Done.

All-in-all, I walked away from actively competing in TF2 with a sense of failure (especially because of S22) when it came to being a leader and a huge sense of regret in regards to focusing too much on my teammates sometimes and not just perfecting my own play. Now I just play Kunkka in DotA 2 pubs and Overwatch while thinking of my good times of TF2 (early -bird noises- / hbv / Clam Bake / Hungry Hungry Ogres). Also an occasional filthy pugger.

[The End]

Instead of really aiming for just about any team to play demo or roamer on, I accepted mattb's offer to play on some iteration of -bird noises- he was getting together on Voll and train's behalf for S20. I literally knew of no-one on the team at that point, with the exception of hellbent who I viewed rather negatively because he bailed on lucrative in S18 just to make playoffs and dealt with that very poorly, so I really did not know what I was running into aside from karova's word that train and Voll were pretty good teammates and ricky saying it was probably going to be a good team. Surprisingly, the season goes pretty smoothly without overwhelming team drama or anything. We, unfortunately, fall short of winning of IM and place fourth due to never really figuring out the team that had habib, botmode, sen, h5, zilly and ictus on it. That was the only team we lost to in matches throughout the entire season and arguably the only team that made us feel truly uncomfortable that season. The off-season ends up being pretty strange and a bit dramatic, but ultimately, we decide to take the plunge into invite with indust on medic instead of mattb and after convincing train, and perhaps sigh as well, that it was truly worth it.

2016 - S21 was looking pretty awesome, honestly, and though I had no doubt that it could be horrendous to play Invite and we could have gone 5-11 or, god forbid, 0-16, things were looking pretty awesome back then and just the challenge of invite / playing against spectacular players and adapting to them was amazing. Unfortunately, not everyone else on my team back then really felt that way and arguably train in particular really cracked under the pressure/hated the game/hated the team/whatever excuse. We end up having to cut train to my utter dismay and despite me trying to hype not only him, but everyone on the team up and attempting to keep everyone motivated while focusing on my own game.

Linkuser comes to the rescue and literally after a night and a pre-game of scrims later, and after the team was a little disgruntled perhaps from having to cut train, we have a fantastic 3-1 half against 20b/TSU and end up closing the game 3-2 with quite a bit of a struggle in the second half. Not exactly the finest victory, but it was a great morale boost for the team and also showed that our potential as a team was a step higher by simply having a sixth teammate that cared a bit more about the game and did not have an emotional breakdown at arguably the worst times possible. The rest of the season goes on to be rather uneventful with us never being able to close out matches against EVL/Luca Goers and losing to them 4-3 on two occassions (including a Viaduct match that ended up being decided by one uber exchange). We lose to TSU/20b the second time we face them on Process 5-3 and our playoff run ultimately concluded with an 8-8 record at 5th place. Not great, but hey, pretty good for a first season of invite and arguably a season where I dragged people into invite that probably would have never gone into invite otherwise down the line.

Fast forward to S22, we part ways with hellbent and eventually indust as well while Linkuser chooses to take a break in order to take care of some family stuff. Looking back at that off-season, cutting indust was arguably the biggest mistake I've ever made in TF2 since I forgot how rare it was to have a pretty cool-minded guy, albeit with his faults, on medic that would show up to scrims and matches when you wanted him to. Even if there was going to be friction between him and corsa or possibly corsa not even joining -bird noises- as a result of keeping indust, our medic situation later in the season was just incredibly frustrating to deal with and a big reason why I hated playing most of S22 and almost came to a point in the latter half of the season where it felt like I should just quit. S22 was arguably the most inconsistent season I played period, and that was in part due to me hating/not really shining in a role aside from combo scout and also being extremely frustrated with having to be "the guy" to talk people out of slumps or bring people back to earth as the team leader. I also honestly have no idea why I coaxed train to play medic for us of all people since the release of OW and just a general distinterest in order to do anything to improve himself / help other people on the team like sigh work better with him ended up screwing us big time later in the season. train also never really played medic before outside of ultiduo medic, so in hindsight it was a pretty retarded decision that makes me wonder why no-one really contested me on.

In a nutshell, we end our season with a 9-7 record and closely missing out on playoffs for the second season in a row. We go through a total of three medics throughout the season, ending on train. Ironically, the last match we played against RONIN ended in a 4-5 that was arguably determined by one uber exchange as well in the last round. I also think we somehow made boomer hate TF2, though those aren't his words and I really don't know how he felt about the season's conclusion. Personally, I really couldn't take much away from the season at all though my understanding of "flank scout" did get better towards the end. I also had some decent performances throughout the season, though alongside some really frustrating moments like rolling FROYO BLK for three rounds in the first half and then getting rolled five rounds for the last 17 minutes of the second half on a map like Sunshine. We somehow stay true to our -bird noises- name and accumulate the most in-match time across ESEA as well due to how long some of our matches were.

The off-season afterwards, half of the team pretty much leaves on its own accord with boomer leaving for work-related reasons. train and Voll leave because they did not enjoy the game/possibly playing on the team in particular. The "core" of the team kind of dissolved on a pretty sour note, and no amount of previous interaction/motivational spiel/effort/friendship/whatever seemed to really make it anything but sour. Off-seasons ends up being pretty loose with me wanting to play again with the hope that finding dedicated, reasonable teammates would be doable. I somehow piece things together amid some very confusing roster mix-ups that ended up leaving players like botmode and Nursey out in the open, and also grabbed Rolling who seemed like he had a lot of potential and would benefit from a nice team in invite. corsa also elects to play again, though most likely because the team was his only option. Literally a week into the regular season, I start feeling like the same mindset-related problems are happening with the team again and nobody can seemingly solve them without getting overly defensive or not really communicating their perspective. I end up leaving the team and paying arekk up to play in my place on short notice due to not really enjoying practice, playing or anything with the team and also having to factor in a decision I would have to make later on to be missing for two to three weeks of the season. Before I did that, we also had a pretty unfortunate loss to Meat Market (now known as Circa eSports) that somehow made some people (myself included) think of the loss in the most asinine way possible instead of addressing issues on the team. Kind of unfortunate to end on that note personally, but I would be lying if I were to say I would feel any different having left the day before the first match in the season or something.

(continued in the post below)

This thread is pretty neat; surprised I did not see it earlier.

For me:

2007 - Pre-ordered The Orange Box as per the recommendation of a friend of Deicide's (a friend of mine from TFC who I also played on some old No Heroes servers with). He was the head honcho (possibly founder?) of a pretty awesome soldier guild (lol) in TFC called Dead by Dawn ('DD) and made the game sound super awesome. I hated it back then though and my snowballing dislike for gaming in general coupled with later being a first year college student prompted me to sell my then shoddy rig and focus on other things in life.

2009 and 2010 - Around the time I actually used Facebook, I think, so I actually caught up with a lot of people (including Deicide) who were still up and about when it came to gaming. Talked to people like fozzie, VJ, luckylpf and a few others that made pubbing on texture-less servers sound like the world's most hilarious thing. Piqued my interest a bit and actually made me check out Steam again, though I ended up just casually playing Left 4 Dead and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 instead. Mentioning this year though since this was the year (I think) that I actually watched some competitive TF2 games? I remember eXtine's post-produced casts of games like MoB's playoff game when Phaser, davis and Platinum were on the team as well as (possibly later) vibrant STV chats.

2014 - I believe I started competitive TF2 sometime in the middle or latter part of this year (probably more towards the middle). I remember playing on my first team with PinKushin and izzat, both very different but equally cool dudes. Also, reminixe, red, and a couple others who probably escape my mind from the fairly short period of time I played CEVO with them. I was skeptical of ESEA because I take commitments pretty seriously (as I'm sure not having missed a match and very, very seldom missing scrims shows), but eventually I really, really wanted to get into it because of how interesting being on a team committed to a seemingly serious league sounded. I set off to try and make a team with leaky, carni and all the immigration enforcement people, but most of them call it quits after zaxx bails for the nth time and my roamer debut in ESEA never sees the light of day. Sometime this same year I also played on a UGC team with sdogg2m in highlander (mainly since I knew him from a Badwater pub) and another UGC team with people like phone, tmoney, flatline, drewbi and so on.

At this point, it became very clear to me that if I waited around hoping to find the right group of players to play with or begging friends from a long time ago to play again / make space to play with me, I wouldn't have many opportunities to improve and have fun. I make an all-class lft thread and get picked up by a team (Hungry Hungry Ogres) spearheaded by Giuseppe (who eventually leaves the team and leadership ends up being in Rigel's hands, I believe). The roster initially consisted of eppe, boon, rigel, rooks, klepp and myself. I honestly had a blast while learning a fair bit due to that being my first real competitive experience on demo and a big part of my experience on demo outside of spamming chokes on cp_warpath pubs. Pretty fun season and we end up placing somewhere in the top six after a rather close playoffs run and some rough, but necessary roster changes toward the end of the season (-boon +ricky/punisher and before that, +coupe). I have a feeling if my first ESEA season was a disaster or was plagued with more bullshit than a couple roster changes, I would probably have never played another season or TF2 itself again at all.

Oh, and sometime in 2014 (maybe very early in the year?) I also played in some No Heroes server versus server tournament and won with the Orange server community (the grand prize was a NVIDIA Titan graphics card that we ended up agreeing to give to BlindSight, if I remember correctly). Overall, a pretty cool year for really getting me interested in TF2.

2015 - Hungry Hungry Ogres end up disbanding after various attempts to make a functioning roster. We try me out on roamer at first and n00bies on demo for the sake of trying something new, but eventually klepp (or maybe someone else) called it quits for the sake of not committing time to another season. I'm without a team with pretty much a week left to go until S18 starts, and due to being super busy for the entire month of December and the beginning of January, somehow get asked by topshot to try out for a team he was creating alongside ricky/punisher (not to be confused with bigpun/John pun btw). I somehow play scout despite never really playing it before (I think I had somewhere around a 100 hours in the class at the time) in IM and seem to be able to hang with other scouts in IM (at the time, cheesymacgyver, yeeegz, old cafe scout duo yomps and h5, sezco and a couple others probably). I did not exactly do as well as I wanted to, especially come playoffs against Champagne and Cocaine, but it was a pretty solid season for my first time ever on scout and not even DMing on the class very much let alone really thinking about it. I also met some awesome people throughout the season, including some that the team parted ways with during the season itself. foster, pauldogg, phelon, micah, miwo, tooth, topshot, fragg and nonis were all people I remember fondly from S18 and, despite the sour ending, were pretty fun to play with.

In the off-season, the team goes through some pretty weird turns and eventually decides to take an invite spot despite not doing as well as we wanted in IM playoffs. Pretty much half the team (micah, fragg and I) bails for different reasons. I choose to play CSGO seriously and end up playing on an ESEA Open team with PYYYOUR, BobSevenSevens, snark, coupe and fatcop. I end up hating the game (primarily due to some internal team issues), but it ends up being an interesting experience overall and playing with Brad and BobSevenSevens in particular was pretty fun. Pretty much towards the end of my CSGO season, I agree to back-up for TechDude's team in Open (Clam Bake) and end up playing a lot more than I really anticipated. I pretty much play the majority of playoffs (save first round) for them as well, and the team as a whole goes on to get second place alongside arguably the lamest fucking Grand Finals I've ever seen with something related to IRC hosting fucking my Internet connection for the second map of the grand finals and causing harbleu to come in on short notice while eulogy lagged around the server with 300 ping or something. Free win for whatever team paddie was on (6cuties, I think).

S19 would definitely have been my most frustrating season if it not were S22 and the fact that S19 wasn't really a full season for me anyhow. The only bright side to it was playing with *literally* everyone on Clam Bake was pretty fun even if they did not take things too seriously or random bullshit like network issues came up. Also, this was the season (arguably) I met some future teammates as well as friends in playoffs as well. I beat -bird noises- by subbing in for the last two maps of some BO3 and, as some may know, went on to play for/lead -bird noises- for the next three seasons pretty much. The off-season before I joined -bird noises- was pretty strange, with me almost committing to a team that topshot and tooth were making and even trying out as demoman for an iteration of Pizzagon that would go on to pick-up hassassin (arguably the start of his success in TF2 since he went on to win IM that season and was a huge part of that team winning as well). I really, really wanted to play a projectile class at this point since, despite doing pretty well in the shitfest that was S19 Open playoffs with little to no practice on scout, it felt like I had a lot more potential on demoman or roamer at the time.

(continued in the post below)

Added to the sidebar. I put your name down as "Яednaxela" rather than your forum name, so let me know if that somehow causes any issues when displayed on the sidebar.

I also sent you an invite to the teamfortress.tv twitch team. You can accept that by clicking here and scrolling down to the teams section to see the pending invite (you must be logged into Twitch).

I'll take a better look at the list sometime over the coming week, but for now I updated a couple listings that I could find new IPs for like b4nny's MGE server. Also, deleted a couple servers that I am almost certain are offline and have no hope of coming back online.

Noted those down just in case anyone thinks something was deleted by mistake.

Updated.

Added to the sidebar.

I also sent you an invite to the teamfortress.tv twitch team. You can accept that by clicking here and scrolling down to the teams section to see the pending invite (you must be logged into Twitch).

Added to the sidebar.

I also sent you an invite to the teamfortress.tv twitch team. You can accept that by clicking here and scrolling down to the teams section to see the pending invite (you must be logged into Twitch).

Added to the sidebar.

I also sent you an invite to the teamfortress.tv twitch team. You can accept that by clicking here and scrolling down to the teams section to see the pending invite (you must be logged into Twitch).

Added to the sidebar.

I also sent you an invite to the teamfortress.tv twitch team. You can accept that by clicking here and scrolling down to the teams section to see the pending invite (you must be logged into Twitch).

Looks like you're already on the sidebar as per your previous request here.

Regardless, I sent you an invite to the teamfortress.tv twitch team. You can accept that by clicking here and scrolling down to the teams section to see the pending invite (you must be logged into Twitch).

Added to the sidebar.

I also sent you an invite to the teamfortress.tv twitch team. You can accept that by clicking here and scrolling down to the teams section to see the pending invite (you must be logged into Twitch).

Ok, done.

There is already a Moonman on the forums. I can do Moonman_ or Moonman- for you, unless you'd like something else. Let me know.