What Remains Beyond the Scoreboard: Playing CTF as a Team
Of all the answers to the question of why we play CTF, one line has stuck with me: something Vie of BBB, who organized this year's DEF CON CTF, wrote in a retrospective. Asking himself why he's still around in this scene, he writes:
“It always goes back to the people.“
It always comes back to the people. Solving challenges and racking up points can look like the whole of CTF, but what actually lasts is who was sitting beside you. So this post isn't about rankings — it's about why we play CTF as a team rather than alone.
Some Walls You Can't Break Through Alone
On the surface, CTF looks like a contest of individual skill. When you're stuck on a single challenge, it really is just you alone in front of the keyboard. But after a few competitions, you realize the difference between going solo and playing as a team shows up somewhere other than raw skill.
cqql of sillysec, in a post(link) summing up a year of playing CTF, puts it this way:
"A team is as important as your own skills. Sometimes you really do need to brainstorm ideas."
When you've clung to the same hypothesis for three hours straight, the person who tosses out "wait, isn't that double-encoded?" never shows up on the scoreboard. Only the name of whoever submitted the flag remains; that one remark is recorded nowhere.
Open our team's Discord and the traces of exactly that are still there. Below is a conversation from a day we were stuck on a challenge that required bypassing a command filter. No single person solved it end to end — each of us dropped the spot we were stuck at, and the piece we'd figured out, into the channel, and that pile is what slowly carried us forward.
These days it's common to just hand a challenge off to an AI. But playing a competition as a team is a slightly different matter. Once, on a challenge where you enter an answer at each stage to reach the flag at the end, we were sharing the answers we'd each found in the chat — and when one teammate asked whether anyone had a script for it, another teammate built one and shared it.
Sharing the techniques you used and the tools you built while solving, and dumping whatever you've figured out into the chat the moment someone hits a wall — that, I think, is where playing as a team really shows.
Good Teams Are Honest with Each Other
Carnegie Mellon's PPP, nine-time DEF CON CTF champions, are often called a "collection of geniuses" — but what team member Erye Hernandez said right after last year's ninth title(link) wasn't about technical skill at all:
"DEF CON CTF involves a lot of teamwork and communication. Many of our veteran players have known each other for a long time, and it's great having that camaraderie, trust and ability to depend on each other when it comes to this type of competition."
What stands out there isn't skill — it's communication and camaraderie. He named the trust between teammates who've been together a long time, the sense that you can lean on one another, as the key to winning. And for that communication to actually work, I think honesty has to come first. Saying you don't know when you don't; not hiding what only you know but putting it out there right away; asking on the spot when you need something, without overthinking it. Only a team where words move that freely can pull out what each person has at the right moment.
In that sense, our team is genuinely at ease with each other. Admitting you don't know isn't embarrassing, we share what we find without holding back, and no one hesitates to ask. As that kind of communication piled up, camaraderie grew between us naturally. More than the memory of winning through sheer skill, what lingers longer is that every competition was fun because we could just enjoy it together, without reading the room.
There's no grand communication rulebook. When you pick up a challenge, you just drop what you've learned into the Discord channel — "this is blocked like this," "this part isn't blocked yet." Not because anyone told us to, but a habit that formed on its own after seeing, a few times, that the spot where I got stuck becomes a hint for someone else. Trade like that enough and even solving one challenge stops being any single person's achievement. That, I think, is what solving as a team is really like.
What's Left After the Competition Ends
Your placement is locked the moment the competition ends. Yet a few weeks later, what stays with you usually isn't the rank.
Orange Tsai, looking back on his own CTF journey after every kind of competition, described his favorite moments this way(link):
"I really love this vibe — a group of people, without worrying about anything, just hacking for fun."
And Vie, imagining the day his four years of running DEF CON CTF come to an end, writes(link):
"I'm probably going to forget about all the struggle and hardship but remember all the friends that I made."
A champion and an organizer are saying the same thing: the hard parts fade, and the people remain.
Our team is no different. Once time passes after a competition, what place we finished gets hazy, but the nonsense that spilled out while we flailed at problems together at 4 a.m., and the moments we cracked up at each other, somehow stay vivid.
So, C4C
At one competition, the "welcome" flag — supposedly the easiest one — was tucked away in MISC, and its solve count came out lower than the actual challenges. We all sat there baffled: "seriously, why hide the welcome," "uh, we still haven't solved it," "hiding the welcome flag is genuinely infuriating." We're the kind of team that gets stuck on the welcome flag.
It wasn't some impressive challenge — just a hidden welcome flag that left us all bewildered and laughing. But being able to laugh off little moments like that together is, I think, exactly what makes every competition fun.
No matter how good AI gets at solving challenges, flailing together at 4 a.m., unblocking each other, and laughing afterward about how "that was so ridiculous" is still something people do. The team C4C wants to be is, before it's a team near the top of the scoreboard, a gathering of people we want to spend that time with.
"Placement is the result; the team is the process. We're going to linger a little longer on the process."
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