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FotM #3: ETF and TF2 veterans Coinz and Moose

Fortressmen of the Month #3 brings together two competitive veterans who were rivals across two different Team Fortress games, yet companions at the same international LANs, 15 years after standing at the top of the European scene. Coinz competed for ECA in Enemy Territory Fortress and later for YoYoTech/TCM Gaming in Team Fortress 2, while Moose played for Clan United (ETF, TF2) and then for Crack Clan/Power Gaming (TF2). Both came to TF2 from the short-lived but competitive tournament scene of the still-young ETF, joining a wider migration that saw entire clans from games such as Team Fortress Classic make the same transition.

For Coinz and Moose, however, the move was far more than a passing fad. They remained at the forefront of TF2 as the game’s competitive domain evolved from humble beginnings into a major scene with multiple leagues featuring several hundred teams each season.

In this interview, they look back at the online ETF competitions, discuss TF2’s unique gameplay and their adaptation to it, revisit the major European TF2 LAN tournaments where their paths crossed, and recall TF2’s early prospects as a major esport—including the first attempts to engage Valve on the game’s competitive future.

Güven: I know you guys played top level competitive ETF and then top level competitive TF2 in its early years (which I got to watch as a teenager), and actually carried your clans/circles over from the previous game to the next one.

Q1. Have you played other Fortress games before ETF? What is the first ever (any) game you played competitively? And what drove you into it, rather than staying in the pubs?

TF2 now has a huge gap between its public and competitive scenes, with the latter only making up 1% of its total concurrent player count* and requiring the players to put some effort to find and learn about the competitive scene. (*Total concurrent of 10-12k player. 100-120 playing competitively. In-line with the league sizes I’d say. The main NA and EU leagues have around 100 teams per season.)

Was it easier back then to start playing a game competitively?

Coinz:
Hello! It is a pleasure to look back on those days. I actually started playing online first-person shooters with QuakeWorld Team Fortress. At the time, some university friends of mine were already playing it, and they were the ones who introduced me to QWTF. Later on, Q3F [Quake 3 Fortress] came out, and I had a brief stint playing for K1ck, a Portuguese clan. However, there was still a small, active community in QWTF, and I personally preferred its gameplay mechanics. That small community eventually faded away just as ETF emerged with a massive player base. I ended up transitioning to ETF, where I played for the /ECA [Elite Combat Alliance] clan until the release of TF2. With TF2, a community of experienced players from similar genres quickly formed. We used to gather on IRC to organize pickup games, which is how the very first clans were established. Since everyone was starting from scratch and learning a brand-new game together, it was naturally much easier for any newcomer to integrate into the community. Nowadays, it is understandably much harder for a new player to break into that tight-knit circle of top-tier clans, simply because veterans have accumulated years and years of experience. But that is the case for any competitive title, like Counter-Strike or Quake. I actually had no idea that TF2 still maintained such a large competitive community today! It is a truly pleasant surprise.

Moose:
I started competitive games maybe back in ’97 with QuakeWorld Team Fortress. Played a bit of Quake DM [Deathmatch] as well, but the original Team Fortress is the one that really got me into competitive matches. We had a decent Finnish team called Ewok and later on Gummybears, and somehow I got stuck to the role of defence and namely playing the Soldier class with rocket launcher, nail granades at this point already. Competitive games like this, especially team matches were something totally new back then, and something about the teamwork and coordinating different roles in the team really resonated with me and drove me into TF games rather than deathmatch. Also the social aspect of clans and tournaments was something very fun and new as well, and that was also something you wouldn’t experience on pubs. I think back then it was natural that if you enjoyed the game and were at least a bit good at it, you also tried your skills against other players in matches. At least that was the case in my friends circle growing up, though most of them never continued playing competitively.

Besides the original QWTF, I didn’t play any other Fortress games before ETF. I know there were at least TF Classic and Q3F available before ETF, but there was some sort of hype around the launch of ETF that it got me interested again and pulled me back. I had been playing mostly Action Quake 2 after QWTF, from 1998 to 2005, so I felt it was time for a new game after seven years with AQ2.

EAQL‘s* (European Action Quake League) Action Quake 2 (AQ2) Nations Cup 2005 match between Finland and Iceland. Moose’s POV starts at 53:50. More information is available on the description of the video on Youtube.
AQ2 is considered the predecessor of Counter-Strike. Its remaster, AQtion, is free to play on Steam.

G: If I look at the article written by you in July 2005 on Clan United’s web page, Moose, it was indeed time for a change after two thousand AQ2 matches. And although 8on8 required relatively more players, the abundant number in the CU rosters speaks to me about what you just mentioned—grouping up for clan matches came more naturally and perhaps socially to players.

Let’s dig more into the ETF years now.
I don’t know if k1ck was still the MGO (multigaming organization) of your Portuguese Q3F clan at that time, Coinz, but I can see in the last article on this k1ck.com page that ETF was prophesied to Q3Fers by April 2004 already. Then we go to the PlanetETF page linked there to find the following news at a particular instance of it.
– STA (Stronger Than All) is running a 4on4 league and potentially an 8on8 one as well.
– There is EETFL (European ETF League), which actually was the most elaborate source I could find (Season 12 standings, results).
– There was a petition for ClanBase to launch a ladder.

I can only hope these bring back some of your old memories.

Q2. Now, with your own words, what was the condition of the ETF competitive scene?

Were there other organizations than the ones I mentioned above, or LAN tournaments? How many divisions and teams were there, and what was the most prevalent game format (4on4, 8on8 etc.)? Who was winning the seasons, either of Coinz’s ECA or Moose’s Clan United?

Moose:
To be honest, it felt like the ETF competitive scene never really got anywhere. The game format for ETF was 8vs8, 4 in defence and 4 in offense. There were a lot of teams and players for the first few months, but I can’t remember any tournaments beyond EETFL from that time and there definitely were no LAN tournaments for the game at any point. It might be that my memory fails me, but it felt like the competitive scene lasted for a very short time before it all fizzled out into endless daily pickup games. I think it may be because the game lacked a strong grass-root organizations like ETF2L built in TF2 later on. Also the logistics of organizing 16 players for one match were always making it more difficult than 5vs5 matches in CS for example. None of the clans involved were professional organizations either. For the top teams at the time I can remember that it was probably Feral from Finland and the international squad Vexillum Mirabilis (or “vex”) at the top when they were at their best. Then the other three following the top two were probably Clan United, Armygeddon [“AGO”] and ECA, but I can’t honestly remember those tournaments at all. Checking the link on EETFL says we won the last season with Clan United, but I don’t think there were 12 seasons played overall, maybe just 2 or 3. I’m thinking the previous seasons were played in Q3F and it was the same tournament organization which continued to host the matches in ETF. It was probably only a single division in the league, and season 12 seemed to have only 9 teams participating. So yeah, not very active at all. But the pickup games continued strong when the tournament scene died out. So we had a lot of fun playing with random squads daily.

Coinz:
Honestly, I barely remember anything about the ETF tournaments; I remember more about the pickup games we used to play daily. I believe that in the beginning, because it was something new, ETF attracted many players, but they quickly stopped playing, and only a smaller community of more competitive players who liked the game remained. Personally, I was never a big fan of ETF because I prefer the gameplay of QWTF, but at the time almost no one played QWTF anymore, so I started playing ETF since it is similar. Nowadays, there is still a community of approximately 30 players which allows us to play 4v4 FortressOne pickups, an improved version of QWTF. There is also a small ETF community, but it is not as active as FO.

ETF Extreme fragmovie by Moose and M0re, showcasing top ETF players such as Haunter, a teammate of Coinz in ETF and TF2; and Sharky from AGO, who still plays ETF today.
M0re is possibly the same m0re in TF2, who played several seasons in top and second division teams including Delirium, and created m0reHUD— one of the most popular HUDs in TF2 to this day, and used by top competitive players.

G: There are indeed eetfl.org pages (1, 2) from the past where gathers (pick-up games) are said to be more popular than the pub scenes. What I understand from the web archives is that Season 12 of EETFL in spring 2007 was its last one, and probably ETF had already turned to a predominantly gather scene, as you pointed out, when Team Fortress 2 was released in October 2007.

Forum posts from a few months later, on January and February 2008, mention the negative effects of Fortress Forever‘s and TF2‘s release on ETF’s playerbase, and shows efforts of starting it up again. You were part of that lost playerbase, who made the transition to TF2.

TF2 was very different than the Fortress mods before it–different gameplay cycle, engine physics, art style. But what you did was far beyond just trying it out throughout the initial hype period. You played and remained at the top level even when the leagues grew to comprise hundreds of teams and several divisions with significant level differences. This is not common with the old-school Fortress veterans.

Q3. What motivated you to adapt to TF2 despite it not being the TF sequel people (and probably you) expected? Was it initially a bad surprise for you as well? Did you have conflicting opinions with your ETF (or other TF) team mates or social circles about moving on to TF2?

Coinz:
As I said before, I was never a big fan of ETF, so my transition to TF2 happened naturally, especially since there were practically no tournaments left at that time, and the community was limited to playing pickup games. The fact that TF2 wasn’t a replica of classic TF pleased me, in the sense that all previous projects trying to do that failed. You meet the expectations of players who are fans of that classic TF style, but it doesn’t attract new players, and in my view, that was the main reason for TF2’s success. I remember there being an IRC channel to play TF2 pickups, if my memory serves me right, even before the first official TF2 tournaments, and that’s where the first European TF2 clans started to emerge. Out of curiosity, if I remember correctly, I was invited to play for Relic at the time but turned it down because I wanted to join a clan together with Haunter. (If by any chance I got the clan name wrong, someone with a better memory please correct me.)

Moose:
There was a lot of hype around TF2 launch again, and it attracted a lot of players who had not tried Fortress games before. I thought the art style and production values for the new game looked great, but the gameplay itself looked slow and not that impressive, so I didn’t get the game at launch. However, I was also a Half-Life fan, so Half-Life 2: Episode Two being shipped together with TF2 and Portal in the Orange Box collection was the reason I ended up changing my mind with TF2. Another reason was that a lot of my friends from both Action Quake 2 and ETF were now playing TF2, and they seemed to be having great fun with it. ETF was completely discarded at that point when the few remaining players jumped ships to TF2, so I thought to give it a chance as well. In the end, I’m glad I did. It was a completely different game, and even if it seemed simplified and slow to me at first. It was something new and fresh, and to my surprise there was quite the high skill ceiling in TF2 as well, which is what motivated me to play more and get better at the game.

When I started ETF with Clan United, most of our squad were new to Fortress games. I had only played QWTF for a relatively short time as well. But this time with TF2, when we started the United TF2 squad, most of the players were either ETF or QWTF veterans, so our expectations to perform well in matches was decently high as well. We had a lot of players who wanted to join United at first, including some IRL friends of mine. But after a few months of playing more casually with a rotating roster of maybe 12 players, it was clear that we had players with very different skill levels and motivation to improve. And so we parted ways with the less active players, and kept the six or seven players who wanted to play at the top echelons of the game. What I remember as the main squad after that was me and snifz as Soldiers, humis as the Demoman, Jambo as a Scout because we also continued to the later iteration of the team and Interrobang?! with these players. Other early team members in United I can think of were Reve, dajackal and ylih.

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