I guess one could say that TFP exists because of fate, all the pieces happened to fall into place at the right time and in the right order to enable us to be as successful as we are today.
It began not too long after I’d started playing Team Fortress 2 back in March of 2008. Being a fur, I gravitated to the then largest furry gaming group available and once there, began to make friends very quickly with a core group of regulars who were probably astounded that there was a real live girl on the interwebs, and became a regular myself.
Ours was a chatty group that liked to have fun as much as we liked to play seriously, and we’d usually dominate the servers, doing silly stuff while playing. One such silly event was to play as what we called the Civilian Heavy, which was when the Heavy got stuck in a bad animation state. He was slower, and didn’t walk so much as glide stiffly across the ground like an upright corpse, and he would shoot oddly. It was funny to watch, and fun to play.
It turned out that the admin team of this server, however, did not find it as amusing. Stating that it was an exploit (apparently one of the hitboxes for the heavy’s arm would go out of whack if you activated this state, though why this mattered on the largest and already slowest moving model of the game that was moving even slower than normal is, to this day, beyond me, considering the very small chance that anyone would be aiming for said arm when they had the rest of the head and body to aim for…ah, I digress.) they began banning players who used it. One of my friends (and according to the stats, the best player on the server) Doom was caught in the crossfire of these bannings and went to the forums to protest it.
It was not pretty. Doom made the fatal mistake of stating, in his ban appeal, that he “didn’t want to have to drag his friends somewhere else to play” and the admins of the group took that as an idle threat before letting his ban stand. I was incensed. I felt it unfair that they ban him for doing an exploit that they had not *stated* was an exploit, without any prior warning and I resolved to boycott their servers in solidarity with my friend. Though I didn’t expect it, the core group of friends and regulars from the servers followed me, and here we were…a group of gamers without a server to play on.
Enter Endeavour3d, one of our group, who kindly lent us two of his servers to play on. They were under the banner of [FOR] (Frontier Operational Recon), at the time but they were unused, and we adopted the servers as ours to play on. However, I quickly noticed a problem: We had no way to keep in contact away from the servers, and come together to chat when we weren’t in game.
And so….whilst talking to Ignis Solus over Steam, I created an informal private group for our little band of refugees and on Iggy’s suggestion, named it The Furry Pound.
It was never meant as anything serious…just a little informal group to keep us connected as we played on the [FOR] servers and upon further reflection, I quickly threw up a forum adjacent to mine. We ended up going through two forums before settling on our third. The first, we kept sailing through the bandwidth as it was my friend’s business site. The second, we neglected to realize there was a “No Porn” policy on the forums. So I, with the help of Ailure, brought up the third (and permanent) set of forums on my personal webspace.
So now we had a steam group and a forum, and since I was the one who provided these, I guess this is how I became the unofficial official leader of TFP, a role I took on with some trepidation but with the idea that this was by no means going to be a true official thing. Ha, little did I realize….
We began go grow as those who started out in our group began to invite in their friends to play with us….soon we were a group of around 50-100 furries, playing on the [FOR] servers and [FOR] members not only began inviting us into the group, but began playing with us as well since now they weren’t playing on empty servers.
However, as is usual, a new problem arose. Taross, the leader of [FOR], had recieved complaints from non-furry members of [FOR] about the porn sprays prevelant on the server, and sought to create a rule to ban them. I, along with some other members (some actual moderators and admins) protested and in the ensuing drama, Taross came to the conclusion to step down from adminning the servers, giving their care up to anyone who cared to take on the mantle.
And I thought hey….the servers are mostly populated by TFP anyway, and I’m in charge of TFP, so…why not?
With that…I took on control of the servers and TFP became the “official” gaming group that it is today.
Born of drama, drama and more drama…it’s a wonder that we’ve done as well as we have. I have no idea how we got so successful. Personally, I’m so glad that we *are* successful, and that so many (almost 1,300 as of this writing) have chosen to hang out here, and listen to the little purple bunny who sometimes likes to do art and play TF2.
