A local gaming website for Team Fortress 2 has come to our attention. The site features news on the local scene, interviews, game info, tournament info and even server info.

TF2.co.za would be your one-stop, locally run, site which has everything you need. Give them some love, visit them!

Of course we’re only teasing you with what they have to offer. To get the full experience, you’re gonna have to go and look for yourself.

miNt Gaming, Equilibrium Team Fortress 2 (TF2) and IS Gaming have all teamed up to host an online TF2 competition – the 1v1 Soldier Rebirth Competition.

The point of the competition is to build up the TF2 competitive community in South Africa in a fun way. MiNt Gaming and Equilibrium.TF2 have noticed a large influx of TF2 players in the last few months, but have also noticed that most TF2 players are fairly casual towards the game.

So to give gamers an easy opportunity to see how enjoyable true competitive play is for TF2, the 1v1 Soldier Rebirth Competition gives TF2 gamers the ability to guage their skill with TF2 players all over the country, showcase their skill and become recognised within the TF2 community.

As there are only 50 spots available, TF2 gamers who are keen to go for it should register quickly. The tournament is free to enter and registration closes on 16 August. It will run over a period of six weeks, with the first two stages being two weeks each.

All matches will be played on the all new arena maps released by Valve. The player who reaches a certain number of rounds first will be the winner and will move through to the next round of the Cup. The number of rounds required to win will depend on the stage of the Cup, says miNt Gaming.

To register, gamers must register at the miNt Gaming forums (click here). Once registered, gamers go to this link and fill in the necessary details.

The ruleset can be found here.

Any general info about the competition can be found at the Mint Gaming site here.

There are only 8 spots left, so hurry if you want your shot at being South Africa’s number one Soldier.

With the current state of the community, many gamers would say the competitive e-Sports community in South Africa is going through a rough patch. A lot of people are focusing on the negatives at the moment, such as Ben “Equinox” Greenwood leaving the SA Gaming community, the number one TeamFortress 2 team, Brazen, are inactive and there are rumors that they could split, many of the good players are moving overseas, and lastly the problem tournament administrators have with the lack of enthusiasm and gratitude gamers show towards their tournaments. 

While most people are focusing on the negatives lets take the time to reflect back on the positives. 

In 2008 we saw the very first installment of the BOTC Call of Duty 4 and Counter-Strike: Source competitions, arguably the most premiere online tournaments to date, it could even rival some international competitions, in terms of prizes, organisation and of course the competition. Although it was a rough start for Robert “iNFy” Hart he weathered the storm and pulled through, showing that with enough perseverance and determination, dreams can become a reality. 

Most of us also saw, or heard of the most notable sponsorship in South African gaming history go to BFB (Big Fat B*stards). Where Incredible Connection sponsored them R60 000 worth of gaming hardware. Again part of the community were negative, and retaliated out of jealousy asking why they had been sponsored as the team hadn’t won anything of note or placed well in any of the premiere online and offline tournaments, and that there were far more deserving teams. BFB too weathered the storm and now boast one of the strongest lineups the Call of Duty 4 community has ever seen. All they need to do now, is learn how to work as a unit, and soon they should be unstoppable.

For  the rest of the story head on over to the miNt Gaming website.

The Intel Battle Of The Clans competition is about to go live once again. The very successful tournament hosted and run by Robert “iNFy” Hart has proven to be one of, if not, the most premiere online competition South Africa has to offer. With Intel sponsoring some huge prizes, the tournament draws in all the big names. Registrations are about to go live with the competition scheduled to start on the 27 of June. The next BOTC will prove to be even more exciting than the last one.

ounter-Strike: Source

This time round we may see some new champions, with most of the top teams having had lineup changes since the last BOTC. In the Counter-Strike: Source BOTC v4 competition, the community saw Eternal Conflict take the title. But since then, the miNt Gaming team (7th) has strengthened their lineup, and should be able to better their previous placing. Pantheon Gaming (5th) has also gone through some major lineup changes. Some say the team isn’t as strong as it used to be and that the players just aren’t dedicated enough anymore. A team to look out for is Soviet, regarded by some as South Africa’s strongest team at the moment, having crushed all the competition at the MPLD LAN in May. This will be their first big online competition, so it will be interesting to see how they fair. The asceNt (2nd) lineup has had minimal changes. They still seem to have one of the strongest lineups around, but providing that a lot of the other teams are catching up skill-wise, asceNt will have to up their game quite a bit if they want to reach the finals again.

In all four of the previous BOTC Counter-Strike: Source competitions, there has always been a wild-card managing to place in the top 3. In the very first BOTC we saw Team Random taking 3rd position. In the second, TAB took 3rd. In the third installment of the BOTC competition Team Enmity claimed 2nd spot ahead of Pantheon. Last BOTC saw c7e claiming 3rd. With the past results and current teams on form we could see the standings change this year. The probability of seeing an eC/Soviet final is highly likely, and judging by previous results anyone of out of the miNt, asceNt, and Pantheon teams could place in the top3. 

For  the rest of the story on the TeamFortress and Call of Duty 4 competitions, head on over to the miNt Gaming website. 

The decision to disband  the miNt Team Fortress 2 team, was made late Monday night, after the teams loss to Pantheon. The team managed to place 3rd overall in the BOTC v1 competition, but it became apparent that most of the members were not enjoying playing anymore, as well as became too busy to make some matches and practices. The team had some great potential and rivaled both Pantheon and Brazen, unfortunately their flair as a team had died, which ultimately let to the disbanding. 

After talking with a few of the members before their match versus Pantheon, they seemed really demotivated, and a few members had their doubts about the match, as there was a large amount of inactivity from a few members

To read more head on over to the miNt Gaming website.

The miNt TF2 team is currently competing in the TF2: BOTC v1 tournament. This is BOTC’s first TF2 tournament and because of this there has been no entrance fee and also unfortunately no prizes. Only 9 clans entered this tournament and when compared to 17 teams entered for both COD4 and CSS the number of TF2 teams seems small. There are many reasons for this low number of teams and some of these reasons have been discussed in this BOTC interview. Out of these 9 teams, 2 of the teams (namely Zero Limit and Implicit) disbanded throughout the course of the tournament. All the remaining teams continued to complete all of their games and the results of these games can be found here.

I have written up a short overview those who do not understand the way that competitive TF2 works; Competitive TF2 is played 6vs6 with no-crits, no-random damage and with class restrictions. ‘Crits’ are 3x regular damage critical hits that occur randomly on regular public servers and are displayed by a glowing projectile. As you do more damage so your ‘crit’ change increases. This randomness has no place in competitive TF2 where a team’s skill and teamwork should determine the winner rather that a random element to the game so these critical hits have been removed from competitive play here in South Africa as with every major international TF2 league. In ‘vanilla’ TF2, each weapon has a damage spread for example the scouts scattergun can do between 85 and 105 damage from point blank range. This damage spread also random and for the same reasons as ‘crits’ was removed from competitive TF2 a while ago. The main 4 classes out of the nine that are most commonly played in a 6vs6 competitive situation are the scout, soldier, medic and demoman. The restrictions on all classes are 2 per team with exceptions being the medic and demoman where only 1 is allowed per team.

The main type of map that is played competitively in TF2 is a ‘push’ map with examples being  cp_badlands, cp_granary and cp_well.  A ‘push’ map consists of 5 control points in a linear layout where each team starts off the round by having 2 of these control points on their side of the map captured by default. The middle control point is open for either of the teams to capture at the beginning of the round. The two teams spawn on opposite sides of the map and rush to the middle capture point at the beginning of the round in order to ‘cap’ it and then proceed to the next capture point that the opposing team controls and hopefully win the round by capturing the oppositions final capture point. All points are ‘locked’ (meaning that they can’t be captured) apart from the one that a team captured last and the one after that in the direction that the team who captured last would be pushing. This may not be the best way of explaining it but in essence it is a very simple gametype to grasp. With this said, by no means is TF2 a easy game to play at a competitive level.

For more information on competitive TF2 check this local article or GotFrag’s article.

miNt’s first game was played vs. Implicit on the 14.02.2009. The map cp_badlands was selected out of the list of maps we could play and in the 30min allocated we managed to beat them 7:1. It was a relatively easy game for us as Implicit were having some team issues and sometime after our game broke up as a clan.

Our second gave was vs. Schizophrenia and was played on the 15.02.2009. Both teams decided to play the map cp_granary. It was a relatively straightforward game with our team having the upper-hand for the majority of the game and thus the end result was 9:0 to mint.

Our third game was played vs. qpac on the 25.02.2009. This was the only game so far where we have had to call in a substitute player because of us not having enough players at the time. P|Numb was more than happy to step in and help us out and we thank him for this. This game turned out to much more of a challenge that what we expected from qpac. It was a very stressful game for both teams and there were some great moments in the game in terms of close captures and strong pushes/defenses. We managed to beat them 4:2 in the 30min allocated but it would be a lie to say it was an easy game for us.

Our fourth and final game of this stage of the league (26.02.2009) was played against probably our biggest rival, that being Pantheon. We had a full strong team playing as did they for this game and all in all it was a tough and intense game. Pantheon managed to beat us 3:2 on the map cp_granary with some excellent play by most of their players combined with some strong organized offences. It was a thoroughly enjoyable game because of the challenge they gave us and we look forward to another game vs. them in the next round.

On a side note, there are 3 new promising TF2 teams that are currently starting up in this country that will not be able to take part in the current BOTC TF2 comp but hopefully will be around in the future to compete. These 3 clans are ‘swift’, ‘Opt6′ and ‘KI’ and we hope to see them competing soon. For more information on our Team Fortress 2 team please visit the following link.

miNt > Bobalas