What’s Next: National CTF League

The Goucher mods get a lot of requests to run more than one HvZ game a semester.  Our opinion is that multiple games would split our resources too thin and take away from the overall enjoyment of the game.  I think it heightens the experience of playing – knowing you only have one life (this semester).  If there were games every month it just wouldn’t be the same thing; the experience would be diluted. That, and it’s a lot of f-ing work to set up one game. Why can’t you people just be happy?!

gouchervspitt

But I do see where they’re coming from. Here they are with this sweet equipment that they’ve spent a good amount of money (and in a lot of cases a good amount of time) on. Shooting your roommate while they’re busy studying loses its appeal after the first few weeks. What are they supposed to do for the 12 weeks during the semester that there’s no HvZ?

How about Capture the Flag?

CTF seems like a natural parallel to HvZ. It wasn’t long after the first zombie game that Emile Sorger (then a player, now a mod) ran a game of capture the flag using Nerf guns and socks in the woods around campus. A few years later, Adam Longwill started running Nerf CTF games on a weekly basis. Now headed by Grant Knud-Hansen, CTF is played almost every weekend at Goucher, assuming the weather permits.

If I thought that this only applied to Goucher, I wouldn’t be writing about it (just playing with them on Saturdays). No, I think that HvZ players all over the country would appreciate a chance to play; for all I know they might already be playing. For example, on November 8th, After Challenging us on the HvZ community forums, 8 students from Pitt (lead by Shane Price) drove down to Goucher for a game of CTF. Needless to say, we kicked their ass (if you want a less-biased recap, you’ll have to go elsewhere) and it got us thinking about expanding to other schools. How cool would a yearly tournament be? 15+ schools all assembling in one place and playing CTF for a weekend. Amazing!

Of course. we are a ways off from seeing this happen. There’s a lot of work to be done. We need to set some official rules, create a standard playing field, create a more official means for schools to challenge one another and decide how the ranking is going to work. We’re looking to have something more substantial to show you this summer.

In the meantime, let us know what you play at your school between games of HvZ. We’re working with Grant and Shane on the official rules, but if you’d like to help out with that too, shoot us an email.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 6:13 pm and is filed under CTF, Content.

16 Responses to “What’s Next: National CTF League”

  1. Chris Saylor Says:

    January 22nd, 2009 at 8:17 pm

    I hope there wouldn’t be an “official” playing field. CTF is best played in slightly off the cuff areas (but not so much anyone’s going to turn an ankle or fall into an unknown mine)

    Best way to get the tournament to happen would be to get a nice corporate sponsor. Nerf would be the first one on my mind.

  2. Chris Weed Says:

    January 23rd, 2009 at 1:05 pm

    The definition of an official field doesn’t necessary need to include dimensions. It doesn’t “need” to include anything, we can set it up however we want. Personally, I agree with you, the best part about CTF is that it changes considerably depending on where you play it.

    But imagine this: Your team has made it to the semi-finals, one more game before the CTF championship. You’re playing against your rival school, and it’s on their home turf. Your team is known for being able to push through any defense in an open field, but getting slaughtered in a wooded area (because you don’t have any wooded areas around your own school). Naturally, your rival team picks a playing field with lots of trees. Should that be considered fair?

    Going with Nerf would be cool, no doubt, but the reality is that the overhead for a national league really isn’t that much. It’s going to require a lot of hours of work and networking with different schools, but once that’s done it won’t cost much of anything to maintain.

  3. Tim Milligan Says:

    March 9th, 2009 at 9:12 am

    Down here at UMBC, CTF & HVZ formed independently, so our CTF doesn’t use nerf; we play tag to capture. We’ve been doing it for 2 and a half years now, and we can get a crowd of 70 the first few weeks of September, but finding a good, balanced playing field sure is difficult.

  4. Alex Schramm Says:

    March 17th, 2009 at 1:04 pm

    I am using CTF as a HVZ promoter; for the people who like to play the CTF with rules similar to HVZ, i ask them to consider the real deal when we start playing (as is my plan) I like it because i get PR by word of mouth (kids telling other kids how awesome last saturdays game was) and having them get interested, then joining up (chalk one more for the human resistance) as for an official playing field, we have forrested area’s everywhere, so i guess an “official” playing field would include a variety of terran so its on equal terms if teams prefer a different type of terran.

  5. Joel Trimvle Says:

    March 22nd, 2009 at 7:47 pm

    How bout each school picks one or two different playing fields and the submits something like overhead and ground-level pictures of the area to a committee that reviews and permits/blocks them?

    Then the group that organizes tournaments would pick one of the two playing fields to be played on, telling both teams at the same time in an email or phone call?

    Another bonus is that these playing fields could be made public on a website for any team to view before playing against that school

  6. Chris Bolesta Says:

    March 31st, 2009 at 9:27 pm

    Chris Weed, I want to kiss you on the mouth. A national CtF League would be epic.

    Oh, and we totally slaughtered UPitt. The first game (Goucher Team A vs. UPitt; I was on Team A) ended within 3 minutes. Granted, I can only assume it’s only because we’re such amazing players and they were in awe of our heavily modded Nerf monstrosities.

  7. Carl Hayman Says:

    April 10th, 2009 at 8:12 pm

    When we’re not running HVZ at PSU, we play a lot of Capture the Flag. We also play a game called Territories which is like a two week mix of king of the hill and Risk. When that’s not running we’ve got assassins, and after that, a game called Heist, which is a glorified cops and robbers. There’s also manhunt and scavenger hunts, but no nerf is involved.

  8. Erich Boldt Says:

    May 11th, 2009 at 9:36 am

    Im at the University of Minnesota, and we have a well established CTF “group” as it were, and its constantly growing, we play through the super cold Minnesota winters and still have 20 people show up for games, and at points have had over 100 show up on a frieday night for some CTF goodness

    Id say if you could make it out to Minnesota we’d gladly slaught-erm play you guys in a CTF Match We’ve got a multitude of playing fields already on campus, we’re also a tag game as HVZ hasnt really caught on here, and my roommate’s and my efforts kind of fell through as we got busy to set up a game..

  9. Chris Bolesta Says:

    May 13th, 2009 at 10:10 pm

    In response to Erich:

    Jesus, 100+?! We have a hard enough time convincing 20 people to get out of bed at 1 PM on a Saturday. And hell, I’d love to come to Minnesota to play you all. Only problem is I don’t actually go to Goucher, I only play CtF/HvZ there. So as far as funding for something like that, you’d have to talk to Grant K-H, the current CtF organizer. At the very least, I’m sure we could just get into a heated boasting contest over who could kick who’s ass :)

  10. Dan McAnally Says:

    July 8th, 2009 at 8:28 pm

    how old do you have to be to play

  11. Joe Says:

    July 8th, 2009 at 8:35 pm

    Well, the league is not really official. We have planned out the how the software will manage it. Maybe once the software is done (when we have time) it will help make it official.

    But the real way to make this official is to play nerf CTF with your friends. Maybe if you are good enough you can try challenge other people close to you on the forums. I bet the Goucher or Pitt kids would love to play you guys.

  12. Grant Knud-Hansen Says:

    July 26th, 2009 at 8:30 pm

    Hello all, I am the Grant that Joe has been referring to in his discussion. One thing I would like to point out about the Goucher vs Upitt game is the kids from Upitt not only drove 5+ hours to come play us, but they even got their school to fund their gas and hotel rooms. Shane Price did a fantastic job with getting his team to Goucher. So he is someone to ask about that type of stuff.

    It sounds like all of you are doing a great job of organizing your own nerf recreational groups and thats a lot of work already done. I personally really really… really want to see this get launched into a massive production with schools playing each other and what not. I think Joel Trimvle is onto something with the picture idea, that would give visiting teams a rough idea of the terrain so they no what they are getting into.

  13. Erica Ritenour (IUP OZ) Says:

    August 11th, 2009 at 9:15 am

    I know at IUP this last semester when we played for the first time, we attempted CTF as a mission. There were four main teams (Zombies vs. Black, Blue, Green Humans), and it was basically hide the flag anywhere on campus and find as many as you can in two hours. Us Zombies made a ridiculous ammount of decoys and planted them, only to have the three Human teams join against us and give all their flags to one Human team without even coming outside to look for ours. Made it kind of a lame experience, but it was a good move on their part.

  14. Johnny Chan Says:

    November 4th, 2009 at 5:53 am

    I come from china,and I am a greenhand, do not know how to play it.who can anyone teach me a little?

  15. Patrick Lear Says:

    November 19th, 2009 at 12:45 pm

    i was thinking of trying to start a HvZ game at job corps any way to convince the center directer to do that. i think it would be a good way to get people to interact with each other.

  16. David SRM Says:

    December 18th, 2009 at 1:49 pm

    Joel Trimvle has a pretty awesome idea as regards to field choice.

    As well as adding pictures of the field, I would also establish some form of a system for what barricades or cover are included.

    You know establish say, types of barricades cover (Ex. Trees, 3×6 wall, ect.) Paintball courses do this exceptionally well.

    We’ve been playing indoors mostly (AWESOMMMMME BTW). We’ve been using various tables of different sizes and shapes set up to mirror each other for deathmatches, but if you were playing something like Attack and Defend it would make sense to have the defending side more bolstered with easier defense positions.

    P.S. I’m sure you guys will want to run stuff indoors as well. Be aware of biased against Nerf carnage and HvZ. The spaces that you would think you could use aren’t always your only option.

    For us, we couldn’t use the gym for this. The people who run our gym have a biased against HvZ and Nerf… you can try and gain a better image for yourself, but these people are usually pretty well set in their ways.

    We took this as a blessing in disguise.

    The organization who runs this worked something out with the people who run our large meeting spaces… I can’t imagine a better way this could’ve turned out. The room we use has a very Rainbow Six feel to it. IT’S AWESOME!!!



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