Around February of 2001, Fury replaced his ISDN with Cable, Beatnik and Sliced Ice's connections were fixed and with the possibility of it all coming together, they jumped on the opportunity. Along with Simple they began scrimmaging other teams and playing more and more.

In March 2001 came the announcement of CALeague's first Quake 3 CTF tournament division. They jumped at the opportunity and made some progress. Shortly before CAL began Beatnik and Sliced Ice started to become inactive due to personal reasons. Having made some progress though, the team was able to pick up another teammate, Sony. GTOM, a personal friend of Fury's, filled out our roster temporarily.

In our first week of CAL q3ctf we were put up against the long time Q3CTF champions, The Peacemakers. We lost the first 2 maps rather convincingly, but then for the last map GTOM was subbed out for Simple and really putting on the moves we managed to take the third map from the champs. This created a buzz in the community about our relatively unknown team, and allowed us to quickly recruit two more members. Gax and Pentagon soon joined our roster.

We continued to play and do well with some ups and downs. Eventually adding another member, sphyx, to our roster. In week 6 of the tournament, after a tough loss to clan Executable, Pentagon and Sphyx both decided to leave the team. We continued on though with the roster of Fury, Gax, Simple, and Sony and made the playoffs. In the first round of the playoffs we were pitted against Executable again, but this time we managed to come out on top. In the Semi-Finals of the playoffs the team lost to True Force 1-2 and was knocked out of the tournament. True Force then received a forfeit win over the Peacemakers and were crowned the champions.

Affliction was the only team in the CAL season to have taken a map off of the powerful ]Pm[ team. With the conclusion of the CAL season, the team had gained some respect from the community, people were taking notice, and Simple received the honor of being selected as an east coast offensive all star.