Traditional PUG rules apply for forming the teams?

I think you could talk to Wiethoofd the http://whitelist.tf/ guy and ask him if there's a way to automate the process of the whitelist generation

You know what would actually be fun. If you had all the inviters and you picked/banned them as if they were dota characters.

I know this has nothing to do what you said but this thread title just made me think of it.

are you a real person

the only limitation in automating this is whether or not the server has to change maps or restart to apply a new whitelist. even then it isn't too bad, waiting a extra 30 seconds to play.

edit: just finished watching the video and I do agree and would love to see this mode. I got burnt out of TF2 a long while ago, but have been getting into spectating DOTA (have only played a few matches) and I really enjoy it. besides the seemingly perfect balance of the game, I love the different possibilities that can and do happen. allows for a much more exciting spectating experience.

Pro-strat: Ban quick fix, medigun, vaccinator, kritzkrieg, and amputator. Meds can only heal with the the crossbow. 9v9 with no heals aside from engy.

edit because I skimmed over the HL part. Didn't expect it to just flat out describe HL instead of saying HL.

Also, you could ban every medic primary too, forcing the med to be melee only.

EDIT2: Actually it might be cooler to allow only the Amputator and ban the crossbow + mediguns, since the medic becomes a sitting duck whenever you want to heal.

You don't ban stock weapons. You only ban unlocks.

Also it's easy to tell if someone violated this rule since they can only have gotten uber % from ubersaw, which is completely useless anyways if all the mediguns are banned.

What are you smoking and can I have some

I take it you don't like abusing rules/exploiting in general.

i'm pretty sure he's referring to the fact that making medic essentially useless is pretty fucking stupid and makes the whole pug pointless

That's the point of the bans I said. Push rules until they have to change them. Also allowing Amputator only would make the medic a bit more useful.

I'm just saying, aren't the bans suppose to make the gameplay different? Speculation will only get you so far, for all we know it might be fun. People whined about the QF after LAN even though many of them were saying it was the best thing to recently happen to TF2. You could ban 18 inconsequential unlocks and just make it another HL match, or you can ban 4 major weapons that drastically effects gameplay and see how it goes. Not much of an experiment if you leave all the goodies on the board. I'm just suggesting the extreme.

Is it really beneficial to allow stock weapons to be banned? Being able to ban every single medigun sounds really fucking stupid. Every class should be able to use all their weapon slots, even if their selection is reduced to only one item. If you really think being able to ban stock items is a good idea, then you should also have a rule to where you can't ban the last weapon of any class's weapon slot if all the other ones have been banned. Even then, you run into the issue of someone not having the one weapon that's allowed for that particular weapon slot if the stock one gets banned.

Taking out all the mediguns is pretty much saying "ban medic".

Glad to see this coming back, pick ban pugs were a lot of fun. Hopefully this leads to valve implementing a lobby system

I'm not sure what the traditional PUG rules are?

I have asked him about the possibility of banning stock weapons and he said that you have to do it through a mod of some sort (it doesn't work with just a whitelist). But I haven't found any mod like that.

Good point!
We are allowing stock weapons to be banned to get more variation on the matches, because some stock weapons are so powerful that other weapons wouldn't be used much if you couldn't ban them. For example the "sticky launcher" or "the medigun"

We will ad an additional rule:
you can't ban all the weapons in the same slot of one class.

Hopefully we can share weapons with eachothers if there are people missing some.

Does that mean that you already have played pick/ban PUG:s?
Yes a lobby system would be nice to see :3

We had a long discussion about getting a lobby system in the game. salamancer who was with extine when they went to valve, made a thread explaining everything they talked about.

here's the link to the original thread: http://teamfortress.tv/forum/thread/8952-how-to-get-to-in-game-comp-lobbies

How is this any fun? Any good team will just ban the essential blatantly overpowered/dumb items like wrangler etc, and once it becomes the meta of what items to ban everyone will ban them just like league. At least with dota2 they ban the really good heroes first then start banning off of what the other team is picking. This on the other hand makes no sense at all and you will be playing with dumb weapons that would be banned in the regular format. Please explain further why this is a thing.

Lifting stuff directly from Dota? They really have no idea, do they.

>and once it becomes the meta of what items to ban everyone will ban them just like league
That is LITERALLY the purpose of having a pick/ban system for TF2 weapons. Holy shit.

I've given up on pick&ban matches. After organizing quite a few of those I figured it's more effort than necessary.

Let me explain a bit:

Whitelists are built with the intention of adding blocking broken weapons and having anything else up for grabs.
Unlocks are not needed for 6v6 classes, most people here have roots in 6's or have played it up to that they begin to understand that meta. Medic / Scout / Solly / Demo / Sniper are all classes that can do well whatever the situation. The problem lies with those other classes. Focus an Engineer and you already limit him.
As seen in the No-Wrangler ONC, engineers were struggling in finding a way to make themselves as useful as they were with the Wrangler.

Same thing for the pyro, spy or even heavy (GRU / FOS / Sandvich). The fact is that all pick & ban formats we tried (which went from banning 2 weapons up to banning 36 weapons, aside from the pick variants we tried next to that) weren't enjoyable for the players on both teams that played a class with an important ban.

The last problem we faced was that players were getting tired of the system. Playing fat kid / pick&ban takes so much longer than a normal PUG or mix.
Mind you, we even had the alpha version of whitelist.tf (credits to my teammate Wiethoofd) to make whitelists which were added to the server instantly.

I have more points to make but frankly I'm too stoned.

Anyway if you can make this happen I salute you, just keep in mind not all weapons and classes are equally as important to ban or pick.

It is a thing because we want to make those weapons you call dumb weapons viable.
And just as Robin walker wanted, we want to have much more variation in competitive play, because that sounds like an awfully lot of FUN.
But you know different people have different tastes, so you don't have to like it.

About this taking a long time, we have made it so that 5 persons from each team bans 1 weapon each, so we won't have any discussions about what to ban, each person choose whatever he/she likes. Also we might give them 10 seconds each to choose to hurry it up (really they should have decided that before it's time to play).
If this doesn't work out we just have to decide it on our steam groups page or something before the scheduled matches start.

Then about some of you getting tired of the format I can't say much about. It might be that it just weren't these particular persons taste.
I still think it sounds like an awfully lot of FUN. So I'm still going to try my best to make it happen.

Anyway it's great to hear that some people actually have tried this, because it seems like you can't find anything like that when you search on Google.

Sorry fluttercharm, you know a lot more about fun than me.

What I don't understand is why valve can't make a lobby system for all 3 types of competitive play and add more in the future if they wanted; 6s, highlander, and pick/ban formats. It's not about what Robin finds interesting or fun, it's about what his community finds interesting and fun.

Robin's talk with extine and sal seemed to prove otherwise.

Uh, no thank you

If I want to play Dota I'd play Dota, not TF2