Time flies when you are having fun. It’s exactly 5 years ago that on the 26th of November 2007 SevenofNine created the ioUrT.com League.

History

Pre-ioUrT / Urban Zone
Urban Terror 3.7 was released in July 2004. Competitive action was mainly centered on ClanBase for European clans. Ladders and the OpenCups were still very active at that time, but the community had to wait quite some time for the release of 4.0 in April 2007. Unfortunately during this gap of new releases people started leaving the game and competitive play all but ground to a halt. The release of version 4.0, Urban Terror players no longer required Quake III to play and it was fully stand-alone. This thanks to the ioQuake3 engine, hence ioUrbanterror and ioUrT.com. Making Urban Terror Free-to-Play and attracting thousands of new players.

This unfortunately for the old-skool players did not mean an instant revival of competitive play. Clanbase was more or less inactive and a new league started. The “Urban Terror Fun League”, the founders were |HSO|RaideR and UTZ|Valkyrja. |HSO| and UTZ| are both clans that have been around a long time and very well respected in the community. It was also the very first time that a league format was used in Urban Terror. As I mentioned before, pre 4.0 ladders and cups were the main competitions. The league existed for one and a half seasons and then stopped. This was mainly due to that RaideR, together with Kalish, had started working on the passport system that will be implemented in Urban Terror HD. Valkyria’s team started playing Team Fortress 2 so interest in the project started to lessen.

Founding of ioUrT / Urban Zone
On the 26th of November 2007 the ioUrT.com CTF League officially opened its doors to the public. As can be read in the very first newspost , the league was intended to continue what the “Urban Terror Fun League” started, with some improvements here and there.” The first season had a signup limit of 15 clans to make it all manageable. On January 13th 2008 week 1 of the ioUrT.com CTF League started. One month later, the season was over and Fruity Groov' aka were crowned our first champions. That was always our intention fast seasons so promotion and relegation would be fast so you would be competing against clans of your own level. This motto still holds true today, though seasons of a month were a bit crazy.

Like the good guy that I (SevenofNine) am, in season two I retired from the ioUrT.com league. Why? Real life was calling, for my study I had to do an internship for half a year; I chose to do it in Japan. That’s the way life goes, but thankfully I had people who could take over the head admin position. For the first season I was the only head admin though we did have some supporting staff, similar to the current referee system we have in place. Eya_allam was one of them, she, nexu and LL_ (Little Lady) took over from me as head admins. When SevenofNine returned from Japan he rejoined Urban Zone and took up admin duties once more.





Name change
We changed our name not long after the resignation of SevenofNine from ioUrT.com League to Urban-Zone.org because of some issues between our host and Frozen Sand.

Team Survivor
In January of 2010 we added a new league, for the first time it would not only be Capture the Flag but Team Survivor as well. In fact it soon outgrew Capture the Flag and has been our most popular game type since its start.


League software
We started off with the free KMLeague software as you can see on our old websites. CTF & TS. The original websites still exist for historical purposes. But as you can imagine, it was very messy. Two different systems even separate login databases. In the end we were very pleased to accept Kendle’s offer to use his Competition Management module – mComp – available at www.leaguecms.co.uk. This new software made it possible for us to customize our website to our own needs and also grow as a competition.

Streaming
Since February of 2011 we've started streaming live shoutcasts. We can't say that we were the first as tastyspleen.tv broadcasted live streamed matches from the FTWGL first. But following their example we started shoutcasting regular matches from the Urban Zone Leagues and ClanBase OpenCups and NationCups on www.twitch.tv/urbanzone. Our shoutcasting archive on YouTube features over 150 video's and counting. We're hoping to grow these activities by having more than one streamer and also creating shows aside from match commentary the same way Urban Radio used to be.

Bomb mode
Over the years many people had asked for a bomb league in Urban Zone but due to the added workload we had always said: "When Urban Terror has a working anti-cheat". Although other competitions had tried their hand at bomb leagues they never quite took off. In September 2012 it finally happened, the holy trinity of Capture the Flag, Team Survivor and Bomb Mode was now available at urban Zone. The signups were limited to 5 divisions of 8 teams per division, all available slots were quickly taken and it'll be interesting to see where this mode will go in the future.


Future
Of course we can't predict what the future will bring for Urban Zone but we do have a couple of dreams. We hope that with the upcoming release of Urban Terror HD the game will be able to attract a new generation of players. Some of you may have experienced the incredible rise in players with the introduction of 4.0, a similar or bigger increase would be fantastic. More importantly HD will also give us a working anti-cheat which will remove a large part of our current workload. This time could be spent in improving the current leagues but also expanding. A good example of events that we would like to introduce is the yearly Skeet Shoot Tournament, but we have more idea's! One of these ideas is an Urban Zone Jump competition.

Thanks
Donators/sponsors:
AGBD for hosting iourt
nvb
Paypal donators
Head admins, current and past: Eya_allam, Frostig, Sawa, Malcon, Gnurkus, Nvb, Nexu, SevenofNine, Tombanius, LL_ , Azul , Orangebud

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