Oh dear!
My multiplayer roots go back to such humble beginnings like DOOM and Duke3D LAN games, then a few sessions of Quake DM online (not much fun due to bad pings), a bit more Quake2 LAN games (and a few odd Q2 CTF online) and then came HL. Played it, loved it, started playing DM online. It was nice, but DM was something which bored me quickly (still does). But HL-DM had a nice variation: You could play DM with teams! That was a lot more fun. And there a map (don't remember the name) which supported teamplay a bit because you could enter a silo, start a countdown, the doors would close slowly and afterwards an airstrike would obliterate everyone still outside.
And then TFC was announced. I knew a bit about TF, even tried an early version for Quake, but didn't quite get it at that point. Now here was a team-based game with objectives other than simple killing on an engine I loved.
Downloaded the beta which was available a few days before the official release. First map I played was
Hunted (VIP style), which was based on an original HL map, since the concept was quite clear. Over the next few days I tried the other maps as well, learned about the concept of CTF and tried a few classes.
I started as HWG (like so many others), did a bit of soldier (since it was to some degree similar to what I knew from previous DM games like Q2) and finally found the Engy.
In TFC I was always more a defender than attacker. I was quite contend sitting in the flagroom to repel enemy attackers. (You have to know that TFC was primarily CTF based. No CP maps at that point)
In that regard Solly or Engy (and the occasional HWG) was perfect. I'd like to say that I was decent Engy, but that class was a different beast in TFC, and to some degree much more powerful and fearsome due to his grens.
I played a bit of medic, but again, medic was quite different in TFC since it was less a supporting class than the main attack class (and for the most part made the scout obsolete). I learned how to cjump (and you think, double jumps are cool?) and became quite good at it.
That, of course, pretty much ended when Valve removed the handheld cjump with the 1.5 patch.
During my days of TFC (which lasted approx 4 years) I was part of the community around PlanetFortress (which was one of the main american sites for TFC) and co-wrote for an editorial site about TFC.
Those were sweet times
Imagine a forum like ours here but with 200+ regulars (and many very fine people among them).
I also participated on the beta tests for the aforementioned 1.5 patch for TFC which - amongst other things - introduced the new netcode and a few new maps (including dustbowl, epicenter and warpath).
Fast forward a few years:
When TF2 was released I tried many classes to get a feel for the new concept.
I found that playing Soldier wasn't as easy as I remembered it and I completely failed as Engy (due to the lack of grens and the concept of übers). So I played Heavy, Pyro (which is more powerful than his TFC counterpart and consequently more useful) and Medic (since I loved the medigun concept). The pyro update kinda drove me away from that class. During that phase of pyro craze I played more other classes, but also after that update emerged a lot more skilled pyros which were simply better than me.
I think I rediscovered the soldier at that point and relearned it.
I don't play medic that much these days because I found that I'm not very good at staying alive
I still play it when needed but I feel I can serve the team better with other classes (that's why I will first point out when we need a medic instead of switching to one).
And lately I'm trying to get back into the engy class. But it's not easy with all our excellent spies. And I'm also pissed off regularly by those idiots who will try to be the 3rd or even 4th engy on a team, which is a massive turn-off
(not to mention that it fails epically 8-9 times out of 10).
As for finding WDG:
At one point I found a server with a lot of good people. Forgotten the name (something with "Melee"), but games where usually okay, there was some solid teamplay and the skill level was a bit above average. I met Torgue there and I think Ringelbeatz played there as well. And one day the server was down. So in the following days I was wandering around, but also joined games of friends. And one of these days I joined Torgue who was playing on the WDG server. The gameplay was intense, but good natured, and there was a lot of voice comm going on. (In retrospect I realize that I was on Mark's team and I guess he supplied most of the voice comm
). I came back. And again. And then, one day, I decided to read the server introduction, saw the link to this site and thought I might pay you a visit.
The rest - as they say - is history ...
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