Discussions between league representatives and top players have resulted in the creation of a global whitelist for TF2. This whitelist will be used worldwide starting with the upcoming season of ESEA, ETF2L, ozfortress, and UGC.
The new whitelist takes the step of unbanning most weapons, with the following select few items remaining banned due to being judged as broken:
- Soda Popper
- Bonk! Atomic Punch
- Flying Guillotine
- Crit-a-Cola
- Mad Milk
- Sandman
- Disciplinary Action
- Buffalo Steak Sandvich
- Dalokohs Bar
- Fists of Steel
- Gloves of Running Urgently
- Pomson 6000
- Short Circuit
- Wrangler
- Quick-Fix
- Solemn Vow
- Vita-Saw
- Sydney Sleeper
- Darwin's Danger Shield
- Reserve Shooter
- Pyrovision-enabling items
- noisemakers
- noisemaking cosmetics
- explosion-on-death cosmetics
- indefinite-duration taunts
In addition, leagues implementing this whitelist have agreed to enable weapon drops/pickups, a controversial feature recently adjusted by Valve in a recent patch.
The group responsible provided the following statement:
As part of an ongoing process to unite the competitive community, ESEA, ETF2L, and ozfortress admins have come together along with representatives from top teams in all regions to unify the whitelists for competitive TF2. This global whitelist will be used in the upcoming seasons of the major leagues and the same group of representatives will meet as the seasons close to review, take feedback, and decide on any necessary changes.
With an unprecedented opportunity to bring together the league admins from all regions, the aim was set to approach the global whitelist with every weapon allowed, and then to consider each weapon fully and ban only when necessary. The broad criteria for banning weapons were: Is this weapon so overpowered that it would subvert the idea of competitive play within a team?; Does the weapon’s concept strongly undermine skill-based play?; Does this weapon have a bug which would be detrimental to play?; And lastly, does this weapon dramatically change the concept of how 6v6, or a particular class, has been played for past years? (The latter being a consideration mainly due to how large a change this whitelist would be already for players, and to recognise the need to acclimatise people).
Another aim of the group was to provide detailed feedback on specific weapons to Valve and to gather feedback and evidence after a season of play. This detailed feedback is more likely to be usable as balance data for the TF2 team, and is better than leagues keeping many weapons banned and having many variations of whitelists.
With these aims in mind and ETF2L’s whitelist as a tested example for unbanning most weapons, we came to the mutually agreed conclusion that there were 20 weapons within the game that we felt should be banned for the upcoming seasons, and the rest would be suitable for competitive TF2 play.
Updated with clarifications.