Hildreth — This week I took a journey into the unknown as I was contacted by The Enigma Zone Crew and set up an interview with a Welshman named Coleman who wanted to share the story behind his ancient clan and their move into TF2. Instead of doing results or anything else I have settled on just an interview to finish off my series for now. I got a lot more than a bargained for as I discovered TEZC are a clan full of rich history in many different games with Coleman himself being a regular LAN goer having real life contacts in the game:
Hi panda, can you give me and the readers a brief introduction?
Coleman: Hey, I’m Craig “Coleman” Coleman. I’m a Geography student, rugby player and also a gaming enthusiast. I’ve been competitive gaming since I was 15, so I guess that I’m an old head now being 23.
So tell me, how did you first get into TF2?
Coleman: Well since I started gaming I was always a CS player. Be it 1.6 or CSS, when the 1.6 scene started to slow down. Over the years the game got less and less fun, to the point where I couldn’t bring myself to play outside of official match times. Because in most CS player’s eyes, every other CS player is either a cheat, noob or German, and that attitude got me down to the point where I stopped playing. But I still enjoyed gaming, and some of my best real life friends are gamers. One of my best mates being Dan Whitty, you might know him as Anderson , so late one night I got a call off of another friend. He says “Dan’s in with a shout of making the i42 LAN final if he wins his game tomorrow want to go down and watch?” So we jumped in the car and drove down to Newbury.
What I found in the TF2 community blew my mind; everyone seemed to be a decent bloke or gal, there wasn’t any rage, accusation or a bad word said. I should point out, that at this point I had never seen TF2 as a game, so I was oblivious to the game play style and cartoony graphics. Any ways, Dan lost his game and we spent the next day getting smashed and chatting to other TF2 players who were very accommodating in explaining the game and rules to me. After driving home on the Monday, I got the game and here I am now.
Reading your team description, The Enigma Zone Crew have been around for nearly a decade now and played in many other games. So what is the history behind your team? What motivated you to ‘go competitive’ and join ETF2L?
Coleman: Well the team was started by a guy called Rage , who not long after starting got ill and had to stop gaming. When Rage left Dan “Axl” Garnet took control of TEZC and from there is when the proper TEZC story takes off. The clan started as a DeathBall team, it’s a game I’ve never played, its a UT mod I think. But the clan we’re pretty good at it and were the best team in the world at it during their time. As games tend to do, it died off slowly and the clan were faced with the choice all teams are faced with when their game goes under: Change or fold. So the clan moved in to other games. The clan has gone through ups and downs over time, but has never stopped gaming. To this point I think we’ve had teams in over 25 games and played over 2200 officials. I kind of see us as the Notts County of gaming. We’re older them most teams; we’ve got great history and a great ethos about gaming.
For those who don't know, Notts County are one of the oldest football teams in the world
The key motivation to move in to comp TF2, is really because after so long of playing structured gaming, i enjoy the team aspect of the game. As much as I enjoy playing public or MGE, competitive team gaming is still the most enjoyable was for me to play. When I got back from i42 and talked to Harold, who is Mr.TEZC as he’s been in the clan since forever and has been in almost every team. Within five minutes of me saying “let’s start a team” he paid for a server for a year from Multiplay and we got searching for players.
So tell us about your current squad for TF2 – Who plays what class and do you play in the main team or you a backup/organiser/guy who hangs in mumble shouting motivational stuff?
They way re roll it is pretty much a core of 7 and we rotate the soldiers depending on School/Work commitments.
Well first off I have to start with Sjoerd “Harold” Loos . Harold is a scout who has pretty good hitscan aim from his old UT days. His roles in the team are much like any senior player in any sport. He gets players together, keeps moral high and arranges social gaming – like playing MineCraft, Left 4 Dead, etc – he also helps me to manage the team, mainly by paying for stuff and charming me with his sexy Dutch accent.
His partner in crime is George “Gigs” Ref . We found Gigs when we started searching for players. He like most of our players, up until joining us. Had never played comp TF2. Most teams wouldn’t take chances on players with no comp experience but here at TEZC we’re all about player personality and George really stood out when we trailed him, he’s turned in to a fine scout for us and is always pushing other players to get better, be it by DM or MGE.
Our Demo is Valesh . Valesh came to us originally to mentor the team. But after a while he decided that he’d like to stick around. God knows why, maybe its because me and Harold buy him games, or maybe it’s because he saw something in the team that he thought he could help develop. He’s really to brains of our team, as he is our ingame leader and is the guy who gets us together to do strat sessions on maps we haven’t played before.
James “The-Monk” Grobb is our medic. He like Gigs came to us saying that he wanted to play comp TF2. As he was a member of UKCS we thought we’d give him a go as UKCS have a good reputation as a community, and community players are always the best guys to have about. Because we all hate clan hoppers don’t we. Monk has really came along and is a great medic, even if he is a little Kritz happy at time.
Our next guy is Mirko “Tecn0Gun” Cognolato , also a member of a community (GFM). He unlike all of our other players other then Valesh has played a fair bit of comp TF2, and his experience can really helps when games get tight. If there is a guy to have on mumble to cheer away it’s him. Because he might be the funniest guy in the world. He once offered to sacrifice himself to Jesus Chris his lord and saviour so we could cap a point. . . LAD!
Our last bit of recruitment was Joni “Jon” Kentala . After we took a two month break during the summer, we came back and decided to add one more to the squad. Gig suggested we try Jon. Yes again, no comp play. But he could cover Medic and Scout which we were having problems with due to work commitments. What we got was much more. Having over 1000 hours of TF2 play time, Jon was more then we bargained for. The guy is so focused, and after playing one game as Solly we decided that was his new main class, even if he does still play a bit of Scout. In the past months he’s really stepped it up with his MGE training regime.
A metaphor of Coleman organizing his team - this one goes out to a certain Russian.
I noticed whatever you guys are doing you’re doing it right. 3 games, 3 wins no map drops.taking Division 6L by storm in ETF2L, currently top of Wireplay 6A, only 1 map loss all season. Could you asked for a better start to your TF2 careers?
Coleman: I guess we’ve just found the right mix that works for us. We’re really tight as a team; mumble can get pretty hectic during a game, but that mainly just me raging that I didn’t get healed from the other side of the map. But in seriousness, we’ve just all taken to the comp side of the game and taken to each other’s style of play. We’ve had some tough games, SitNGo were very strong in WP, they smashed us 4-0 on Bazillion, but I think we showed our togetherness not to let it get to us and we came back to win the 2nd map to draw the game. That just shows the character of the players we have though. They don’t let the situation faze them and just keep doing their best for the team. Hopefully we can keep up the form and establish ourselves as a good lower bracket team and work our way up the league structure.
Now one of the big changes for 6v6, especially for the new teams is the introduction of the Vanilla + medlocks ruleset. Has this made a difference to your team? Do you prefer Vanilla or would you rather that lovely OP pick axe in your hand?
Coleman: For me personally, being still new to comp. The rule change hasn’t done much to me as I didn’t have time to adapt to what it was like before the change. What I will say though is when I was just starting the equalizer was a big help as I was learning to rocket jump and rollout, so if I made a mistake I could just smash 3 on my keyboard and be as fast as medic. I personally, think that the Vanilla rule set is the way to go. Because regardless if you’re at the top end of the game or the bottom, if you’re playing comp you’re playing to see how good you are and can be, so introducing a plethora or different items with different abilities can alter the true result, and then you’ll never really know who was better.
Think we may have reached our word quota. Anyhow been a pleasure interviewing you, got any shoutouts?
Coleman: Yeah i’ll keep it short. Shout out to Axl and Harold for keeping the clan alive. Much love to Anderson for being a top mate and geting me in TF2. Holla to everyone invloved with TEZC over the years, Sonix for being a bad man drinker at LAN and the TF2 community for being so welcoming.
Last review for a while, this makes me a sad...well you know.
That settles that, great interview and best of luck to them. For myself this article came out way later than I hoped and due to the launching of the HL league I will have to suspend bringing these out. I love writing for lower levels of TF2 and promoting it however the time and effort isn’t really there. I hope those from Division 3-6 have enjoyed the articles so far, I will return soon if all goes to plan.
Originally published on VanillaTV (vanillatf2.org) on 2011-10-23 by Hildreth.
Recovered from the Internet Archive (archived copy) as part of tf2esports.com's preservation of VanillaTV's TF2 coverage. The original site is no longer online. All rights remain with the original author; reposted for historical reference.