The Next-Gen
Xander2KX January 2007
Unlike every other year, we kind of skipped that year as far as the annivesary tourney goes. We tried to host one at MTM2, but we didn't even have enough players to do one round. It's then that I said «SUCK IT» and it was the end of MTM2 and Wolfpack. It was a bad thing for a good thing. Then we put ourself 100% into CoD2 at recruiting and getting better.
We recruited top talents in the young ChrisChampion, and some other that are no longer with us. Collector who I doubted would get as good as the rest is simply owning. He trained hard, he said he was going to kick ass and you can bet he does. Inferno who had never played this either was good from the first minute he played and helped a lot in the recruiting which made him regain his captain rank.
Things went better for me aswell. In middle-january we even had a survey about me cheating. Yes, I had gone from a complete noob to an unstoppable war machine. All this wasn't very hard to understand. I was trying hard just like everyone else to get better. The only problem was that I was already good to start. What was holding me to beat up people was my graphic default settings that were way too high for my computer to handle and I was probably playing under 15 frames per second all the time.
During the first four months we made ourself recognized everywhere we went in public and scrim match. We also started 2 ladder at TWL where we did good but had to stop for summer since it would be hard to get enough player to play the matches. At this point, I had individual meetings with all the members to know if they liked how the team was going and by the sametime I was telling them what could get better. We soon realised that even if all meetings were all nice, people were not telling the truth. Many found our schedule of practicing, ladders and meeting too hard for all their hundred hours of free time. The tension between the suckers and those that were trying for real started to get high and I had to do something about it. Many got kicked or some were simply brought to decide to do more or to simply leave which was my way to boot them.
But it didn't stop there. DarKaTTaK had certainly obtain his place forever in this team but was part of those player who couldn't get the job done. I had thought about taking off his captain rank for a long time so I came up with a fair test for him to see if he had really any interest in the team and to see if he should keep his captain rank. It turned out to be a complete failure for DarK with a note of 2.5/10. The decision was easy. We talked on how he should change his attitude toward us and his own life. He almost cried during the conversation to tell the truth. He changed a little bit, but there's a long road to travel for him.
We were down to 1 captain for CoD2 in Inferno who was not doing his job that much anymore so during a general meeting following this, I named 2 new captains. ChrisChampion for CoD2 and Collector for Ghost Recon Advanced WarFighter which was not started yet then. Both were really happy and surprised since the captain rank is not something you usually gain at all and especially not in the first five months. Those 2 soon took their job in hand and started making practice and dealing with the ladder matches.
In may, we had our first ever Wolfpack COD2 Tournament. It was a Wolfpack only tournament that was lasting around 1 month. It was fun for some, but some players beeing immature made the whole thing crash. In the mean time, some youngster were kicked out of the team. A rule was broken to let them in under 16 years old and we've seen they couldn't handle the way things work or simply the way we talk so they had to find their place somewhere else.
After this, summer was coming real fast and that summer I couldn't be on at all since I was going to lose internet. During June the guys and I took care of proving ourself in the province of Quebec by scriming top teams and making friends of them. It would have been easy to increase the amount of members we had then but our team beeing international, there was no way we were going to accept french that can't talk in english anymore. We already had many quebecers and we were less looking for people from there at first. This continued during the summer without me. That summer I got to go to TraKeR2x and DarK's place for a little fun week-end.
During summer, Collector and Champion played a lot. In fact they made a name for themself and got in touch with many teams and players. Once I came back at the end of august they let me know they wanted to take the team to the next level. Playing all summer long while I wasn't made them become way better than I was and at some point it was hard for me to follow them.
The next level for them was CAL. The best league there is for cybergaming amateur. For that, we needed to recrute some more people that we could count on anytime which happened to be DeConCriSSeuR, Maalox and Infinity. We all faced the fact that we were no near to be ready for this great league and decided to get experience at TWL instead where we suceeded to get the 5th rank for 4 vs 4 TDM and 15th in 5 vs 5 SD around december when we took a break.
If only this had happen it would have been great, but no. Back in october, Deconcrisseur was kicked from some server and 1st thing we got to know 2 weeks later was that he was banned from TWL and punksbusted.com for some violation which was cheating. Trusting Decon, I knew he had not cheated and I started a unban process. Basicly it was a simple as saying mission impossible. Over 12500 bans on CoD1, CoDUO and CoD2, only 2 person had ever been unbanned. Good thing for Alex, I worked my butt off during 3 weeks non-stop and finally made agree evenbalance with all my arguments that he was not guilty of the violation he had been victim of. You can easily imagine how everybody was so happy and proud of my work.
It slowed down for the rest of the year. A tension was created between us that got us inactive and sore losers and made us lose a lot of matches. Happily, when I left my appartment for holidays break everything was back to normal, we were winning and the fun was back. Everything was just fine and we were looking forward to join CAL on January. Well, that's what I thought.
On December 31st, I got the shock of my life as I came on xfire, and saw Collector wearing another tag. This was the beginning of many huge losts, but this... this is a 2007 story.
