Here you’ll find the history of Global Warfighter League. The idea was conceived in early 2004 and brought to fruition by 2005. The idea was simple. Empower players and teams for online multiplayer games with tools that allow competitive challenges to each other. They would rank on leaderboards within ladders based on the games the members play and compete in.
Internet Archive: GlobalWarfighter.com, MyGWL.com, GlobalWF.com
Related: SWBF2 History at GWL
Tribes 2 & 3 Origin to Global Warfighter League
The idea of Global Warfighter League started with a couple of players from the game “Tribes 2” (and then “Tribes 3”) communities. Teams and players would compete against each other at t2warfare.com (and then t3warfare.com) and rank amongst themselves via ladders and tournaments. Some players and staff were unhappy with the management (and group think happening) in the Tribes 2 community so “JudgeDoom” and “SpellBinder” decided to form their own gaming league for more than just one competitive game. Global Warfighter League was born.
Several ideas for this new online gaming league included adding a few games that were known to have online multiplayer competition so the new site would not just focus on one competitive community, but several. All players would have private messaging (on the site) with each other to schedule their matches within the player ladders. All teams would have their own private forums and competition calendars for team matches, events, competitions and tournaments.
“Grumpy” was added to the GWL Staff to help with administration and support for this new gaming league. It’s important to note that JudgeDoom and Spellbinder were still in military service (Army) (as well as Grumpy at some point) during this time. These three all depended on volunteer GWL staff to run the league when they were unable to intervene or act as GWL administration because of more pressing matters in their military service and schedule.
How the Global Warfighter League Worked
At GWL, teams were formed by Team Leaders, who then were allowed Co-Leaders, Captains, Moderators, and Members in their group. Team leaders would assign these site ranks from their created team (clan) members depending on responsibility for their team here at the league. Teams were given the ability to post announcements at GWL in their own team forums and when a member of their team arrived at our site, they would see the announcement for their particular team on our front page (as long as they were logged in).
The goal at GWL was to provide a place for online teams that didn’t have their own website to gather and organize their team for online competition. Teams were given free private forums and team calendars where they could schedule matches and keep their team informed about upcoming matches and competitions. Eventually this calendar system was extended to individual players so they could keep track of their own competitive schedule without having to be on a team (1 on 1 competition).
GWL teams were allowed to join various competitions and multiplayer events for any game we supported here at GWL for competition. Games were determined competitively eligible and supported here at GWL by public polling or by us working privately with certain gaming communities to bring a competitive edge to their online multiplayer gaming here at our website. Generally multiplayer games that had enough interested players to form several teams were chosen to be supported at our league.
Communication was an integral part of the league and was supported with private messaging and Matchcoms between players and teams for all gaming communities we supported. GWL also had 3 TeamSpeak voip servers that were utilized for voice communications where teams could create their own channels for their players to communicate with others for competitive matches or for just hanging out.
At this time, Global Warfighter League also had an IRC live text chat that served as a support channel for GWL and was yet another way players and teams could communicate with each other for competitive matches or hanging out in a text environment (chat room).
GWL Grows into Something More
In 2004, GWL had team based ladders but in an effort to get more competition going at the website, player ladders were introduced with 1v1 ladders for solo competition. Individual players could rank by themselves without their team but could still enjoy being on a team for multiplayer competition. This allowed players to compete by themselves without actually being on a team if they so desired. This was an innovation for competition websites at the time and was received well here.
GWL was adding games such as Star Wars Battlefront (Classic) for competition to expand the player base at the site and also started introducing a new feature here called “Voting” points. This feature wasn’t voting in a poll in a forum post. Our new GWL voting system was more of a voting option for players on our site to vote or “root” for their preferred player or team that were involved in a scheduled competitive match. If you voted on a winning player or team in their competitive “match” then you received a “Voting Point” and with this came another ranking (meta) we could track for individual members at the site and then further tie into rewards for our community.
GWL Introduces Advertising
At this time, another thing players were starting to see at our website was static advertising. This was relatively different from the “pop-up” ads that were prevalent on other websites where each page you went to showed a new “pop-up” with advertising to make money for the websites sponsored by the advertising involved. “Pop Ups” were considered spammy and we didn’t want to corrupt our league with “pop ups” that would deter our players from frequenting the site.
Our original intention here was to NOT HAVE ANY advertising for GWL. However, in practice GWL was offering free tools for online team management and multiplayer competition, which was well received by our player base. However, other competition websites were popping up on the internet offering prizes and had sponsors. Admin staff for GWL were already donating their time for free so the decision was made to start showing static ads in the sidebar for sponsors who wanted to help support our website. This would allow GWL to start bringing in money for prizes while still offering free tools for our players and teams.
New Format, New Tools and New Front Page
In 2006, we changed the format to include a navigation toolbar on the left to immediately allow players and teams to quickly get to their desired location and get immediate information. Admin staff could get to the admin interface quickly. Players could get to their profile, their team, their desired forums quickly while seeing immediate information such as their rank, how many new posts have been posted since their last visit, as well as who was on the GWL website at that time.
Information about each competitive game was added to the front page. Visitors could see what competitive games we supported, what platform, the quantity of teams that had signed up and how many players competing in the game along with the amount of challenges in the system individually and collectively.
This was so everyone could gage how active the game was at GWL at a glance and sometimes there was a promotional video for the game in the widget container to entice others into joining the game for competition here at the league.
By this time, teams and players were using the tools and the online calendar for scheduling their matches quite often. The competition calendar was public so everyone could follow other teams and players and make challenges based on wins and losses of all the competitors. Team leaders and captains could make challenges and adjust their competitive calendar based on their matchcoms that were kept in private. By doing so, everyone on the site was kept in the loop (via the calendar) as to what the status of any particular match was and when it was scheduled. Users could click on the match and “Vote” for their preferred player or team.
Matchcoms were private communication between teams and players for competition that was the official record of getting the match scheduled to play. This system served as a way GWL game admins could monitor the competitive matches of their particular teams and players under their game purview. GWL Game admins could intervene in matchcoms if a match was taking too long to complete or teams or players were holding up competition on the ladder because they weren’t completing their challenge and match completion, which in turn was actually holding up a ladder or position in the ranking.
More Games, members, staff and Continued Growth
More games were added to our league to include Battlefield 2, Fear Combat, COD 2, Madden ’07, and the continuation of Star Wars Battlefront Competition with it’s sequel Star Wars Battlefront 2. GWL was growing with new staff members to run these communities and new games were coming in to keep the league afloat.
Staff was added to handle the added games like “.mojo.Cobra”, “mojo.adam”, “Rusty911”, “UltraShock”, “)G(Redhead”, “Crazy56”, “[SL]Jaxter”, “[SL]Marbury”, “|KW|Intrigue”, “[SL]Sprite” and “~FL~Triphamm3r” were brought on board to handle the extra workload for games and site coding. Jaxter, Marbury, Intrigue, Cobra, Adam, Rusty, Ultrashock, Redhead and Crazy56 all eventually left after real life started taking a front seat to their life priorities. In many cases, rightfully so and understandable.
At this time, Global Warfighter League was utilizing several domains for the website. Basically we had “GlobalWarfighter.com” for the main website and we were using another domain “MyGWL.com” for users that had logged in and this site domain would provide users with their logged in details and information based on their “logged in” status. Information like ladders, tournaments, matchcoms, private messages, and pending challenges would be shown to users via this “MyGWL.com” domain.
Global Warfighter League was kind of like both a private site and a public site on several different domains. A decision was made to add the domain “GlobalWF.com” into the mix and this would be a domain to combine the public and the user “logged in” websites into one combined site for better security and better manageability overall.
GWL started doing online tournaments for their games when ladders were proving successful. There was usually three months of active competition for a game before a tournament was offered. Teams and players could join tournaments where the teams were seeded based on their ranking of the ladders they had joined here or if the team was newly formed for the tournament.
Newly formed teams were seeded against each other within the tournament and would have to prove themselves against the ranked teams. Essentially teams and players were seeded based on their win loss record at GWL on the ladders. If there was no record, they were seeded against others with no W/L record or in some cases (depending on the game and amount of new teams), were seeded against top teams to weed out irrelevant teams.
Fort Drum “America’s Army” Lan Tournament 2007
JudgeDoom, SpellBinder, and Grumpy actively tried to grow our league and get “Military Gamers” to join our league by partnering with Fort Drum and “Military Gamers”. The plan was that we would run, monitor and use the web tools at Global Warfighter League to keep track of the tournament brackets and determine winners. This worked well in theory but some snags at the time prevented full engagement of our website with the LAN tournament at Fort Drum and we only served as a backup record for the tourny. The competition at Fort Drum was AWESOME. Congratulations to all winners.
While there were a few issues with actively integrating our site with the competition itself, this gave Global Warfighter League valuable experience with getting involved with real world LAN tournaments and who could ask for a better partner than 10th Mountain, Fort Drum, Military Gamers, Boss Gaming and MWR. “Hooah!”
Moving into 2008
As our league moved into 2008, GWL was starting to show cracks in our list of supported games. At this time many of the games we had supported were slowly becoming less and less active online because of developer and competitive mod support. Games like “Fear Combat” and “Tribes” had dwindling communities online and they either went elsewhere to hang out or these games became strictly casual playing with no real room for competitive play. We lost several staff and game admin during this time along with losing the communities they managed.
“Star Wars Battlefront 2” and “Call of Duty 4” were still strong games in our competitive community here while other games slowly started falling to the way side. “Call of Duty 4” was a strong game here because we held strong ties to Punksbusted.com and PBBans.com. We held gaming league status at these websites and were actively involved in developing our own tools using these sites as the backbone to some of our own site structure and anti-cheat.
Both PBBans.com and Punksbusted.com were anti-cheat leaders with website tools utilizing the anti-cheat PunkBuster. This in turn allowed GWL to hold legitimate credible COD4 competition for our community.
Expanding upon this legitimacy, GWL was also using the COD4 PAM MOD with our own custom coding configuration while also developing ladders and tournaments such as “Pistols and Knives”. Other online gaming leagues were unable to get this type of gameplay working correctly within the PAM mod in conjunction with the COD4 maps available so this was a bonus for obtaining players for COD4 and we reaped the benefits. Lead coder for this was [SL]Sprite. We utilized the COD4 ProMOD briefly along with a few more mods but the PAM MOD allowed better utilization and customization through the coding on our end.
With JudgeDoom and Spellbinder still in military service and little time to dedicate to GWL, the Global Warfighter League was put in the hands of ~FL~Triphamm3r. This was a logical choice as Triphamm3r was now running the SWBF2 community at GWL which at the time was the majority of website traffic to our league at the time. Triphamm3r also owned SWBF2stats.net, which had it’s own leaderboard system (and community) based on active online servers for the SWBF2 (Classic) multiplayer mode of the game. He was also an active member at the website community for the SWBF2 Server and Remote GUI, at BlackBagOps.com which handled issues and problems and updates to the GUI. This made TripHamm3r not only a logical choice, but an experienced and credible one as well.
As time moved forward SWBF2 and COD4 were most of the traffic coming to the GWL website. COD4 competitive community was being run by [SL]Sprite. She was coding configurations for the PAM mod anyway and was also running the [SL] clan community at SL-clan.net during this time so these choices made sense for our league as a whole.
New Games for 2009
When Global Warfighter League crossed over to 2009, we were supporting new games and had several new staff members. With overwhelming community support, GWL added “Combat Arms” to our competitive community. This brought a tremendous amount of new members and activity to the site. “DudsBro” was the lead admin for the CA community and he had come from the SWBF2 community as a member to manage the CA community as an admin. He did a spectacular job running the CA community, ladders and tournaments.
“Super Smash Bros Brawl” was added to the competition gaming list with two probationary admins but while many players signed up to compete in the game, there were never more than a couple challenges in the system at any one time. So as quickly as the game went up for competition, the game was archived and admin removed.
“Call of Duty 4” continued to have competition ladders and tournaments and we were able to add “Call of Duty World at War” to the competitive gaming list. Both used PunkBuster and both were enabled for using the competition PAM mod for customization with our ladders. Sprite continued to manage the COD series here and coding configurations for the PAM mod which put two COD games under her belt for management here at GWL.
“Star Wars Battlefront 2” (Classic) continued to go strong with a super community and was literally carrying our league while we tried different games for competition and moved through problems with the site and community challenges. In fact, if anything, “Star Wars Battlefront 2” was actually growing as a competitive community for the game.
We were introducing new mods to SWBF2 (Classic) competition. Ones that added the original maps from the “Star Wars Battlefront” original game as well as mods that added over a hundred mod maps and game modes to the game. Players in competition could negotiate which mod map they wanted for competition and we added specific competitive ladders for specific modes of play.
More Staff, Seasonal Leagues and now Prizes
As the SWBF2 competitive community started to grow, we needed more admins to manage the community and competitions. ~FL~Triphamm3r was still running the league and the SWBF2 community with [SL]Sprite, and the new ladders, tournaments, and now new seasonal leagues meant both their duties had been expanded. New staff was needed. The “Star Wars Battlefront 2” community was still growing and was now divided up into three separate communities (Conquest, Space, and Heroes/Villains)
The time had come to have admin staff for each of these communities as each game mode was vastly different. “)G(Mawk” was brought on board to handle the SWBF2 Heroes/Villains community. [SL]Sprite would handle the SWBF2 Space Community, with “~FL~Triphamm3r” managing the SWBF2 Conquest community. The three of them would handle competitive events and tournaments as a whole and as needed.
Eventually we would add -=WGO=-Rancor and [GFAQ]Stinger to the staff for SWBF2 (Classic), and we would also add [SL]FeanorGem to help in coding for the site and potential web applications. Along the way, we also brought on board some probationary GWL staff that ended up being questionable regarding their seriousness, responsibility and maturity. These probationary admin recruits never made it past the probationary phase.
We started offering prizes as incentives for competition and this was received very well. We saw an uptick in competition and moral among staff and players. We were offering MP3 players, recorders, gaming keyboards and mice along with other rewards for keeping competition active and kickin’.
JudgeDoom Returns as AgentAlpha
An important factor to note here is that “JudgeDoom” had finished his deployment in Afghanistan at this time and came back as “AgentAlpha” to again run Global Warfighter League in an “Overview” position as well as being the Lead Coder.
“AgentAlpha” brought prizes with his return and supplied a budget along with admin cleaning out the old prize crate via tournaments and league prizes for top competitors. GWL benefitted from having a coder who could dedicate more time to updates and improvements for the website as things were starting to need work badly and we definitely needed mobile friendly upgrades if we were going to continue growing as a major league.
Global Warfighter also gained some new sponsors and we even had a slight budget for advertising with our partner sites that we donated to in exchange for a link back. We also posted links for our partners in return for a link exchange. The point is, we were advertising and trying to promote the league. This included game server providers that gave us a discount based on link backs.
GWL Founders Taking a Step Back
Up until this point, “C1n3rgy” (Previously Spellbinder) and AgentAlpha (Previously JudgeDoom) were paying the bills for the website and the online game servers for our league. We had three locations for the servers across the country and we had a nice speedy setup for any games that we intended to support here at Global Warfighter League. Unfortunately, our community was dwindling and financial support though the ads was dwindling as well.
Game developers were also starting to support their own online multiplayer gameplay within the games they were releasing making an external server system irrelevant for many competitive games. Public server files for hosting your own servers were not being released by developers for new games and were becoming more exclusive to some game server providers. This made the expense of paying for dedicated server boxes hard to defend.
Many games were also creating their own leaderboards within their game and third party online gaming leagues like ours were becoming less relevant (or wanted).
This created a financial burden for both “C1n3rgy” and “Agent Alpha” with fewer supported games to host on the game servers that they were paying for and there was even less money coming in from advertising to help support the costs generated to keep our league afloat. The decision was made to drop the game servers. “~FL~Triphamm3r” stepped in to start setting up additional game servers when they were needed for competition and competitive events.
At this point, Agent Alpha was taking a step back to make more time in his personal life. C1n3rgy was still in military service and couldn’t make enough time available to help out significantly and left Global Warfighter site operations in the hands of current GWL staff. At the end of the day, we all have real life issues and this will sometimes conflict with your online gaming life.
Combat Arms and SWBF2 (Classic) Competition
While we had traffic to Global Warfighter League, interest in setting up new games and ladders to support them was absent. As mentioned, online multiplayer games were developing their own leaderboard and communities within the game they had developed. While this is common place today, “back in the day”, third party websites had to setup communities and leaderboards to support these games for ranking on leaderboards.
Most online games were client based and they were now starting to change over to server based games to control hackers and cheaters. This resulted in our own online competitive community at Global Warfighter League left with two communities that not only continued but in some cases were growing.
Through this time, ~FL~TripHamm3r started putting in prizes for the tournaments that GWL was able to have and we had gotten a few sponsors to help us keep our league going for the games we did support and then trying to get new games supported. Unfortunately, we kept running into the same problem of competitive games having their own online leaderboards and communities for these games were content with the in-game leaderboards and system in place for competitive play.
This also meant if we were to take things into our own hands for these games we had to guarantee legitimate play with no cheating or hacking players. Most of the time this meant recording your match from the player’s spectator perspective and many players lacked the computer resources to do this without lagging the game significantly to do so.
Combat Arms
By this time, Combat Arms as an online competitive game was becoming quite popular. Global Warfighter League hosted several ladders and tournaments related to the game that were quite popular and successful at the time. “DudsBro” was game admin and did a fantastic job at managing the community and keeping the game competition updated here to match updates within the game itself.
Unfortunately, there were several Combat Arms competitive sites starting to pop up and with it were cheaters trying to take advantage of lax rules for competition and the websites that offered tournaments awarding prizes.
This presented a problem for us because as much as we wanted to keep Combat Arms hosted at our site because of the fantastic community that came with it, the “in game” anti-cheat for the game was horrible at the time. The preferred method of preventing cheaters for the Combat Arms community as a whole ended up being a third party software called “TeamViewer”.
This was basically allowing a person access to your computer to look for hacked game files and cheating software. We weren’t fond of this method and it meant getting more staff for the game on our end if we were to continue. GWL Staff would have to be considered trustworthy and accepted by the Combat Arms community as a whole because these new staff members would literally have to gain gain access to your computer remotely and need to search through your own computer’s files.
This put us (GWL), who wanted to support Combat Arms for competition, in a difficult uncomfortable position. We didn’t want our GWL staff looking through player’s files for hacking software. This ended up being too large of a hurdle for us to make the whole process mandatory to compete here. If we were to continue we needed to keep large scale Combat Arms competitive events staffed properly with people who knew what they were doing AND knew what they were looking for on player’s computers? We couldn’t, and didn’t.
A compromise of recording matches was reached but not before the Combat Arms community started to dwindle significantly. This recording method was preferred by our community over the “TeamViewer” method but requiring more resources from the individual’s computer. Gameplay online for Combat Arms became slow and chunky when recording. Much of this was too much to continue supporting the game for competition here.
Star Wars Battlefront 2 (Classic)
Star Wars Battlefront 2 (Classic) was still popular at Global Warfighter League and we were having weekly SWBF2 Gamenights. Usually Friday nights and usually trying out mods we hoped would be brought into competition. Sometimes this was a good idea and other times trolls showed up to ruin it for everyone.
Cracks were starting to show in the SWBF2 community. While we never posted publicly about the issues being experienced online, we were seeing the online experience getting hacked within multiplayer gameplay. This kind of behavior was literally impossible up until this point while in multiplayer mode. Pandemic had created a great system that allowed multiplayer competition for a very long time. This recent uptake in activity was endangering the competitive element to the game.
Besides SWBF2 (Classic) having more than several wall hacks (getting behind the game environment walls), we were seeing people reverse engineering the game. Out of the box, the game already allowed LUA script injection while playing. Anyone who was familiar with LUA coding could start causing problems if they had malicious intent. However, it went farther than that.
Based on community support, we had developed an SWBF2 (Classic) Anti-Cheat software, however after a few months this had divided the community into people who would compete with the anti-cheat and those who wouldn’t. This further divided a community into smaller ladders with less participating teams and players per ladder, tournaments and seasonal leagues.
More on the SWBF2 History at Global Warfighter League HERE.
Smaller GWL Community
With a smaller community for Combat Arms and no possibility (or intention) of GWL to get our staff to go through people’s computers looking for hacking software, the future wasn’t looking good for continued support for Combat Arms here at Global Warfighter League.
This was compounded by a split SWBF2 community that had more problems with the game every month. It was clear that there were people reverse engineering the game because new problems started surfacing all the time. Eventually the division within the community became too strong for our support to continue. The activity within the competitive ladders and tournaments became too small and were resulting in a small amount of challenges in the system.
We left both SWBF2 and Combat Arms open for challenging here at the website for loyalty to the communities and wanted to give them support upon our competitive platform so we’d have a player base for other games as we added new games to the site. However, every game that was added got limited support from our users. We had hoped that SWBF3 would come out as we already had plans to add the game and already had infrastructure in place to support the new game.
SWBF3 never got released and instead EA was going to release a new Star Wars Battlefront on a new game engine. This resulted in an environment ripe with hackers and hacking software that as a small competitive league, we couldn’t keep up with. To top it off, EA had their own system for leaderboards and hero vs villains. An Idea that we were using for 10 years by this time in November of 2015, which is when EA released Star Wars Battlefront on the new engine.
GWL Website and Database Updates
The real problem we had was that our competitive system was built for a desktop PC. Even though we supported competition for XBOX and PlayStation consoles, our focus had been on PC gaming with Windows and was the majority of our traffic. This meant that we were lacking for mobile phone compatibility. Many people were starting to use their phone for visiting websites and the world was turning to a mobile friendly internet experience.
Our website and competition system was a hybrid of PHPBB and PHPBB2. This meant that our updates had to be done manually or we would break the website and our competition system updating in conjunction with the PHPBB software and versions. We had done so much custom work on the original software we started with (PHPBB) that we couldn’t use the PHPBB updates any longer. As the PHPBB community started moving into mobile with PHPBB3, we were being left behind without true transition options to the new software.
PHP as a language was also being updated in the coding world which then started deprecating some of the custom PHP we had that kept our infrastructure intact. This included MySQL queries that had been originally setup using v3.x. With an evolving PHP standard and us needing to update the database to a new STRICTER syntax, combined with making the website mobile friendly, this became an enormous task with a huge commitment of time. We needed an extended staff to tackle these issues in a timely manner, which we didn’t have.
The Final Decision to Take A Break
Eventually we had to face facts. We had a dwindling community and a smaller staff to help. There was also no funds coming in to support the development of Global Warfighter League, we had to address how we were going to move forward. The remaining GWL staff needed more staff to handle the everyday operations while we coded the updates in the background.
We tried to get staff that could help us in this task but were consistently disappointed in recruits that signed up. As mentioned, probationary admins were lacking in maturity and responsibility. We needed more than what these new staff were bringing to the table and most were more interested with the admin forums in relation to the drama in the public forums. Clearly these new admin weren’t interested in helping or growing Global Warfighter League.
Understandably, website traffic started to deteriorate and only games and communities that needed third party online leaderboards were games that didn’t have their own “in-game” competition system. Global Warfighter League was becoming a community growing smaller and smaller. The remaining staff decided to take a break.
Ultimately, We Were Gamers Ourselves
At heart we are gamers and the time spent trying to upgrade and grow GWL (while people were actively trying to knee cap the League) was in actuality time taken away from our own gaming experience, especially with the lack of a community here and consequently their support for GWL as time went by.
So we all decided to take a break and went back to our own gaming experience as well as developing software and web projects to support ourselves IRL.
Then after several years, the Global Warfighter League Project was born (again).
Keep track of our progress moving forward in our “Moving Forward” post and also check out our site blog.