We sit down and talk to TWL founder Polaris (Part 1)

All of us here started and spent a lot of time with TeamWarfare, it's where a lot of us got our first taste for the experience and it's what has kept us together after all of these years. With our reboot it only seemed fitting for us to sit down with the founders and have a long overdue chat about TWL, how it started, challenges it faced and more. We hope you enjoy this first part of interview:

What prompted you to start TWL? / what did TWL offer, to who?

The OGL was the big dog when we started. they had just completed a massive rewrite of their platform and the main guy running it was in the middle of some pretty significant burnout. he made some choices that he shouldnt have, and that gave Myles and I a reason to do something different. Our goal was to build a more approachable, community-centric system for Tribes.

When did you realize that TWL was a success?

AA and RTCW were the real signals that we had nailed it. RTCW did ok, but when the admins at CPL/CAL fucked up with the community, we jumped in. we were ladders only at the time. Zedsdead ran RTCW at the time and told us if we built leagues we would dominate the landscape. Myles and I holed up in his apartment and deployed the league code less than 24 hours later. When that took off, we knew we were on the right track.

How has gaming changed since you started?

Communities are mostly dead. I remember the tribalism (pun intended) of the T1 and T2 communities are what made it amazing. when WoW came out that persisted in the server communities that existed. When the server you were on stopped being important because of the battle group model, actually recognizing people was gone. Today I can play 100 games of overwatch and maybe see one person I remember. It's reallly sad, tbh.

What do you follow these days in terms of gaming activity?

I play daily. Overwatch and HotS mostly in MP. for SP I play sandbox games like Skylines, Banished, Astroneer, etc. I dont like competitive because the ranking model is a dumpster fire, so it's mostly PUGs. MMOs are mostly dead for me because I have no patience to grind.

How do you feel about all the TWL reboots?

I love it, so long as you retain the community feel. I think that even though people use aliases, it means something when you know a bit about the people you're hanging around with.

What do the former TWL admins that are building Rebound Gaming League have to do in order to be a success?

..be careful when disconnecting. I will explain in our chat later.