Free the Disciplinary Action

o wait, heavy exists. hmm, idk :(

just ban all the bullshit weapons that the community has been calling for to be banned like the rescue ranger, natascha, machina, jarate, etc.

I think we should just ban whatever gives a player/team an unfair advantage. If something is unreasonably difficult to counter then I think it should be banned too. I don't mind if there are unlocks in the whitelist which literally everybody uses as long as it doesn't break the previously mentioned rules.

LOL took you a while to catch up ...
oh wait nevermind i finished reading ...
so you want more bs weapons to counter the already existing bs ones OK ...

Blacklist is fine. What needs to change is map pool. All 5cp doesnt do us any good.

I believe we should go back to how TF2 used to be, and remove all these unlocks that make the game extremely stale and uninteresting to play as well as watch. I suggest we do something like ProMod to revert the demoman damage nerf and medic speed buff so that you can actually push in this game again, instead of teams winning round just from the enemy team failing to push.

Since valve will never acknowledge TF2 as an esport anyway, I think we should head for "fun to play" instead of "cater to valves interests", since the latter has only resulted in a decline in team signups in most leagues, which still hasn't halted to this day, along with prize pools and coverage being exactly the same as 3 years ago.

are u making a point of challenging this assumption

How is having a large weapon banlist confusing? When I started playing it took me maybe 2 seconds to figure out I couldn't equip the wrangler.

The "So strong everyone uses them" is a good point to bring up. However, these weapons are used because their alternatives are niche or pale in comparison to the unlock. Unlocks for the primary roles like scout would be a mad milk spree because the healing far outweighs the extra dpm in a firefight, AND supports the team.

However, that can't be said for all unlocks, and this is an opportune time to feel for the unlocks and loosen up. It's been what, 7 years since Bonk was legal? The speed boosting of Crit a Cola is prob a bit much to allow it, but Bonk is certainly worth a try. Guillotine seems like a no drawback secondary, as do Atomizer and Sandman.

I've only really been bothered by the natascha, and that was just one time, on product. I'm sure others have had different experiences, but I think the effect the looser whitelist has had on how fun 6s is is greatly exaggerated.

hey guys so we did this for no reason and gathered zero data while at it
now that all this time has passed and our favourite devs keep feeding us shit, can we get bigger spoons ?

The thing is, you're assuming that Valve is holding back on us because we still haven't reduced the whitelist to their liking, but I really, REALLY don't think that it's true.

Time for an example:
We've been letting valve know for eons that we wanted a better voice codec. We've pleaded and begged them for it time and time again, but they never actually did it for us no matter how much we bent over backwards and adjusted our rules for them. (Hell I'm pretty sure we could completely remove the whitelist and it still wouldn't matter at all, and we'd still end up being ignored.) Do you know why this is? Money. We don't have money. We don't have enough money being generated from our events to warrant valve actually putting effort into fixing our game or helping us host events.

A Faceit admin sends valve an email to update the voice codec and they immediately fucking do it, like really fucking fast. You know why? Because Faceit has money and Valve thinks its in their best interest to listen to them.

We shouldn't be trying to cater to whatever vague bullshit idea valve has for the game, especially since we don't even know what they want. We need to focus on keeping the game the most fun to play, and work towards amassing a decent amount of revenue for the prizepots in our leagues. Once we do that, THEN valve will step in and help us further.

So really:
-Figure out what maps are fun to play (If there are too few, make more and test them)
-Figure out what weapons ruin the fun of the game and ban them accordingly. IE: Not trying to fucking unban shit like the bonk because we just assume valve will start caring about us.
-Figure out how to make the game fun to spectate
-Figure out how to increase our prizepools to give people an actual incentive to play and improve.

Once we figure these things out, THEN we can expect Valve support, but what we're doing now with these lenient whitelists hasn't fixed a goddamn thing and has only served to make the game more annoying.

Valve will only help us if we help ourselves and show them that we can stand successfully on our own 2 feet. (Aka make our prizepools actually worth playing for)

I don't think merging community-run 6s with Valve's current open ended system is the "way" to creating a starting point for us to work with them. Valve has shown that they have negligible (if any) real interest in improving their matchmaking in a timely manner, and from the public perspective they haven't taken anything out of seeing us apply global whitelists and less restrictive bannings.

If we removed white/blacklists, we won't see valve implementing changes based on UGC/ESEA statistics. We'll see them working the same way they already do, all the while the community will struggle to enjoy their own 6s variant because it now includes various weapons that slow down or change the game in bad ways and aren't being rebalanced by valve any time soon.

As much as I agree that it would be a fantastic idea if we could constantly churn out statistics for valve to review and accordingly balance with, it's been shown five times over that they will not do that. Not if we sent them a heartfelt letter, and certainly not if we tried to adjust our system to be more like theirs. All these things have been tried and while we've seen SLIGHT improvement from valve given these things, we've also seen them completely revert to not caring a single bit every time too.

TL;DR: Great in theory, if your game's developer would actually use that information. Ours won't.

unbanning more shit doesnt lead to "more variety" because people will just pick the new best weapon.
eg 100% scouts run boston basher -> 100% scouts use atomizer. no variety added and game is more aids

It's not like we have been shouting all these years at Valve that these weapons are banned for a reason.
Valve is acting like everything is as it should be with weapon balancing when they literally have a community of high skilled players playtesting them in leagues and witnessing that they do in fact in balancing.

V A N I L L A

no this makes no sense

full time heavy with natascha is useless
machina doesn't really change much
jarate I can understand but I think it has potential to break stealmates and it can be funny
rescue ranger doesnt matter, two stickies is all it takes. rangering your gun back into spawn is risky at best.

I think the whitelist is fine right now as long as offclasses don't become better than the generalist. I think making an off class more viable in its situational utility is fine as long as it doesnt break the game.

The last major update (MyM) contained several item rebalances that improved weapon balance in a competitive context and I believe the next major update will follow suit. By unbanning a few items this past season we have gathered some experience with more items which goes a long way towards giving our evaluations of the items any credibility in Valve's eyes. If these two trends continue, I think every weapon could reach a point where a banlist is not required, which would be huge for the approachability of competitive TF2. Even those first couple days where BASE Jumper and Atomizer were legal were an extremely valuable part of the whole global whitelist project so far because they gave us experience with those items. One of the big problems with testing anything in TF2 has been that people don't play normally/seriously when new factors are introduced, so having teams give them a fair shake was actually huge.

I don't think there is too much change that can be made to the global whitelist at this point, and I certainly don't feel that any of the items that are currently legal have proven to be game breaking or requiring a ban. It might have taken some adjusting to things like Rescue Ranger or Jarate, but they have become fairly inconsequential in the bigger picture of things. Now that we have this very small pool of banned items, the best thing to do from this point forward, besides waiting for the next major update to see how it affects current items, would be to systematically experiment with some of the unlocks that have either never been tested in a competitive setting, have recently been rebalanced but remain untested, or are considered borderline balanced. I think we should start with the Quick-Fix.

consider unbanning pomson they fixed the invisible projectile glitch, though the uber drain mechanic is kinda busted
consider unbanning the quick fix as they nerfed it last patch
ban jarate it is much too much of a get out of jail free card and dying for bombing a sniper when he happens to throw it last second is actually bullshit
ban rescue ranger the right click is overpowered and the left click is also much too powerful

anything else is whatever (ie. banning cow mangler as it becomes stronger when rescue ranger isn't in the game)

Why not just make a poll?

That's an awesome idea. Let's discuss it for a bit and then open up a poll so the community can decide.

can we ban the cow fucker I don't like being on fire its scary

I don't really think not having certain weapons is really scaring people off from playing at this point and because there's pretty much no hope in people being brought in from matchmaking I think a whitelist would be great.

There's no reason to not make the game what we want it to be, and most weapons either don't serve a purpose, are gimmicky, are overpowered/broken, or just add faux depth by pretending that diversity of weapons is inherently good. There's really only a few unlocks that really further TF2 as a game, and the rest is fluff that is generally either provides nothing or is occasionally slightly detrimental to it.

I wasn't in TF2 when the Quick-Fix was legal. I'd be interested to see how it would play these days.

Also, as far as the whitelist/blacklist thing; take each weapon on a case-by-case basis. If it's not BS (Atomizer), allow it. If it is, don't.

Edit: For clarity, I meant the Atomizer as an example of a weapon that is BS. I structured that awkwardly.

There were more teams in etf2l when I first started playing etf2l around season 10 than there are now. Back then etf2l had the smallest whitelist (only ubersaw and kritzkrieg were allowed) and there were 1/10th of the tools available to new players right now and the scene was DEFINITELY much harder to discover and get into.

It is clear to me that unbanning weapons did jack shit in terms of appealing for newcomers. The vast vast majority of competitive players are in it for the competition. Rules are just a minor concern.

People actually think anything that is done will matter:

Nothing will make a difference, this game is on a backwards spiral, we've lost our best contributors, in a community that depended on volunteers they're going. They've all given up for one reason or another or because their talents deserve financial rewards.

It depends how you measure success of TF2 :
- If it's amount of teams competing - it's losing appeal.
- If it's amount of LANs - it's improving.
- If it's the amount of prizemoney - it's going down.
- If it's amount of coverage and viewership - still going nowhere.

Unlock debates are as old as the first unlocks were made for Medic, you will always have a battle between people who want more things unbanned versus those who want more banned because people enjoy different aspects of the game. Keep discussing it, but I have seen many names have the same discussions for nearly a decade and 99% of them aren't here anymore.

I'm okay with the current whitelist. Only thing I really don't like is the Rescue Ranger.

every time slin posts about competitive tf2/balance i get so fucking triggered