The beginning. The best place to start.
In February 2011 I was browsing ESL for some games that I could play competitively, especially since I had basically stopped playing xbox and was now interested in pc gaming, at this time I had also started playing borderlands, counter strike and cod4 on the PC with its competitive mod so was also on ESL to see if their league was active for cod4 pc. This was also my first year of college so I had a lot more free time on my hands than in school. The game appealed to me after I gave it a try and saw it was a simple game that was easy to access and easy to understand. Once I knew how to reduce lag and how to control my character properly I was interested in leagues straight away, even though I wasn't exactly great. I also had started hosting at this time the well-known "Mad's 4v4 Room" as most rooms were still playing 3v3, also was noted for its great adminning work as it was run well and rooms where I have admin still are to this day. The problems we occurred in these early stages of Haxball, as it was only created in about November/December 2010, was that we had limited pitches (All before Big Easy on the list, even only classic just before I started playing), we had no ability to change players to spectators/other teams and no way to kick/ban people either, we only had 30fps option so double bounces etc. were rare, these problems as you can imagine were pretty crap to be honest but we all still played because of the appeal and fun we had, also if a player left midgame and they were on the field their haxbody would still be there but just a corpse, most of these didn't take long for Basro to sort out as he was actively updating the game.
The interest and Pioneering UK
Whilst I was searching for leagues I of course remembered where I first heard about haxball, which was on ESL. As I liked 4v4 more because of the teamwork needed and never really playing 1v1 or 2v2 I wanted to join that ladder on ESL, so I searched for players that would be able to play in it. I asked regular players that joined my room if they would play in a team and ended up with me, George Best, Cookie (not sure if same cookie, he always said it wasn't him), Chicharito and probably some others who I never saw again, we called this team M.A.D and I got them all to sign up to ESL whilst in the same room. We never made the team in the end as we had no way to contact each other except if we were randomly online on haxball so we just never played ESL. Meanwhile on the community section of haxball there was something about a /sp/ league or something that I was checking out, which turned out to be an American league but the only league I knew of (because I didn't look at other country listings really), it was just at the end of their season 2 and was 4v4. I watched some of their streams/replays as that feature had just come out I think and whilst watching I saw something that I had never seen in pubs in the UK which is where the player kicks it off the side wall (next to the goal) and then crosses it to a teammate. Now this blew my mind sort of as most people just tried to tackle/power up or try stupid angled passes at the time (not much has changed then). I tried this out and it was with great effect that it worked so others caught on and started using it, thus the meta had suddenly changed, more focus was on crosses, positioning in the box from both teams and not just ball chasing as people would need to react, all thanks to a simple move. Now people were discovering stuff all the time like obviously working out tackle angles to favor them so that they would win, bouncing off the top and bottom walls to get round players or just fool them and how to attack and defend together efficiently. The main player I would always love to watch and study in pubs or my rooms was always Bluebird, now this guy seemed like a master at the time, had a great attitude and was playing any position pretty darn well, I can honestly say I learnt more from this guy than anyone I ever have since (because I learnt nothing from nobody except him, got em).
The birth of something new
Now I was just cruising along still hosting my rooms and playing with the regulars who came in most nights, playing most days by now as I was enjoying myself more and more. At around this time I discovered that aeRo, who I sat next to in Physics in my first year of college, also played cod4 on the pc, I just randomly stated something from cod and he replied with something that also referenced cod and we were like woah, from then on it went from a homo friendship to a gaming and homo friendship, no joke, his dick was out a lot in Physics lessons. We discovered we played mainly the same games on the PC and we decided to play some together, this was mainly cod4 and sometimes counter strike. We would use xfire for voice comms, as I had next to no idea about teamspeak and other software except steam/ventrillo and much laughs were had as I was terrible and he was pretty good at cod, even if it was 2v2 lows. I decided I would introduce him to haxball, whilst at the time we had both just finished exams and other stuff for the year so we played it a lot whilst mixing in cod during the summer. It was great times and most came to know him to as a regular on haxball as well. I then came up with something, the idea for a community so we could tell each other when rooms would go up and a place to talk about the game and get to know each other. I talked to him about making a community and he agreed it would be a great idea and we were deciding on a name for a long short time. We both discovered we liked the same kind of music and he went more towards the electro side of things whilst I went more drum n bass, we both enjoyed listening to Feed Me and Spor songs who is actually the same artist under different aliases, so our love for this act was the reasoning behind choosing Feed Me Haxball as the name even though it was just a random suggestion at the time by aeRo. All in all we started using names such as Mad is hungry and aeRo is hungry to go along with the Feed Me name in a different way and to mainly promote the idea that we would be making a community. July 24th, haxballishungry website is made by aeRo using forummotion and it looked...well rubbish, but, it was a massive step up for UK haxball. We quickly went about linking regulars in my room and people who had joined started using fm avatars to promote and linking people who seemed interested whenever they were asked about it or asked about it themselves. The first few topics and stuff were just some rubbish really like aeRo's haxball terms so we could all agree on stuff such as
, gg, n1, snipe, rush etc. We also saw Blazing raging on hax replays and my amazing videos Haxball: One and Haxball: Two (still viewable today!). I decided the next one would involve the whole community of FM as we had got to at least 20+ members with most on every day, this is what we had planned even if it was slow for the first week or so. We started hosting passworded rooms with our passwords such as BLAZINGFAG and BLAZINGPEDO (before moving onto WOAH), these rooms were a step up from pubs as the standard of play was rising due to people being motivated to becoming better and playing regularly, it also made people interested in Feed Me Haxball as they saw the passworded rooms that were full and would sometimes see people sporting fm avatars so would ask them what it was about. I'm pretty sure Donny recruited about 50 people just on his own (or so he has claimed) so mad props to him. There was a sub-community already within the group as players such as Donny, mc smiley, Northam, Alec Baldwin, Joey, jonnyynoj (?) and Chef who came from a football forum together so had some history, I think they also had a 3v3 league running there too.
A rivalry
Now we also saw at this point another community/league around which was 365, they had players such as sparegoal, BB, CareBlair, doogie, Besty, H and crib$ who some may know today. Whenever they were seen in pubs the always seemed arrogant, well, most of them anyway so as we became known to them and them to us we decided we would fight (being the only logical thing to do of course). This started a rivalry which lasted quite a long time until we just moved on to other things, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here! I also had started creating gifs at this point and Haxball: Three [Feed Me Community] was released! FM were playing 3v3 and 4v4 a lot now depending on who was hosting or how many people were online so we knew how to play each format well. I decided I would post lineups with a GK and two other players (plus a sub maybe) of 4/5 teams that we would then use against 4/5 teams of 365 and whoever won the most would be the winner and proven therefore the best in UK at hax.
Needless to say because they only used a single thread on a bet365 forum as their haxball talk and not a sub-section it was a bit un-organized at how we would play, nobody would be on at the right times etc. and everyone was claiming they had won, mainly 365 the petty fools if they won against one member of fm with two random pubbers, shaking my head. Now, more importantly I knew they had a league over at 365 and were in maybe their second season so I was interested as to how they ran their league so I did some research on them and the American league, which I still followed but never played in. I decided I would ask the community if they would prefer 3v3 or 4v4 to be the format played for the upcoming league I wanted to start and was going to follow up by asking Big or Big easy pitch (as it had come out not long before this point and the American league was also switching to this/had switched to it and I always used it for 4v4's in pub/FM rooms because of this), but sadly 3v3 won due to peoples arguments of not having enough players to make a stable/competitive 4v4 league. I decided, because aeRo was never active much when we got back into college that I would test out things before starting an actual league with a cup. I'm not sure if we did a draft type for this but we came away with some teams (deleted the forum things so cannot remember). Now the teams seemed quite fair and everyone seemed to like the draft system (if we used it) so next came colouring each team and people practicing for the cup. Here is where our skill levels started raising even more because we were playing regularly with the same players and focusing more on beating a unit instead of just individual players. I was all for making match days so we could make sure matches were played and scheduled but jonny convinced the majority of people and therefore me that saying matches must be played within a certain time frame like 3 days or so with the captains arranging a date was better. This he got from 365 I believe. What a mess, is all that can be said and I decided to scrap the cup after just a few matches had been played. The only good things to come away from this cup were the way matches would be scheduled, the interest shown in competitive hax (as 365 was closed off to invitation basically as well) and new talent that had recently joined and was active.
The real beginning
Now, here it was, I had scheduled in the start date of the season (02/11/11, maybe a bit earlier then moved to a new league site I can’t remember), the date of the draft (22/09/11) and more importantly started taking captain applications and draft sign-ups. We had a lot of people interested and I decided that a 6 team league would be the best way to start up, we had the captains consisting of mc smiley (NWA), Donny (DEJA Entendudes), Cathalio11 (Cathletico), jonnyynnoj (Arriba!), Circleboy (Circles' Boys) and socrates (Soccerettes), I had decided it would be best if I was not a captain as to avoid adminball situations and people calling me unbiased, as this is what I had seen in the American league for a long time. These people would then take part in one of the most anticipated events of the FM community at the time, THE SEASON 1 DRAFT! Well just look here viewtopic.php?f=129&t=104 to see the results of this epic event and see for yourself. What would have happened if Cath had picked deer instead?? What would have happened if, Rachel played haxball?! Oh my god Blazing picked 3rd round?! Wow rising star in last round but he's great now?! Hah well this just shows who was the best players at the time really so yeah, all these were fairly logical picks at the time. So teams were set, team rosters full to the maximum of four, team-names were decided and the schedule was created after a poll on what days we should have matches (Sunday was conclusive and I settled on Thursday for the other day), we were basically set to go. Then, some decided that it was unfair on the people who had not been drafted as they would not get to play that season because I had decided that no cuts/signs/trades/free agency was to be made unless someone really did leave forever, therefore I decided to create the 7th team known as the leftovers who was mainly meant to be just for the four left over from the draft but as they were unreliable I came up with the idea that players who were new to the site or had just not been around at draft-sign up time that any 3 of this mixture could play for the leftovers on that said day, this became known as a pretty crazy idea with many just being a random mishmash of 3 with some teams getting historically high scoring games against them. Whilst it did show some potential talent it really didn't work out and as it came these were the final results of the season:
The first season the only real controversial thing was my decision in a game where we reset a half to 0-0 on a new host instead of me remembering my rules and finishing that half as it had started and then switching to another host. Also deer scored an obvious lag goal and Arriba! didn't fair play the twats. NWA had the strongest 1st half of the season and then Rachel and thor had a massive fallout and destructed everything smiley had worked towards, leading to them dropping to third by the end of the season. Circle's Boys showed people wrong and performed much better than everyone had predicted by coming second with the most goals scored (two stat pads against leftovers though). Mirrored game schedule meant that teams would play the team they played on the 1st matchday on the last which ended up with Cathletico getting a whole week off due to the odd number of teams. Now this is what we will blame on not getting higher as everyone had predicted with me and Cath being on the same team but needless to say Blazing plus opc were still developing into good players at the time and Blazing/Cath were both GK's so opc was our main choice for mid as Blazing couldn't do anything looking back, heh. Cath was big on defensive play and that was always our main focus, this annoyed me as I preferred to be attacking and scoring but even I saw the logic in if we conceded less than the other team then we would for sure win more matches. At one point in the season when Cath benched himself against the leftovers and we won 3-1, me, blazing and opc thought that we were better without Cath playing, hah, luckily he saw sense and decided that it wasn't a great idea to start Blazing instead of him so he carried on starting and we didn't do too bad. Whilst this was happening Blazing and opc tended to rage at each other quite a lot so me and Cath tried to sort them out but who knows, Cath even suspended Blazing because of this and he never really improved his behaviour but oh well. Soccerettes underachieved I guess with Navjuve being a pretty good prospect but never really achieving it, he also rage quit the forum and deleted his account or something so I allowed soc to get a new player, this player was Cookies and made a massive impact to the Soccerettes team. Towards the end of the season I also started to stream the matches being played and me, aeRo (even though he didn't play season 1) and CircleBoy would commentate on them in preparation of my idea that all matches next season being streamed.
In February 2011 I was browsing ESL for some games that I could play competitively, especially since I had basically stopped playing xbox and was now interested in pc gaming, at this time I had also started playing borderlands, counter strike and cod4 on the PC with its competitive mod so was also on ESL to see if their league was active for cod4 pc. This was also my first year of college so I had a lot more free time on my hands than in school. The game appealed to me after I gave it a try and saw it was a simple game that was easy to access and easy to understand. Once I knew how to reduce lag and how to control my character properly I was interested in leagues straight away, even though I wasn't exactly great. I also had started hosting at this time the well-known "Mad's 4v4 Room" as most rooms were still playing 3v3, also was noted for its great adminning work as it was run well and rooms where I have admin still are to this day. The problems we occurred in these early stages of Haxball, as it was only created in about November/December 2010, was that we had limited pitches (All before Big Easy on the list, even only classic just before I started playing), we had no ability to change players to spectators/other teams and no way to kick/ban people either, we only had 30fps option so double bounces etc. were rare, these problems as you can imagine were pretty crap to be honest but we all still played because of the appeal and fun we had, also if a player left midgame and they were on the field their haxbody would still be there but just a corpse, most of these didn't take long for Basro to sort out as he was actively updating the game.
The interest and Pioneering UK
Whilst I was searching for leagues I of course remembered where I first heard about haxball, which was on ESL. As I liked 4v4 more because of the teamwork needed and never really playing 1v1 or 2v2 I wanted to join that ladder on ESL, so I searched for players that would be able to play in it. I asked regular players that joined my room if they would play in a team and ended up with me, George Best, Cookie (not sure if same cookie, he always said it wasn't him), Chicharito and probably some others who I never saw again, we called this team M.A.D and I got them all to sign up to ESL whilst in the same room. We never made the team in the end as we had no way to contact each other except if we were randomly online on haxball so we just never played ESL. Meanwhile on the community section of haxball there was something about a /sp/ league or something that I was checking out, which turned out to be an American league but the only league I knew of (because I didn't look at other country listings really), it was just at the end of their season 2 and was 4v4. I watched some of their streams/replays as that feature had just come out I think and whilst watching I saw something that I had never seen in pubs in the UK which is where the player kicks it off the side wall (next to the goal) and then crosses it to a teammate. Now this blew my mind sort of as most people just tried to tackle/power up or try stupid angled passes at the time (not much has changed then). I tried this out and it was with great effect that it worked so others caught on and started using it, thus the meta had suddenly changed, more focus was on crosses, positioning in the box from both teams and not just ball chasing as people would need to react, all thanks to a simple move. Now people were discovering stuff all the time like obviously working out tackle angles to favor them so that they would win, bouncing off the top and bottom walls to get round players or just fool them and how to attack and defend together efficiently. The main player I would always love to watch and study in pubs or my rooms was always Bluebird, now this guy seemed like a master at the time, had a great attitude and was playing any position pretty darn well, I can honestly say I learnt more from this guy than anyone I ever have since (because I learnt nothing from nobody except him, got em).
The birth of something new
Now I was just cruising along still hosting my rooms and playing with the regulars who came in most nights, playing most days by now as I was enjoying myself more and more. At around this time I discovered that aeRo, who I sat next to in Physics in my first year of college, also played cod4 on the pc, I just randomly stated something from cod and he replied with something that also referenced cod and we were like woah, from then on it went from a homo friendship to a gaming and homo friendship, no joke, his dick was out a lot in Physics lessons. We discovered we played mainly the same games on the PC and we decided to play some together, this was mainly cod4 and sometimes counter strike. We would use xfire for voice comms, as I had next to no idea about teamspeak and other software except steam/ventrillo and much laughs were had as I was terrible and he was pretty good at cod, even if it was 2v2 lows. I decided I would introduce him to haxball, whilst at the time we had both just finished exams and other stuff for the year so we played it a lot whilst mixing in cod during the summer. It was great times and most came to know him to as a regular on haxball as well. I then came up with something, the idea for a community so we could tell each other when rooms would go up and a place to talk about the game and get to know each other. I talked to him about making a community and he agreed it would be a great idea and we were deciding on a name for a long short time. We both discovered we liked the same kind of music and he went more towards the electro side of things whilst I went more drum n bass, we both enjoyed listening to Feed Me and Spor songs who is actually the same artist under different aliases, so our love for this act was the reasoning behind choosing Feed Me Haxball as the name even though it was just a random suggestion at the time by aeRo. All in all we started using names such as Mad is hungry and aeRo is hungry to go along with the Feed Me name in a different way and to mainly promote the idea that we would be making a community. July 24th, haxballishungry website is made by aeRo using forummotion and it looked...well rubbish, but, it was a massive step up for UK haxball. We quickly went about linking regulars in my room and people who had joined started using fm avatars to promote and linking people who seemed interested whenever they were asked about it or asked about it themselves. The first few topics and stuff were just some rubbish really like aeRo's haxball terms so we could all agree on stuff such as
, gg, n1, snipe, rush etc. We also saw Blazing raging on hax replays and my amazing videos Haxball: One and Haxball: Two (still viewable today!). I decided the next one would involve the whole community of FM as we had got to at least 20+ members with most on every day, this is what we had planned even if it was slow for the first week or so. We started hosting passworded rooms with our passwords such as BLAZINGFAG and BLAZINGPEDO (before moving onto WOAH), these rooms were a step up from pubs as the standard of play was rising due to people being motivated to becoming better and playing regularly, it also made people interested in Feed Me Haxball as they saw the passworded rooms that were full and would sometimes see people sporting fm avatars so would ask them what it was about. I'm pretty sure Donny recruited about 50 people just on his own (or so he has claimed) so mad props to him. There was a sub-community already within the group as players such as Donny, mc smiley, Northam, Alec Baldwin, Joey, jonnyynoj (?) and Chef who came from a football forum together so had some history, I think they also had a 3v3 league running there too.A rivalry
Now we also saw at this point another community/league around which was 365, they had players such as sparegoal, BB, CareBlair, doogie, Besty, H and crib$ who some may know today. Whenever they were seen in pubs the always seemed arrogant, well, most of them anyway so as we became known to them and them to us we decided we would fight (being the only logical thing to do of course). This started a rivalry which lasted quite a long time until we just moved on to other things, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here! I also had started creating gifs at this point and Haxball: Three [Feed Me Community] was released! FM were playing 3v3 and 4v4 a lot now depending on who was hosting or how many people were online so we knew how to play each format well. I decided I would post lineups with a GK and two other players (plus a sub maybe) of 4/5 teams that we would then use against 4/5 teams of 365 and whoever won the most would be the winner and proven therefore the best in UK at hax.
Needless to say because they only used a single thread on a bet365 forum as their haxball talk and not a sub-section it was a bit un-organized at how we would play, nobody would be on at the right times etc. and everyone was claiming they had won, mainly 365 the petty fools if they won against one member of fm with two random pubbers, shaking my head. Now, more importantly I knew they had a league over at 365 and were in maybe their second season so I was interested as to how they ran their league so I did some research on them and the American league, which I still followed but never played in. I decided I would ask the community if they would prefer 3v3 or 4v4 to be the format played for the upcoming league I wanted to start and was going to follow up by asking Big or Big easy pitch (as it had come out not long before this point and the American league was also switching to this/had switched to it and I always used it for 4v4's in pub/FM rooms because of this), but sadly 3v3 won due to peoples arguments of not having enough players to make a stable/competitive 4v4 league. I decided, because aeRo was never active much when we got back into college that I would test out things before starting an actual league with a cup. I'm not sure if we did a draft type for this but we came away with some teams (deleted the forum things so cannot remember). Now the teams seemed quite fair and everyone seemed to like the draft system (if we used it) so next came colouring each team and people practicing for the cup. Here is where our skill levels started raising even more because we were playing regularly with the same players and focusing more on beating a unit instead of just individual players. I was all for making match days so we could make sure matches were played and scheduled but jonny convinced the majority of people and therefore me that saying matches must be played within a certain time frame like 3 days or so with the captains arranging a date was better. This he got from 365 I believe. What a mess, is all that can be said and I decided to scrap the cup after just a few matches had been played. The only good things to come away from this cup were the way matches would be scheduled, the interest shown in competitive hax (as 365 was closed off to invitation basically as well) and new talent that had recently joined and was active.
The real beginning
Now, here it was, I had scheduled in the start date of the season (02/11/11, maybe a bit earlier then moved to a new league site I can’t remember), the date of the draft (22/09/11) and more importantly started taking captain applications and draft sign-ups. We had a lot of people interested and I decided that a 6 team league would be the best way to start up, we had the captains consisting of mc smiley (NWA), Donny (DEJA Entendudes), Cathalio11 (Cathletico), jonnyynnoj (Arriba!), Circleboy (Circles' Boys) and socrates (Soccerettes), I had decided it would be best if I was not a captain as to avoid adminball situations and people calling me unbiased, as this is what I had seen in the American league for a long time. These people would then take part in one of the most anticipated events of the FM community at the time, THE SEASON 1 DRAFT! Well just look here viewtopic.php?f=129&t=104 to see the results of this epic event and see for yourself. What would have happened if Cath had picked deer instead?? What would have happened if, Rachel played haxball?! Oh my god Blazing picked 3rd round?! Wow rising star in last round but he's great now?! Hah well this just shows who was the best players at the time really so yeah, all these were fairly logical picks at the time. So teams were set, team rosters full to the maximum of four, team-names were decided and the schedule was created after a poll on what days we should have matches (Sunday was conclusive and I settled on Thursday for the other day), we were basically set to go. Then, some decided that it was unfair on the people who had not been drafted as they would not get to play that season because I had decided that no cuts/signs/trades/free agency was to be made unless someone really did leave forever, therefore I decided to create the 7th team known as the leftovers who was mainly meant to be just for the four left over from the draft but as they were unreliable I came up with the idea that players who were new to the site or had just not been around at draft-sign up time that any 3 of this mixture could play for the leftovers on that said day, this became known as a pretty crazy idea with many just being a random mishmash of 3 with some teams getting historically high scoring games against them. Whilst it did show some potential talent it really didn't work out and as it came these were the final results of the season:
The first season the only real controversial thing was my decision in a game where we reset a half to 0-0 on a new host instead of me remembering my rules and finishing that half as it had started and then switching to another host. Also deer scored an obvious lag goal and Arriba! didn't fair play the twats. NWA had the strongest 1st half of the season and then Rachel and thor had a massive fallout and destructed everything smiley had worked towards, leading to them dropping to third by the end of the season. Circle's Boys showed people wrong and performed much better than everyone had predicted by coming second with the most goals scored (two stat pads against leftovers though). Mirrored game schedule meant that teams would play the team they played on the 1st matchday on the last which ended up with Cathletico getting a whole week off due to the odd number of teams. Now this is what we will blame on not getting higher as everyone had predicted with me and Cath being on the same team but needless to say Blazing plus opc were still developing into good players at the time and Blazing/Cath were both GK's so opc was our main choice for mid as Blazing couldn't do anything looking back, heh. Cath was big on defensive play and that was always our main focus, this annoyed me as I preferred to be attacking and scoring but even I saw the logic in if we conceded less than the other team then we would for sure win more matches. At one point in the season when Cath benched himself against the leftovers and we won 3-1, me, blazing and opc thought that we were better without Cath playing, hah, luckily he saw sense and decided that it wasn't a great idea to start Blazing instead of him so he carried on starting and we didn't do too bad. Whilst this was happening Blazing and opc tended to rage at each other quite a lot so me and Cath tried to sort them out but who knows, Cath even suspended Blazing because of this and he never really improved his behaviour but oh well. Soccerettes underachieved I guess with Navjuve being a pretty good prospect but never really achieving it, he also rage quit the forum and deleted his account or something so I allowed soc to get a new player, this player was Cookies and made a massive impact to the Soccerettes team. Towards the end of the season I also started to stream the matches being played and me, aeRo (even though he didn't play season 1) and CircleBoy would commentate on them in preparation of my idea that all matches next season being streamed.
TL:DR I'm the greatest.
Lots more to do niggas, s2/s3/s4/s5/s6/s7/YeS/Hbc/SPHB/GALA/HAXLEEG/FRH/UK
this is like 1/16th done or something
