[phago].de

Two days ago, on 21st of January 2009, [phagozytose] turned four years old! Being the sixth team that was made in guleague, this implies that guleague also turned four.
So much has happened during these years and its impossible to write about everything... but I’ll try to remember as much as possible, to bring back memories for veterans and give a little history-lesson for newer players.

Read the full story after the jump!

Follow up:

Lets start with some numbers first:
All teams together played 14,5k matches in these four years and we’re proud that phago took part in 2078 of them, which means we were involved in almost every seventh match. Also interesting: In average we had an activity of 1.42 matches per day. Our current win-loss-tie chart looks like this:

Our first match was versus romfis’ team "The Lightning Tanks" - at least we thought so. Theres a pretty funny topic on the old gu.de-forums, which you can read here: gu.de
When it was all settled we played our first, real match, which was again against TLT, a screenshot is here:

In the early matches we had a pretty obscure defense tactic which involved me sitting on our base with our flag, defending it by camping for the whole match. I have to admit that it was pretty lame but in the beginning there were no common tactics and gameplay had to be discovered yet. We managed to play three (!) matches with that tactic, but somehow it wasnt fun for the other team and everybody started massive complaining... sorry soxs, I have to attach this.

I wonder if this tactic would be effective these days... it sounds awesome to always hold the base, so no enemy can get up, still one has a player less on the field... no idea how it would be to play like that today. We better dont try it out.

When we founded phago we had only three active players: SAMY-{100%}, Der_Bachelor (Bachiiiiiiiii today) and me, Saturos. kill3r was always a member of the team, but I think until today he just played half a match. However, it took us more than half a year until we found a fifth member, which was TRAC. After we met in reallife eating some ice-cream in winter, we visited the GamesConvention in August and could convince him to abandon AssassinClan and join our team. This decision really pushed our offense, but TRAC never adopted our sense of teamplay... which wasnt always the best for our nerves, but in the end quite nice that he always kept his playing style.

During the first year we held the first BZContest which was a huge success and great fun... by the time we had the second quiz the community had changed a lot on the one side, on the other side we ran out of ideas towards the end, so it wasnt the same level of fun and cant really be compared to the first. Still, it was a try to bring some action into the community, apart from the servers. You can still check out bzcontest.com which has lots of strange photos I really should take offline as soon as possible. So take a glimpse while you still can.

In our early days we were not very active because we took our points-rating very serious and saw cheaters behind every corner... I guess this is normal for people who never played in a league before (remember, we never got into ducati), but we annoyed the crap out of the other teams... there were forum discussion about us not matching good teams etc etc which got really bad at some point. I never felt we were as bad as it was said in these discussions, but looking back I cant deny the tendency as a whole... our nice win-loss/tie-ratio looks mainly like this because during the first ~500 matches we took all of this way too serious. Then we finally got a slap right into the face: TBO refused to match us because of our "cheater" shouting. I’m still thanking them for doing so, because it really woke us up and showed us that we were becoming a pain.
The bad image we partly still have today comes from this time... its amazing how long these prejudices (which it really is today) hold up against the reality, how deep they’re burned into the heads of the players. But we cant blame them, I guess.
With this behaviour of trying to make sure we would win, we ran into a problem soon:
Bachiiii’s cousin benji picked up BZ in the end of 2005 and wanted to play in the league. It was a given at that time that he couldnt be in phago because that would destroy our rating.
After thinking about that for quite a time we finally came up with a solution: Found a second ~zytose team to train new players and let them into phago once they get better. The first pino was led by benji 13, Gorak was a member, too. You may also know ts and T-90 or even remember Ponnyplutt and x0nix.

benji 13 joined phago on 2006-04-14, Gorak followed five months later. Between these dates pino turned into a top-team and many players didnt understand anymore why phago never matched pino. This rule made sense in the beginning because it shouldnt look like pino was just founded to be exploited for points, but wasnt very reasonable in the end... we made a mistake here, when we tried to keep this rule longer than we should have.
Finally, when Gorak made it into phago our activity got a boost and we were leading the league for quite a long time.

Some time passed and we had plenty of LAN parties, visited the GamesConvention again and finally accepted new members: ToughShooter (today known as ts) joined us on 2007-03-12 and Upsetter on 2007-08-02. Some of the newer players might wonder why we always make such a big deal about people joining, but you have to know that the personal contact has always been the most important aspect of phago. We’re not just a group of players who plays together occasionally - we have very concrete ideas of how we play this game and we always made sure that the new players fit well into the existing structure. You may argue that we’re taking all this too serious, but for me good teamplay is the key to having fun with this game. I dont really like funmatches because I dont know the people and usually teamplay is on a very low level... but in phago I see Bachi driving on the other side of the map and I know exactly what moves he’ll perform next. In a 2vs2 with SAMY we dont even have to write stuff like "pass" or "base" because there really is just this one, right move... misunderstandings are really, really rare, even when we’re not playing in one room how we used to do until I moved.
While teamplay is so much fun, another essential part if talking about the game. Discussing new tactics, talking about new members, other teams or other players takes the game to a whole new level... I am very sure that I would have stopped playing this game a long time ago if I had been the only person in my neighborhood being addicted to BZ.
Keeping all this in mind, the choice of new members is also the choice with whom we talk and spend lots of time with... thats why we dont just invite people, but also take into consideration if we would have something in common outside the game, if there’s stuff to talk about on LAN parties and how this person generally fits into the team.

When Upsetter and ts joined the character of the team changed a lot over time... we became more relaxed, didnt take everything so serious. ts and Upsetter came from teams who didnt care about losing and who were not very interested in their place in the ladder. This is good and it helped us to calm down and get some distance to the game. We had great fun together, peaking at a LAN party in August 2007 in Berlin when we had Upsetter, ts, Bachi, benji, SAMY, TRAC and myself all in one room, challenging the league and playing 20 matches on one evening and the following night.

In March 2008 we finally could announce a new member, who changed the whole team: dexter. At that time Gorak was trying to build a new pino (which was quite a failure, considering what pino stands for) and dexter was incredibly active. I had my first encounter with him in IRC (he was "whodaman") when he told me that our map OctoCage had teleporter errors. I told him I would look into it, thinking something along "quiet, noob", but when he joined the league I kept an eye on him. He raced through a bunch of teams and at some point I had the impression that this guy would make an impact on the league and that we should acquire him while we still can.
Upsetter and dex didnt get along very well and their problems continued to grow, finally resulting in Upsetter leaving the team and ts following him. I always hoped we could solve these issues, but couldnt avert the split-off in the end. Ups and ts told me dexter had led the team into a new direction they didnt like. Today, I agree that the team changed with dex, but I think it was more a back-to-the-roots thing: Taking the game not too relaxed, fighting for a win, having a nice spirit during the matches. When dex joined I had this certain "this is phago!"-feeling again, which was lost for some time. Another point might be that 10 players is just too much for a team like ours.
It was sad to see Ups and ts leave, but I think it was the right decision. Since then Dexter visited us two times in Berlin and in my opinion he was just the kind of player we needed to keep phago interesting and competitive.

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The league has grown, too and is still very healthy. There was a time when I thought we had come to an end, because we couldnt attract new players and I thought we had played through our map HiX. But then everybody found out about the pyramid ricochets, passing from the teleporter became quite common and some creative brains still discover new tricks, jumps and shots the map offers. Just a few days ago I saw somebody passing from the teleporter without even jumping, which really stunned me. Even after four years, after > 14 000 matches, players not only perfect their skills, but come up with brand-new stuff. Thats amazing. Always when you think you had seen it all, theres a new hot thing to learn. This is something ducati or pillbox cant offer and it shows that HiX is one of the best maps out there, being the basis for the best league out there.

Time will tell how long we can continue with this game... we're all getting older and at some point life probably wont allow us to spend our time on gu-servers, but until then I'm enjoying every minute of it.

There's so much more to write about... the two RikerCups for example, tactics in general, the various phago-movies, -shirts or our ducati-attempts - but the most important part of this league is its teams and while this post focussed mainly on [phago], I'll dedicate a completely new post to the various teams that made this league what it is today, addressing most of them with a few comments. Check back next week!