Hello all,

To start this of I would like to describe what types of gamers there are:

Casual: Hops on for fun, plays maybe 1 hour, gets off
Competitive: Comes on to play to become a better gamer, is part of scrims, matches, and teams/clans
Professional: Players spends many hours weekly becoming the best at the game, eventually is sponsored or paid to play


Pubs, scrims, and matches

What is a pub?

- A pub is any public server on any type of online server browser for games. Pubs are known to be for fun play and played to advance with experience points for certain games.

What is a scrim?

- A scrim usually takes place on locked/private servers. Scrims are used for team v. team "practice" match to perfect or test out specific strategies teams/clans plan to use in upcoming matches. There is usually no XP gain often on Locked/Private servers.

What is a match?

- A match is organized by a professional organization. Leagues or Team Tournaments involve matches. Teams bring their best on match night as they have spent a lot of time scrimming against other teams for a match night.

Where do you find these players?

- Often casual players are only involved in pub servers where they play for fun. Some casual players do not even know the competitive aspect exists outside of public servers, some just choose to play for fun because they do not have the time to become competitive.

- Competitive/Professional players are often involved in scrim and matches daily - they might pub for XP gains - depending on the player.

Becoming more competitive

Players do not always have access to the medium needed to become more competitive, nor are some aware of the competitive community. There are many ways to make your path towards joining teams and becoming competitive.

Public Team Servers

- There are many public team servers around, you will as "XTF CLAN SERVER CTF" or so, these are usually teams who enjoy pubbing and competition but are there as a relaxed clan and usually have a more mature age range. If you are an older generation player, most likely these types of teams will have people in your age range. Although teams can contain a WIDE variety of ages and players of course.

Tools

-mIRC - A tool such a mIRC is a huge gathering for gamers. Most team have their own channel servers, and there are many players who idle in game specific channels such as " #BRINK " has many BRINK players idling right now. Clan XTF might have a "#XTF" clan channel server as well for communication. mIRC is where teams post for scrimming, so joining a channel like #BrinkSCRIM, you can post "MyClan looking for 5v5 on this map our server" and other teams will see this.

-Ventrilo/Teamspeak/Mumble - These are all voice software, many team use these for daily communication. You download this client, join the IP address (just like a home address but for the internet) and join the team voice server. Using your mic,speakers or headset you play together with outside game voice communications which usually have better speed, quality, and layout.

-Websites - Many teams use websites for communication or posting news etc..usually are "xtfclan.com" or "xtf-gaming.com" such as those.

Leagues

- This is where competition starts, leagues such as (TWL, IGL, CEVO, ESL, CSN) will be hosting BRINK for example, so if you do a google search "BRINK + League" you find these. In leagues you can find out which teams are looking for player, create your own team and have your friends join it, and find teams to scrim against. The biggest part of this is that leagues have game "seasons" - Weekly match ups for X amount of weeks, and tournament which may last 1 night ,or a couple days.

Tournaments/Cups

-These can be hosted by Leagues,Teams or even sponsor such as "Antec" "Newegg" or anyone really. These usually involve cash or prizes for the top placers in the tournaments.

Why become competitive?

- Entering the competitive scene in games can be fun, you make new friends, and find network on some level. Having a dedicated team means you all can travel to LANs such as QuakeCon or GXL (many more..) and compete in person versus other team that travel to the event. With this you can wish cash, prizes, and get a lot of pictures with huge checks to show off



I hope this was informative to some of you at least, during a Round-Table discussion that was hosted on May 1st I saw many questions about some of these topics.

you scrimmin on the first day?
if you are hit me up steam: beastname

my team unR will be scrimming right off the start

Thank you bosnaK, I am now ready to pwn.

But seriously, get mIRC (gamesurge), newbies.

Professional means playing is your profession, you are already making enough money to live off of.
Pub is short for "public", refers to a public server.
Scrim is short for "scrimmage" refers to a scrimmage.
PUG is a pick up game, it's a scrim, but usually between people who aren't on teams/clans.

Competitive and professional players don't play games for experience.

Websites are generally for community clans, or nub teams. The only excuse for a site for a competitive team is when they get big enough to warrant advertising, sponsors, and selling services/goods.

Community clans are groups of casual gamers that like to play together, or big a part of something, or w/e.

The competitive level of play is literally a completely different type of game, it does not resemble public games. You will learn new things, and you will see a depth of the game you literally did not know existed.

Public clan servers don't really serve any purpose for competitive clans, it's just for nub and community clans generally.

MIRC used to be a huge tool in the clan scene for finding other people to play against, now a days, it's not what it used to be thanks to mainstream adoption of the FPS genre. :/

Nice addition! :foodndrink:

Np, thought this thread could use the touch of a competitive gamer.

Is there a mIRC channel ready for Brink scrims already?

gamesurge - #brinkscrim