x

Surely people would vote in a pick ban system in a way that plays to their own strengths, not what is bad for the game etc.

Like I'm sure the reserve shooter is one of the more disliked weapons in the game, but I dont think that its strong enough to warrant a ban when other things that you could ban that would have far more impact.

If you're playing against Lowpander, your first ban will probably be gunslinger, if you're against 7, why would you even ban it at all?

Unfortunately in google forms there's no combination of validation that works well. I did try

If you feel you would like to play Gru Heavy in 6v6 feel free to make your choices accordingly. Nobody will know it's you

GentlemanJon you made the survey only with currently banned items. Why is that? There is currently allowed items I disagree with being allowed (cough xbow cough) and these options do not represent my opinion well.

my top 5 are gru, disciplinary action, wrangler, crit a cola and flying guillotine. full time heavy would be miserable, wrangler is just clearly overpowered and scout doesnt need major buffs. if anyone wants me to clarify anything i will but i think all of those things are pretty straightforward and agreed upon.

Blame the global whitelist illumimati. We're all just pawns in their evil game

Sandman > Guillotine IMO. As bad as the guillotine is stuns are worse.

Did u guys forget about short circuit

Scout unlocks can be aids but I'm not gonna deal with dumping 8 stickies into a sentry with a short circuit engineer

That's the thing though, that's not all that far off. It seems like most people (at least vocally) are against the recent push to unban everything other than what's absolutely necessary to keep banned, and would rather go back to a whitelist where the items allowed are picked because they actually make the game better (or at least don't make the game worse).

Not trying to discredit what you're doing, finding out what people want banned the most could give some interesting results. But at the same time you can't dismiss how many people feel that the we should be looking at what we actually want to keep instead of what we think we could suffer through having unbanned, which imo is more important info to gather anyway.

One of the things you can do with the data is get an idea of the kind of distribution you would be likely to get if people had anonymous votes for this kind of system, and that can give you a guide to what kind of number of votes or weighting and scoring preserves the 6v6 meta a reasonable amount of the time, as well as which unlocks are likely to slip through (although obviously if you had the full range to vote on it's different).

I'm not trying to push for more unlocks to be released or anything, just get a more detailed picture of the community perception of those that remain banned. I agree it's probably cut about as far as it can go with maybe only a couple of marginal candidates left.

This also potentially gives some idea of the worst offenders/most unpopular in a completely empirical way if Valve are interested. If there are enough responses then I could also look at correlations in voting patterns, "people who hate this also hate...", those kind of things as well as assessing the differences from the other questions. There's a lot of stuff that can fall out of it although admittedly it might only be of interest to me

e: that last point could be an interesting factor in matchmaking, in that you could match people with varied voting patterns instead of accidentally matching people who always ban scout unlocks who then end up with parachuting soldiers and heavies to mid being quickfix healed.

Thanks to everybody that has responded so far, you are champions. I've quickly run some initial analysis on the data gathered and there is some interesting reading.

http://i.imgur.com/n3dSy4j.png

Crit a cola, Atomizer, the Quick Fix, Reserve Shooter and Wrangler lead most people's banning priorities list. It may be a backlash caused by exposure but it does show how divorced from community sentiment the idea of unbanning the Quick Fix is.

In this world however there'd be a very good chance items like the Buffalo Steak Sandvich, Fists of Steel, Solemn Vow, Sydney Sleeper and Guillotine would make it into a lot of games as they just don't attract a large volume of votes. That means annoyingly hard to kill heavies, but they'd also be covered in piss and getting a guillotine in the face so maybe it all balances out?

Looking at voting tendencies, Crit a Cola being such a widespread ban would be less likely to have a much of a relationship with any other unlock. However it has a fairly strong negative correlation with ban votes for the disciplinary action. Possible Soldier's union at work?

The most predictably correlated banning pair are the GRU and Fists of Steel, although the GRU are a far more commonly banned item.

Projecting the vote distributions into a game situation these are likely levels of voting in any given game (still assuming that only items on the current ban list would be targeted)

http://i.imgur.com/DhE38Ng.png

Looking at this the minimum level for accepting a ban looks to be about 6 votes against. This is also logical as with 5 "ban points" available to each user for a single item it prevents troll banning unlocks the vast majority want like gunboats. However with a standard deviation of around 7 many unlocks like the BASE Jumper, Vita Saw and Bonk! would still appear in games around a third of the time with more acceptable unlocks occasionally being banned instead. Only Crit a Cola, Atomizer and the Quick Fix would be kept out more than 95% of the time.

Early indications are that a vote ban would probably need more options available to produce a more stable meta

I'd love to get more data to give a better analysis, so if you haven't filled it in I hope this might change your mind. I might run this again with more unlocks at some point to give a broader picture of both how a pick/ban might play out and get a better overall view of unlock sentiment in the community.

I think the results are skewed because of the viability of certain classes, which is why the top 4 unlocks are standard (the Wrangler is just exceptionally bullshit). So broken unlocks for specialist classes aren't prioritized for banning because their impact is relatively minor.

Also surprised how low Mad Milk is. And Vita-Saw.

i can't choose they are all so fkin gay

Although most players agree the Vita Saw is a bad addition to the game, it seems like people would rather prioritise stuff that is frustrating in direct combat than something that messes with the tactical aspect of the game.

That theory doesn't explain Mad Milk though. Maybe there's an element of scout unlock banning fatigue

the healing rate of the quick-fix is just too much

Those all or nearly all need to stay banned, what's the point in trying to pick out which 5 are the most broken?

I'll ask your permission next time

ban the vaccinator..........

I feel like the mad milk gets lost in the atomiser, critacola, bonk, sandman, flying guillotine, soda popper mess. Scout is not only the strongest class but also has some of the strongest unlocks and I would say milk and flying guillotine are the weakest of the OP unlocks. Plus that doesnt even account for other classes weapons.

my bans in order were atomizer, critacola, sandman, rescue ranger, and wrangler. trust me, you don't want to play against a scout with any of those weapons. it's aids. and you can't beat a wrangled sentry at last without using an entire uber for it.

are you fucking kidding me people are ok with the base jumper

http://i.imgur.com/Divi9yo.png

no wonder this game is dying

no one is ok with the base jumper u retard its just that there are so many retarded unlocks its hard to decide 5 u wanna get rid of

appreciate your wise words sam

np

I would like to see a steaked up heavy with gru getting whips to mid.

I didn't ban vita-saw because the only time I've ever seen it used was in a highlander match on ctf_haarp

ban everything except gunboats escape plan ubersaw kritzkrieg

steak doesnt stack with gru or whips

I've done some analysis and posted it here

I'll repeat it here as well, the intention is NOT to identify unlocks that might be worth releasing from the ban list and looking at some of the items that haven't attracted many votes should show why interpreting these results in that way would be a bad idea.

If there's interest I might repeat the exercise with all unlocks, and maybe simulate a pick phase as well. There are limits to this though, given that votes are anonymous but it's possible to do some different types of analysis on that as well.