Team Presentation: [Red] OctapuzZ – Retrospective View

Hello community. This article starts hopefully a long series of league team presentations. If you want your team presented in this space – please contact Jamppu_Fi on Discord.

First up is BCL Season 2 T5 winner OctapuzZ Gaming. The team has recently quit BF1, but I’m sure we will see the team again in the future releases of Battlefield. 

Enjoy,
Jamppu_Fi


OctapuzZ Gaming was created in March 2017. Although we are very young, 8Pz is one of the most capable Battlefield 1 clans on the PS4 at least for the domination 5vs5 game mode. It is all about teamplay, good players, organisation and a good atmosphere.

Phew, when I wrote this About Us for our website back in the glory days of the most casual but all loved competitive Battlefield 1, we just took our first steps into the great international, often cringe and trash, league & tournament world of the game. This post is for all great people we meet on our path in the course of time and for all who want to know more about how OctapuzZ, a team of competitive newbies, with an even more newbie like background, became one of the most capable teams out there in Battlefield One.

How It Started

One of the reasons why many, mostly German, players couldn’t understand why we became such a strong team, was, that me and most of the very first OctapuzZ players, came from an absolutely fun clan called Deaddevils. I started there as a showcase public hero and with time I managed to find interest in taking on responsibility for the team itself and planing future steps. I even wrote software solutions to keep track of players activity on our training games, connected to the crappy webpages calendar.

We were bad, however I was able to enforce an “e-Sports” team of our best players and started to get into early business, even though the focus was still on fun. To keep things short, I decided to create my very own team weeks later and with a lot of help from my team mates and later friends like Seven or Deluxe, we managed to transfer the best players from the old “e-sports” team to OctapuzZ Gaming. This is the point, were many people are still stuck at, concerning information about the composition of our roaster.

On our first website, you can still find some very prehistoric DDe matches (click image).

 

The First Successes

The new goal of OctapuzZ was to be able to play at the top and to have a chance to get defeat less badly by top tier teams. We still had one roaster with about nine players. However, to become the best you have to take into account the following rules and make hard decisions, such as excluding buddies from the team or rejecting friends:

  1. Removing bad players from roasters, when new more skilled players arrives
  2. Give new players a time of four weeks, in order to prove oneself, before adding them to the roaster
  3. Taking reliability seriously and remove unsuitable players, even if they are skilled
  4. Try to play with the same five to six players over and over again
  5. Take care of concentration and calm during matches
  6. Create tactics with your team for every map, even if it sounds ridiculous, in the end it creates easy handable standard situations
  7. Play against the bests (not from the beginning)

Getting back at 1., I already wrote about excluding and rejecting buddies and friends. For us, one of the first mates to remove from OctapuzZ was Seven, who helped me a lot with the old team which later resulting in a second team. However, it was also a joint decision, since he had less time to play and couldn’t hold or even rise his skill level. Also Korte, later captain of our second team, was rejected by me, although we played hours of Battlefield together over years and was, and thankfully still is, a good real life friend over seven years now.

Over the time, we managed to get a lot of very unknown new players, which was a result of still being very unschooled concerning the Battlefield scene and didn’t have any connections to the old so called legends out there. And even if we had, we still weren’t worth the talk, to be attractive for well known high-skilled players, but this wouldn’t last forever. Getting back to the above list, we got players like clockHQShakhthar, Red over the time and the kernel of OctapuzZ Team Red was born. A good point about the unawareness of the existing legends was, that we weren’t busy measuring ourselves with them, but just putting the full focus on our improving gameplay and finally, out of nowhere, we were capable of playing with the best out there and winning our first tournament ever, the NGT Fast Cup.

We are proud to announce our first victory in an international cup!
The CUP was organized by NextGenTournaments a well known organizer for competitive cups on PS4 and PC. One interesting thing about the cup was the so called looser bracket in addition to the main bracket…

read more: NGT Fast Cup.

After loosing 5:1 in rounds against GnatiX, now eMp, in the German Bundesliga easter cup, we managed to beat them two days in a row in a double final in NGT. Wow, what just happend? We jumped into spotlight and firstly got confronted with a mix of love from a new fanbase and also a lots of derision and trash from a lot of people, except from GantiX, also they weren’t obviously quite pleased with the result.

Overall High-point And Loss Of Interest

Look, its OctapuzZ, the randies out of nowhere, where everyone is cheating and now they think, they are the best in a randy game

– almost every good old player, we beat 🤷.

Now being on everybody’s lips, things changed a bit. We got confronted a lot with hate and trash, mostly by bored kids and some, which got just misinformed by players we didn’t took after their testing phase or to whom we turned our backs on. But we also found many friends like the Hooligan or Rage team (Hi Scream, Hi xSolistic) and players like Bonnie, [Zdiv]IJ, Danielsan or germanance are just some of our supporters in social media and friends. I won’t list anymore, since I will forget some for sure, safe call.

Later in summer 2017 we were able to beat Gnatix again, this time in revenge for the easter cup, and managed to get the title as“German Masters” in the German Bundesliga Summer League. At this time Bulletz joined us, the first top tier player from another team, Revelation, and our main roaster reached the final strength. Staying at Revelation, as one of our main competitors in Battlefield, it was them we faced in the BCL EU Domination 5v5 Season II final. The tough fight was even streamed by Battle Epic and we managed to win our third gold in a row. It was a match which anyone would have expected, when both teams are facing each other and is still worth it to re-watch it here: OctapuzZ Gaming :: BCL GRAND FINAL :: vs. Rev

We in person

 

But where the good time lasts long, the bad time sneaks slowly around like a Model-10 bush-camper. The game is old, the new Call of Duty is about to launch with an build-in competitive experience, we beat the strongest known teams more than just once and our Win-Loose account is reaching near a 180:10 Win/Loose ratio. We managed to win some more tournaments and even got our first price money, but without the motivation of finding stronger teams than us and the rarely played scrims against teams, which where willing to play against us, we have lost our ambition to stay at Battlefield. With our second team, team blue, we barely missed top three in the BFNations frontlines clan tournament and the first players finally went inactive for Battlefield, resulting in eMp and Revelation got stronger than us again. We tried to fill the lack of players with PulzR and Iron, both members from our second team and even if both are strong infy players, you can’t expect the team to work with a replaced player like before, when there were month of team-orientated up to 14 scrims and matches per week. Especially not, when you barely find any scrims to practice.

So for now, besides some BFNation related matches, we went official inactive with a total (in December stopped updated) Win/Loose ratio of 200:15 :
OctapuzZ-Gaming.com:  No More Battlefield

What is Left

Literally everything! We are still the same mates and just playing other games now, which is resulting in something big in the next couple of weeks. Just because No-Slidefield is dying and Incursions might not be what we were’re thinking about a competitive experience, it doesn’t mean, we are out of sight! We will be using our gained level of awareness and experience to take the next step of providing a new team-experience for all interested team captains, which will fit to our philosophy from the very first quote of this post, giving them the ability to use our brand to get recognition and our help resulting in the need just to focus on their team and nothing else. Moreover, our still growing YouTube channel has some new videos in its release pipeline, with not only Battlefield or gameplay related stuff.

Stay tuned and take a look at our website from time to time, to get the newest information about whats coming next. Maybe we could call you an OctapuzZ player soon!

New banner, pointing out some future plans