<reserved just in case>

Is your criticism about the gametype or the lack of a solid support structure around it? Tools like TF2center and other pug sites/IRCs have had several years to develop a convenient interface for separate tools to make the gametype more accessible. It just seems to me a bit unfair to criticize the gametype itself for not being popular enough for someone to come up with a convenient UI to set up an A:R pug.

Things like people not knowing what classes they're going to play without a pre-game discussion comes from a solid meta not existing yet. 6's allows players to play any class in the game, but a long standing and refined meta makes the game a bit more predictable. Given enough time and playing, A:R will undoubtedly find its meta that people can rely on.

I understand your criticism of the whitelist, but even when you do have whitelists you still have a pretty limited set of what you can play. In 6's, most soldiers are going to be running the gunboats and never switch off of it. Scouts will just about always run the same loadouts. Demo runs stock.

I dunno, I just think your criticism is more about the A:R meta not being well flushed out than it is with the gametype itself.

Edit: Reworked my argument from a point-by-point criticism to a general one that's easier to read.

Oh boy been waiting for this http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/stewart.gif

I completely agree with your assessments. I think that if it was introduced earlier into the game, Arena Respawn could have some potential to grow, experiment, expand and fix some of its current gameplay issues. But I don't think what's best for competitive is to be pushing a completely new game mode 7 years into its existence. I think we should try and work with what we've got.

Another reason: We already have a bunch of competitive formats and we don't need another

Do any other competitive games even have 5 different competitive modes?

I don't know why anyone thinks class bans in tf2 is a good idea. It works in dota because you're banning 10 heroes out of 100+ where in this you're banning 2 classes out of 9. This significantly limits the player's possibilities in tf2 because every individual class has a unique role. In dota there's always going to be carries, supports, junglers, and offlaners. Because of the massive hero pool, any player would need to be proficient with multiple heroes, and doing so isn't too difficult because many heroes fall into similar roles and can be played similarly to others as long as you keep in mind the unique quirks the different heroes have. A team can't simply just ban all of one role (and doing so would be fucking stupid anyways). This ties into Kevin's first point, in comp A:R nobody is going to know what they're going to be doing before the game starts because of this forced class ban phase, again this isn't a problem in dota because while players don't know what specific hero they're going to play, they almost always know what ROLE they're going to be playing before the match starts. That's why it works, that's why the pick/ban phase in dota is interesting, you know what roles the players are most likely going to play before the match starts, you just don't know what heroes they're going to use to do it.

TF2 doesn't have any of these qualities, in A:R all you have to look at is "What player is going to be the biggest threat on their main class? Ok let's ban that one." Bam, you've effectively fucked over one person and probably made the game extremely less fun, also you're taking variety out of the game because you've removed a unique role from the match entirely. Please stop trying to apply competitive dota mechanics into tf2, they are different games, they don't translate over well and they never will.

not at all a good justification

you're implying that 6s and HL and 4s have any more reason or right to be played over A:R that is inherent, and not because they are better formats. Following your example, if a perfect game mode existed, we shouldn't play it because 6s and HL already exist and it will just divide the game more

and class bans are gimmicky as fuck, tbh the game mode would be more approachable and funner without it
its basically 4s tho

KevinIsPwn while I admire the wall of text and the legitimacy of your post/thought processes, the response to this is going to be a simple 'YAOOO' and an overly basic post littered with capital Xes

actually nobody cares why do people keep posting huge paragraphs about shit that doesn't matter. you're not swaying anybody away from w/e your paragraphs are about because nobody was gonna play that shit anyways.

salty lives up to his name

I've always thought that A:R only does class bans just for the sake of it/because it works in other games, rather than a well thought out reasoning for why it is needed and would work in tf2.

A:R with weapon bans and all the different 5v5 class configurations is like if normal competitive dota relied on random heros w/ random skills.

Too gimmicky and good luck trying to pug.

There really isn't a good reason for it. The only reason that's ever been given for it is "Well dota does it and dota is popular so obviously this would make tf2 more popular/interesting." There's no other valid gameplay enhancing reason for it. Even Robin Walker himself has only ever given this reasoning to include pick/ban in a competitive TF2 format. There's absolutely no merit for it and pick/ban is never going to work in tf2 or make it more interesting. Not for classes or weapons.

I don't get why class bans would never be a thing considering you have people like mustardoverlord who put 10k hours in one class. I mean that was a joke, but there are a lot of people that only main one class and if they're forced to play something out of their comfort zone they'll just not be as effective/not have fun. Bans and shit work in dota because like what other people said, there are 100+ heroes so sure a team can ban a rubick or wisp, but your team can still give you venge,skywrath,es,or one of the other 20 supports and that example works with literally every role. Where as in tf2 if a team bans a scout and you main it, it's like what the fuck an entire class that you put hundreds of hours into just got banned. Why comp A:R would ever be a serious game mode is beyond me.

I don't like it because its not fun, and I don't think there is really any point in arguing why. I don't think there are really any redeeming qualities for this game mode other than that 5 players is a reasonable amount.

Maybe I'm dead wrong and the meta will change drastically so it isn't even played arena style

tl;dr I hate arena

But Kevin, you forgot about pro battle league

The main problem that I've always seen is that TF2 doesn't have a perfect correspondence with Dota to justify a pick/ban system with classes or weapons. In TF2, the meta heavily revolves around classes while the game's balance is more dependent upon weapons, but in Dota, both revolve around heroes. Thus, a Dota-style pick/ban system in TF2 will not work as well because there's no perfect correspondence to the role that heroes play.

In this regard, TF2 more closely corresponds to CS, where the game's variety revolves around maps with all else being mostly equal. You wouldn't have a system where you would pick or ban weapons in CS, but you do have a system where you pick and ban maps, and that system already works well with TF2. How exactly will substituting a class or weapon pick/ban system for the current map pick/ban system solve more problems than it creates?

Pick/ban weapon system would just alienate players more from the mode. No re-spawn already freaks out the casuals/new players enough as it is.

I'd take issue with this apart from the maps, CS's variety revolves around the weapon buying choices teams make from round to round, and TF2 has classes with very varied abilities before you even take into account their weapon selection which is a completely different set of mechanics. They are different enough that no single approach made in one game would work in another.

TF2 already bans weapons (the weapon pick/ban suggestion merely posits making that potentially variable) and TF2 already restricts classes, so both mechanisms are already in place in some form or another and they both work.

When I was referring to all else being equal, I meant that every map is played with the same set of rules - the AWP won't be allowed in one match and banned in another (but is limited by its high cost), and similarly the soldier won't be allowed in one match and banned in another (but is limited to two per side). Obviously the games are played differently, but the ruleset stays consistent across maps, and map selection in both plays a significant part in determining the course of a match.

As for class/weapon restrictions, certainly, but my point is that it's not a part of active team strategy, and whatever is done is part of an attempt to further balance the game, not as an attempt to add strategic complexity.

in its current form*

I am actually sick of this statement. They are balanced to allow viability of each class against all other classes when a hard counter may not exist.
The weapons are "balanced" in that method because there aren't class limits, player limits or anything like that. So no, they aren't balanced to 24-slot servers, they aren't balanced to any specific criteria, at all. There is no reason to believe anything else.

Gunslinger
wrangler
stickies
scout
spy

very little in this game scales well with player count

i'm pretty sure there's literally nobody who wants to play arena respawn that isn't named extine anyways

let's just all call it "Diarrhena: Respawn" until the nickname gets so popular they're forced to abandon it

That's basically what I'm saying with this statement though: "But some of the weapons in Team Fortress 2 are inherently flawed when their powers aren’t counteracted by the white noise of 23 other players fighting over a single cart or control point."

When I say that the weapons are balanced for 24-slot servers, I mean that there isn't a huge amount of inter-class balance and meta-game thought by valve.

Reading through this list, a lot of the complaints are about certain classes or weapons being unfun. Are these just weapons that are passive/discourage aggression? What exactly makes them unfun?

Gunslinger and wrangler make an otherwise slow, set-up dependent scout able to compete with the faster classes.
Stickies are only awful when in the hands of somebody good, otherwise they're just a nuisance. Scout is by far the best class, which is why a lot of the more imbalanced weapons (read gunslinger) have seen very little re-balancing. And spy 1v1 is pretty silly, but not unfeasible with unlocks (ambi and enforcer come to mind).
Like, 1v1 none of these things are specifically incredible barring stickies and scouts. And only in a chaotic situations like a pub do they get frustrating enough to complain about. MGE with a mini would be pretty crappy if your'e a scout, but definitely not unbeatable.

Inter-class balance is just the thing though, every class keeps getting unlocks to be at the level of scout/demo/solly. SC wouldn't exist if demo weren't incredible, gunslinger to scouts, wrangler to soldiers; it's a matter of reaching the level of the classes that actually do dominate the metagame. Similarly, spy gets a shitload of crutches because it depends on others to be more effective, but also because 1v1, it's trash without the unlocks.
Everything is balanced to make 6's classes less dominant in both 1v1 and 16v16. It doesn't scale well, but it's an attempt.

The AWP also won't be bought in every round, the CS mechanic is very much like pick/ban except there's an added element of resource management and reward for success. The ruleset doesn't stay any more consistent than TF2 with no weapon restrictions. Many complaints about never knowing what weapons your opponents are using with larger whitelists apply to CS, except the timescale is different.

I'll illustrate. In a CS game you get up to 30 rounds, in TF2 5cp you get up to 10-ish (depending on ruleset) which will feature roughly 3-5 point caps on average which are analogous to bomb attempts in CS. That adds up to 30-50 events (if you got 10 rounds which is rare, more likely 21-35 total events for 7 rounds) which also happen to coincide with action that causes respawns, so comparatively the players will get a similar number of chances to change loadout to a CS game. The primary difference is that the pace of the game is faster.

I'd say the existing TF2 bans are rarely an attempt at balance, on the contrary (apart from bugs) they largely act to cripple classes to prevent them becoming viable because they aren't fun or very skillful. 6v6 is fast paced in part because Heavies don't get any of their extra mobility updates and Engineers can't wrangle level 3 sentries on Gullywash last, steal uber or destroy projectiles. Meanwhile Gunboats that massively increase soldier mobility are fine, because they preserve/enhance the game style without breaking it. Also it's worth remembering that these decisions are often made arbitrarily by a tiny number of admins.

The balance argument applies when you consider favoured classes. We all saw what the BFB did to the scouts in the Valve's game series, and the effect was to also destroy the uber-push dynamic because the scouts could not be contained - play was constantly spread between multiple points, was highly chaotic and hard to follow.

Obviously in this and a relatively small number of other cases the weapon needs to be controlled, but the whitelist is merely a hangover from the days before anyone realised what would eventually happen to the game. If the comp community at the time had realised the wedge it would drive between Valve and themselves they might well have tried to arrive at a more flexible solution.