2009. In 2011 I started to take interest in competitive but it's a bit difficult to start playing pugs in Brazil because we don't have lobbies nor newbie mixes. So I was tired of not getting picked in pugs and started playing NA lobbies with 150 ping, there I got used to rollouts and other basic things.

Then I talked about the difficult I had to join competitive in one of the monthly thread complaining about it that we have in the Brazilian forum and I got the attention of the guy who was organizing a Pubbers vs. Pros and he invited me to play in the event. After the event, he and some other guys started teaching me how to play and now I am one of the guys organizing things for our community in SA.

someone was making shit up

i remember my first lobby being a demo on badlands and java b calling me shit for not knowing how to rollout

Late 2008 is when I started playing TF2.

I've been watching competitive since ESEA S5.

Been playing since CEVO S7 2010? (old CEVO)

you might have to scroll down

http://news.esea.net/index.php?s=news&d=comments&id=13358

i make anime/game ripoff art for $$$
there were a lot of girls in scout cosplays august 2011 on the animu scene so i was like
ok lets play this game and then draw pictures of it for cash money cash and sell it to thirsty nerds

little did I know the economic value of future wasted time would actually make TF2 my least profitable drawing decision of all time

i would like to read more stories about this

Still here

,

.

been playing the game itself since the end of summer 2012 and comp since the beginning of summer in 2014 but i had to take a lot of breaks/miss seasons because of school.

the way i heard about competitive was through one of my baseball teammates freshman year who showed me a video of gravelpit hl casted by cb (i think).

Learned about comp scene around summer 2012,didn't get into comp myself until late 2014, wasted time playing ugc for a while, played my first season of Esea s22

ive been playing on and off since release

Been playing since late 2012, I didnt get into comp until summer of 2013, and that was only UGC HL (regret), figured out competitive existed through a friend I met in a pub randomly, I watched a bunch of 6s from like s12-17, and then got picked up in the big open recruitment for S18, and the rest was history.

Started playing on and off in late 2013, but 2014 is probably a better time frame of when I began picking up the game. That summer I started getting into competitive and things went off from there.

However near the end of summer 2016 things really dropped off for me competitive wise due to going off to college, and earlier this year I began doing TFTV writing since I still wanted to have something to actively follow. I also found that I was pretty good at doing articles and such (probably since my mom's side of the family has had a few people do writing for big companies) so I started doing that.

Also reading a lot of these posts makes me feel kind of like a little kid compared to some others that have been playing since the game's release