Forum

Now that all games except any playoffs are over, I thought I’d do another re-cap thread like last season.

Our season started with some roster changes. Krian went AFK for real life, meaning we finally brought in longtime friend TroubleGirl to play scout alongside Gryzor and Mooy. We were playing lots of practices and doing OK, so we were quietly confident (sound familiar?). The other huge change was finally dropping all capitals in our player names. This was probably the HARDEST change to cope with, but we managed.

Week 1 saw us playing id, and winning both maps. For once we held our composure and didn’t panic, meaning that although we traded control points regularly with them throughout the map we never got rolled. The second map, cp_well ended 1-0 to us, to call it tense would be the understatement of the century.

We beat a PBP team struggling with roster issues in week 2. This was a good confidence boost as I felt most worried about our two turbine fixtures, but this season we finally got the hang of the rhythm of the map. This meant we now had 12 points overall, as many as we finished the last season on. This was only 2 games in! We actually dared to hope that we’d have an excellent season.

Before week 3 Gryzor managed to type himself out of the season with an ETF2L ban, so playing against fellow swedes Fader was full of drama outside the game itself. After bringing in a dutch scout called Wing, we won comfortably without conceeding a cap, so we were now stupidly thinking about finishing the season with a flawless victory. When you compared it to previous seasons it was a remarkable achievement, in 3 games we’d already won more maps than we had in any previous season.

Week 4 saw us play a familiar clan, FLB. Our scout mooy had an awesome game on turbine, quietly capping flags whilst the rest of the team did our best to hold onto our flagroom. Gullywash had a very nervous ending, with us almost snatching a draw from the hands of victory.

4 weeks, 8 map wins! Unprecedented! Amazing! People were already congratulating us on having won the division (LOL). It was also officially our best ETF2L season EVER!

Of course nothing ever runs quite so smoothly. Around this time in the season, I started getting terrible lag during friendlies. Eventually we managed to track this down to mumble (thanks to everyone who helped and offered suggestions), but it took a serious toll on clan morale, with us essentially playing every single mid point with 5 players.

This problem was compounded by new map cp_obscure. Far from me to judge the map itself, we just completely failed to get to grips with it. Loses began to feed the maphate, which fed the losses.

So it came to week 5, against Epx. Despite actually winning a lot of mid-points on obscure, they handed us our asses with good fallback tactics and general mastery of the map. We could have been a bit unfortunate on gravelpit, but a draw was ultimately the fair result.

Our week 7 game against Nicey came first because my mumble problems reached a head on the night of our week 6 game, forcing me to do an emergency wildcard 30 minutes before the start of the match. So instead, we faced Nicey, who took granary off us with a 2-1 win, then lost new map gorge 2-0. We were reasonably confident with how we were playing gorge, so it was nice to get the points there even though granary felt like a missed opportunity.

So after 4 weeks of awesome results, we were a little bit down, with everyone stressed about our lack of friendly wins because of my mumble problems and the league results not going our way either. Around this time a few teams dropped from our division, who we’d already beaten but had beaten other teams near us. This was a double blow as it meant that we lost wins but our competitors lost draws and map losses, meaning they closed the gap and even overtook us. We went from first place to fourth, only half down to our own results.

However with our week 7 game now re-scheduled and my mumble problems fixed, we pulled back together to beat Vatic Gaming. We even managed to get a win on obscure (which we almost threw away), which boosted moral again (further helped by a bit of private forum morale boosting before the game).

We got a default win in week 8 which meant that we only had one game left to play against Evil Empire Headquarters. This game was likely going to decide who was first, second and third in our division, so naturally my PC decided this was the week it was going to completely fall apart. After re-installing windows only to find the PC stay alive only for a day or two before not even turning on, I had to desperately re-schedule. Many thanks to Evil Empire Headquarters for re-arranging the match about 3 times.

£400 worth of PC parts later (some of which I intend to get back) we were finally ready to play. Tonight in the warmup of our game, we heard that Epx had won their remaining game by default, meaning if we didn’t get any points from the game we’d finish joint second with them, requiring us to have a playoff game to see who was promoted.

Fortunately that wasn’t required. The first map was badlands, and despite going 4-1 down we managed to pull together as a team and bring the score back to 4-4 with 40 seconds remaining. This single point was all we needed to secure second place! Of course we could still have come first if we’d beaten them on second map gravelpit, but by that point everyone was far too exhausted/hysterical/delirious and we ended up utterly failing to cap C on either round of gravelpit :D

So we’d finally been promoted! After seven seasons, 9 Men have finally gone up a division. Starting season 1 in division 3, we’ve generally been one division up from the bottom every season, so although it might seem funny to some this was a big deal for us. We’ve gone through dustbowl, heavies, new unlocks, crazy map picks, some questionably unskilled players, we’ve been on the brink of folding a few times as we’ve failed to figure out why Q3F tactics like two heavies on the jump pads of Last Resort don’t work the same in TF2, but we now know the basics – if the enemy has more than you fall back and if you have more than them then push! See you in division 4!

How was your season?

Edit – Maybe we won’t see you in div4, a further drop means we’re now third place. Ah well, incredibly difficulty come, EASY GO! :(

cool story bro

won our div, went well :)

Bring on next season for our 10th Year as a clan :)

We had a bad day playing Restricted Area and lost at least 3 important points.
Gonna be our 6th season in div4. Talk about non-improving

We won the league and guarenteed promotion into div 4 all on the last match.

Great division with many great and close games, really looking forward to next season.

Teamless for most of it, played 3 matches with GoT2, had an awesome time. Definitely looking forward to S8!

Admins gave us our chance and i think it went ok, considering the ammount of flame from people that complained at us (especially demourge and some empathy guys who are clearly missing… empathy) about that.

Also, a double player leave that make us turn into an international team. Things look stable now, and we should be able to do better things next season in div1 (if www finaly drop as rumors pretend) if we have a look at all the tight results we made :)

In short : good season, satisfied, and gratz idk?nigga :))

Guys, please don’t get too carried away with any close results in the league at the moment. There are a number of issues that are still affecting a couple of divisions in the league tables. Please wait until tomorrow before celebrating, so we can check through them all and the tables will be finalised. Apologies to any clans that have been affected by issues such as teams being dropped for 3 or more default losses.

Edit: Tidied this up for Kop :p