Why are the player emails needed to sign up a team ?

This is a feature hard built into Toornament and is not done by choice. It is designed this way so that when your registration is accepted it sends a email updating you.

We do not check or use these emails in any capacity, and I believe you can just use any filler email here.
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Quick Tournament Update, the Whitelist link has been posted on this page. You should be able to exec this whitelist with the command rcon tftrue_whitelist_id 14719

A quick reminder for teams that signups will be closing tonight, so please get your registrations in ASAP.

Currently with the number of teams we may push the start time of the tournament forward to be more in line with normal match/scrim schedules, but will confirm this as registrations near close.

next time dont waste time on weapons we have already tested and decided on being bad inclusions. if you want a host a funny cup just call it that and allow more. if you want to do something more productive include weapons that are divisive right now, like winger/solemn vow/banners/frontier justice for example

I feel like the Market Gardener was a fairly divisive pick which is a key reason for its inclusion. The other two are weapons that have not been tested for years, in which time metas have changed, and unlike some more solid bans the justifications on them were fairly loose.

The Gas Passer was banned on release per standard ETF2L rules on new weapons, and once the throwing-through-wall bug was found it has never been unbanned. So there was no real period of time where the weapon saw active competition, and given that as a weapon its pretty bad the reasoning is not really strong in the grand scheme of things. We can say all day that the bug is more than enough reason to keep it banned, but for the upside of being able to apply a brief period of afterburn which is canceled by healing - its not really a huge upside even when the exploit is abused.

The BASE Jumper is definitely got a bit more of a reason to remain banned, given the ability to spam from height free from any real threat. But this is a weapon that has one strong use case and thats about it, you take far more damage with rockets and damage falloff hurts when you are that high up. Again, you can make a case about it but this is a weapon that has not been considered for a long time.

I think solely looking at weapons that are divisive 'right now' is a short-sighted approach to weapon bans. Of course discussions around those weapons take priority, but that is not a reason to re-look at some older bans and see if A) those weapons are a better fit in the current meta/skill level and B) if those weapons are really as impactful on the flow of play as they were seen to be.

We had a fairly open whitelist back in 2017-18 when the last real balance changes occurred, with around 80% of all weapons unbanned and I believe we should only be banning weapons that have a direct negative impact on the flow or fun of the game. Re-looking at these older bans in combination with more modern ones allows people to figure out what kind of game they want to play now, even if that means a more restrictive whitelist. Ultimately the point of Experimentals is to provide opportunities to test and discuss the way that we play the game, so even discussing whether we should only look at "divisive weapons" is a good thing.