If invite players are going to decided on the whitelist, it should be a legit yes or no vote for every weapon and not just an open discussion, to ensure the loudest don't have the most influence. I'm not saying there can't be a talk along with the vote, but without the vote it can be hard to gauge where the support really lies.

An example I thought up would be something like:

Top 4 ESEA captains
Top 4 etf2l captains
Top 2 Ozfortress captains
+3 community votes.
13 total votes

The community votes would be a simple poll on tftv that would be proportional, so if 66% of the community voted to keep the xbow, and 33% voted to ban it, that would count as 2 KEEP votes and 1 BAN vote. After all is over tally up the votes and that's what gets played with.

its the common opinion shared by 90% of invite tho

(@vulcan, I got ninjad)

just speaking the truth and facts my man

Same for ozfortress. UGC does their poll.

Discussions between Aoshi, tri, snowblind and I are ongoing for the third iteration of the whitelist. Plan is that each region talks to their players and we come together as head administrators and discuss our region's views and we make a mutual decision.

pretty sure the only thing that has people apprehensive about another global whitelist meeting and not a vote is the possibility of another atomizer/quick-fix fiasco

as long as you keep slin and b4nny out of it the admins will probably do a pretty good job at determining a whitelist everyone can live with

That whitelist honestly seems pretty solid to me...

Bear, you are a treasure

From the perspective of a mass vote ETF2L almost have the ideal, in that they can get their members to vote and restrict it to active players, etc, but I'm not sure if the polls themselves can handle it. But the two things you'd need for a proper mass vote system are steam login and an access list of active players and there's a system development gap there that no one can be bothered to fill because it's not trivial.

So from a practical perspective you probably need to restrict it to captains or admins. If having an anonymous vote was important you could probably use a google form restricted by accounts or something, but otherwise collecting them by hand would work with that small a number.

Just for the record this survey isn't meant to be authoritative or binding, I haven't got the power or inclination to try to make it so. It's meant to get some real player's opinions in an unbiased way without pushing an agenda and get some real data about how unlocks are affecting player's experiences.

I don't think I've done a great job interpreting it as the Vacc and Cow Mangler stuff shows, but I'm not pretending that any kind of final decision is my job. If a league admin wants more of the data, or if a whitelist group want it, then I can provide it.

you are a fool

I just wanna pick this one statement out, because i feel it represents the discussion if we should ban redundant weapons (not op, but annoying and gimmicky)
Someone equipping this weapon is making a bad decision, because in general it will do less damage than a sniper rifle in skilled hands. Nevertheless there is still a possibility someone equips it, and kills a player on first shot with very little skill required (hold m1, aim headheight, peek shutter, release). This is infuriating for the receiving end and rewards a player for a bad decision.
Imo random crits are an exaggerated version of this problem, someone could make a generally bad decision ingame but kill someone with a crit, hence we banned those.

unban the rescue ranger

I think we should focus on weapons that really cause issues and are being abused often. Not on the gimmick weapons that you only see in random pugs/mixes. For example saying "I just died because a Heavy hit me in the back with Holiday Punch, THIS IS SO DUMB" isn't a good reason to ban something. There're lots of unlocks that are not worth banning because they're not used in 90% of the games anyway.

The huntsman at least for NA has been ubanned for such a long time and for the most part hasn't been an issue. That said. RIP Platinum's huntsman

You could also say that there are lots of unlocks not worth allowing because they're not used in 90% of the games anyway. I think that if an unlock doesn't add anything positive to the game (e.g. sun on a stick, volcano fragment, etc.) there is no point allowing it.

You're a looking at it from a different point of view. You say "let's ban everything except for what's good for the game", when I say "let's allow everything except for what's bad for the game". Those would be equal if we could separate all unlocks into strictly good and bad, but we can't.

Imo "this weapon is clearly only used to dick around with" counts as bad. Not "we need to ban this asap" bad or anything, but if we're changing the whitelist anyway then it's no extra effort at all to ban things that are only ever used to be annoying and nothing more.

But I think the whole point of the follow-up survey is to see what everyone thinks about exactly that.

It bring some diversity to have fun in unserious games. Do you want to play every single pug/mix/dmix like your league match? I personally had a lot of fun in offseason scrims as Wrap Assasin flank Scout (before we switched our roles up).

it would be nice in an ideal world, obviously it's never going to happen but stopping people from throwing and cheesing and essentially just ruining pugs can't be a bad thing, can it?

If your whole team is always in a perfect harmony and everyone's always chill no matter what's going on then yeah (but this isn't real).

Nothing stops you from using custom whitelists in mixes, that's not an argument for an official whitelist though.

Yeah let's make a ton of whitelists (again) just because you don't want "stupid" unlocks in your officials (that nobody would use anyway).

I'm pretty certain that that one scout who 'strongly agreed' to put in the gunslinger was a frustrated HL engi main who calls the 6s meta stale cos he can't play his main.

either that or he's an insane masochist

I don't mind the gunslinger. People overreact about minis way too much honestly. Weapons like jarate, natascha, machina, vaccinator, etc. are far more game breaking as well as annoying to play against.

Oh yeah, 100%

But it's usually the scout mains who complain the loudest, as seen by 55% of them choosing strongly disagree - more than any other class.

I thought I'd provide a bit more insight into some item voting patterns

Vaccinator

http://i.imgur.com/WewdJ14.png

The interesting thing here to me is that players that identify themselves as playing many classes are most strongly against it. Scouts tend to be most strongly against everything and medics the most permissive so those differences although marked are predictable.

There are also some regional differences

http://i.imgur.com/S0LbUoO.png

NA aren't nearly as anti-vaccinator as EU, so I suppose it's understandable that it's EU players that are surprised by the Vacc not being on the most contentious/unpopular unlocks list. Could this be down to there not be a Lowpander equivalent in ESEA?

Cow Mangler

http://i.imgur.com/pkAb5uh.png

This is both a little more unpopular and a little more controversial in NA than in EU. Although both regions are slanted against it you can blame EU for supporting it just enough to find safe harbour in some of my whitelists.

The class voting breakdown is in the original summary, if anybody has any solid insights into why Demomen are so in favour of this thing I would love to know.

Crusader's Crossbow

http://i.imgur.com/qJ4ahe0.png

This one gets a lot more support in EU, both regions are generally supportive of the unlocks, but EU almost has it on classic status while NA is merely OK with it on average.

When you take into account possible variance of the results for this unlock (which are high because it's contentious) there is a moderate chance total NA opinion is actually negative. EU opinion almost always remains positive though.

(if anybody has any solid insights into why Demomen are so in favour of this thing I would love to know.)

Because when their pocket runs it they don't have to struggle to share the ammo supply. I can appreciate that aspect but it's hideous and annoying and gimmicky with the charge shot so meh.

It's interesting that such a small practical consideration overcomes all the other protests about the weapon being random, gimmicky, etc.

People are going to vote in favour of what makes things easier for themselves, probably why Medics are the most in favour of the crossbow, and scouts are least in favour of it.