See this is what is ridiculous. People who are being realistic and not completely delusional are given such a bad name. No one has the opinion that they don't want new players to play etc. For sure an increased playerbase for comp would be great but its just not going happen. Having the old school whitelist wont bring in new players and this new whitelist also wont bring in new players.

Razer cups died, matchmaking died, faceit is dead, pugchamp is just the same aids every map, esea numbers are falling (invite doesnt even have the required teams atm unless 2 im teams follow through with b4nny's repayment thing he proposed), etf2l becomes worse every season. How many things are going to have to be tried and fail for people to realise its just not going to happen. Yes I know faceit is getting an update/refurbished.

People just want to play non aids tf2. This whole idea that people dont want new players and want a more severe whitelist so pyro mains can fuck off is just plain stupid. I'm tired of this idea that "valve are really listening guys things are going to change just you wait". I've played comp for 9 years now I've seen the attempts at getting tf2 bigger, I've seen the attempts at changing things its all just come to the same conclusions, failure. I'd love tf2 to be at the stage where I can stream all day and that would be my job but its simply not going to happen.

Those other games have a fuckton of money so no pro would complain too much for the game's balance. The esports you talk about are strategy games, they are completely different from tf2. Also we have an overpowered aspect that the whole game revolves around, it's the medic's uber. If you wanted to compare tf2 to popular esports then compare it to csgo where whenever valve makes something op they are only hurt the scene.
Also by your logic valve's official matchmaking would be huge right now. If what you like about tf2 is choosing unlocks and countering the enemy's retarded unlocks then fps games are not for you.

LOL

How come?

Legitimate question. I've only played one season.

I'm only going to go off prem as I honestly haven't looked at the other divisions in a long time. The best team in europe doesn't play etf2l currently. The incentive to play just isn't there so the effort put in is just non existent.
The actual games have become very sloppy and unorganised in my opinion. I'm not saying this like I'm really good and the teams I've played in have been perfect. They have been far from that and some were the worst offenders for sloppy play. Top teams from other games just seem to have much more of a drive and have much more incentives to put in the effort. Yeah its in their contracts and shit that they have to do this but still all of the top teams in any game which has had a shred of support and not the "just wait and see guys its gonna happen".
Se7en is the only team that gives off the impression that they don't just show up to scrims and officials and thats it and as I said before they don't even play etf2l atm, they might in the future for rewind practice but I'm not a mind reader it just makes sense for them to next season.

How was this different in the past then? Hasn't it always been about the honor of winning and negligible prizes?

Its not even about the money, well it is to an extent. As you said its negligible the amount of money won buts its still an incentive. The main thing is there just isnt any competition for teams to get to that next level in terms of skill and to actually have the drive to push themselves to the next level.
No team in Europe, since full tilt, have posed such a threat to Se7en for them to actively go over stuff and be keen to fix their mistakes. Full tilt was a team that could take coudl regularly take maps off Se7en/Crowns. Yeah I know arctic foxes beat them in the grand finals that time but it was a Se7en who had no drive or anything they literally showed up to officials and that was it.
I'm not making excuses up for them losing to them, I can see why Se7en didnt practice that season and yeah it fucked them over but as I said it was a team which had no drive as there was no actual rivals for them to deem it necessary for them to be keen.
Around the time of last rewind, in my opinion was the last time Se7en gave a shit. i61 was going to be another time you would see an eu team be really fucking keen and strong but Froyo decided the smartest decision was to not attend.
Now the next rewind is soon, Froyo are attending and so is Se7en and guess what? Se7en are actually playing and preparing themselves for this as there is actually going to be some competition for them.

In the past things just seemed so much more organised, more keen and there was more drive to improve.
I know I've just used Se7en as an example but its the only team in europe thats been able to stick together and continuously improve.

Do more research tom.

Its my opinion and I doubt it will change anything. If its wrong then fair enough. Just wanted to express my opinion.

I am convinced that there is no actual possible way to balance this game in a way where the amount of people satisfied outweigh the people dissatisfied by a significant amount on either the casual or competitive side.

Even if we somehow managed to get every unlock in the game reworked and redesigned for 6s, then what?

The specialist classes are still not good enough to be run full time in 6s regardless, but lets assume that these classes are changed so that they're powerful enough to be run fulltime.

What happens to pubs? Do you really think people are going to enjoy dealing with a sniper, spy, pyro, heavy or engineer (or multiples of them for that matter) that is powerful enough to deal with the 6s classes in any situation when they're already annoying as fuck to deal with in pubs as it is? I honestly don't. People want these classes to be more powerful but I think you'd literally ruin the balance of the casual game if you try to make them any stronger than they already are, and lets face it, the casual playerbase of this game is vastly larger than the competitive one.

There are enough people who want these classes nerfed in pubs to begin with if you look at the cesspools that are reddit and facepunch. (People think sniper shouldnt be able to quickscope, or that engineers shouldnt be able to repair teammate's buildings, spy shouldn't have gotten a speed buff, etc.)

Seriously, if these classes get buffed then I can actually see this game dying due to pubbers getting fed up.

Even if I thought it were possible, I don't see or trust valve being able to pull the kind of balance needed off, solely based on what they did to pyro recently.

TLDR; We ask for weapons to be balanced but nothing else.

@T0m, I'll be honest now and say that while as much as I would want the scene to actually grow more (any amount will be helpful but also really hard due to the age of the game), I also would hate myself for seeing any action that is done by ETF2L to hurt the top of the scene just as well.

It's a completely double-edged sword in my case, I personally want the top of the scene to stay healthy but at the same time I was very keen when the global whitelist was initially released to hope that it would gain more people around. Surely that's not true as it has been pointed out already in this thread, but the point of it was not to hurt all the experienced players that have already been playing this game for several years already only to find out that a Heavy can heal himself with a banana now of all things.

Then again, if money is the only thing that people are looking up for, all I can say is that money was never even a big thing in European TF2 in these past 4 years that I am personally aware of, aside from Insomnia LAN of course that just barely is also hitting similar numbers to what there are currently in NA. But if winning around 80€ per player for something that a whole team puts 3 months of effort into keeps the top of the scene alive, then I guess we have no other choice then.

@bloodis, so what would you have us do?

If you think LEGO, champ.gg or lowpander didn't have some impact on them, you're wrong.

If it came across that I said money was the only reason teams wanted to play then I've worded what I wanted to say wrong, tbh I did get sidetracked and didnt really say anything of substance.
80 euros per player is better than nothing so it is an incentive to an extent (this will change on a player to player basis). Obviously money would be a big reason if the prize pools were drastically different.

To be clear all I've wanted to say is that more unlocks will not grow the game. TF2 is past the stage of becoming big. I'm not saying it to harm the scene, I just think we are better off actually keeping the scene alive. In my opinion it could be done by having a global everything, whitelist and map pool but not with the intetion of hurr durr this will make casual players want to play. Its not even to drive them away as well. A big part of this comes down to the players wanting to improve as well.
Obviously Smash can be used as a counter argument to this, but still, in my opinion I just cant see tf2 getting the treatment smash got.

And yes Josh you are right. I dno about champ but yes lego and lowpander for sure has had an impact. However these are the only other teams apart from full tilt to have an impact.

With the whitelist or European scene in general?

We have been the life support for the whole scene, since we as a community do keep the game as alive as it is currently because we want to keep it alive. It's not even a case where leagues would just churn out a new season after another just because they "have" to, but because they actually do want to, since they care. But if the big parts of the community are losing interest for actions that the big boys happen to do that are affected to all those seasons, then it's obviously something that we are still able to improve upon from.

So who wants ESEA to give EU another shot?

For actual testing feedback:

• Bonk - still stupidly overpowered, let's scouts completely commit into losing fights and then escape. Effectively forces the pushing team to be less aggressive to not die to scouts that can safety remain in a fight. Haven't tried it breaking stalemates, but I imagine it will be just as effective there. The damage invulnerability lasts far too long.
  
• Parachute - both teams refused to run it and I really don't see much of a difference between now and when it was last tested to allow it. If you are going to unban it because all teams are refusing to play with it, then please let us know.
  
• Sandman - is bad, but annoying. Best use is like all other recharge weapons, spamming from resupply cabinets into choke points.
  
• Gas Passer - doesn't charge fast enough to ever really be a factor.

The difference between now and times gone by for tf2s lack of prizes is that before e sports just weren't really a proper thing, I mean you had some semblance, but not much, the point isn't that tf2 never had incentives to win, but that most games didn't.
Now the best e sport players earn actual money and there's no reason to stay in tf2 if you want to try. If you're a talented player and you have the drive to focus on ur aim and go over shit with your team, then you can just go and play a game where you can get more out your harvest. even the esports that are laughed at by people still get astronomically fat prizepools compared to tf2

So the people that are still here are people that just love the game and want to enjoy it, not people that actually give a shit about winning, for the most part anyway

we do https://play.esea.net/teams/8707216

Pardon my obvious ignorance but if a weapon is underpowered and unbanned, what impact does it have on the game?

Depending on the unlock it might make the game just a little bit shittier.
For example the phlogistinator is underpowered but if you happen to get kills with its crits, it's going to be complete bs to die to.

I'm sorry I'm not a fake bitch like you

I don't understand this philosophy of how unbanning everything makes it easier for casuals to get into 6s. In the first place it really doesn't, and in the second place even if it did, the change in quality in the games you cause by having stupid shit allowed certainly has an effect on the longevity of the game. Casuals migrated to competitive slowly because they wanted a more challenging and balanced way to play the game, and that's why they kept playing it. making every 6s game a pubfest might make more casuals try competitive, but it will certainly make more people quit because it's just not fun anymore.

My personal feedback would be mostly around dragon's fury, I've been trying this weapon a lot in pug, and i compared it a lot with stock, as i mainly play pyro in 6's, i can say first it has bugs :
There's some problems of hit detection way more than no damage rockets and shit ( Happened to me around 2-3 times a game)
Then it is not op at all, i would even say underpowered : The fact that you have to aim instead of just spreading flames is very punishing, i've been playing pyro as a substitute of pocket soldier and when it comes to defend your medic, i'd rather just flame the guy than missing my shots and let my medic die. Then, just realize that what makes the pyro that good is also airblast, i'm not saying that it's the most important part to have an impact as pyro but surely it is an ability that allows you to do perfect plays instead of good plays or ok plays, having that nerf airblast may be why i would not use that weapon.
This weapon only becomes interesting when it comes to push a last with full ad for me, but as i'm saying, my pyro's gamestyle is more defensive and protect the medic than ambush and flank things so i could not help you on that in terms of experience, just ask Gazy

then thermal thruster is useless for me, detonator is ,first, too important to have to deal consistent damage and then, why do use a weapon that gives the same things as a deflected rocket jump (ok it can't always happen but you can still do it without this weapon so for me it's useless).

Finally Gas passer can be interesting but only in certain situation, like i imagine thorwing it on the pack while your roamer is sacking for med, must generaly to begin a fight, it can be huge, but at the cost of not having a secondary, which is huge.

To conclude, those 3 weapons can be allowed, certainly not overpowered for me

Would you feel better if you were killed by the far superior stock Flamethrower?

If a team is so much better than you that they can kill you with joke weapons and not be punished, then they could kill you just as hard running stuff that is unbannable, like permaHeavy/Sniper/Pyro, or Shotgun-only Soldier, or Crossbow-only Medic, or Pistol-only Scout, or anything. What's ultimately annoying is that you're losing and being disrespected, but banning underpowered weapons won't change the fact that there are teams out there who are better than you and want to BM. You'll still be just as upset.

Imagine trying to Uber into Badlands last through top left and being bodyblocked in the choke by an invincible Scout for 8 seconds. Or pushing Process IT into mid.

Not to mention you can literally run away from any overextension as long as you can duck around a corner for a second.

It's actually so blatantly broken, please don't force us to play with it.

To clarify, it is really annoying and should be banned, but nobody will use it because there is no reason to sac a parachute Soldier when you can jump back to spawn and switch to Battalion's Backup, which is a second Uber, is impossible to punish reliably, and doesn't put you down a fragging class.

The Huntsman is significantly better at this because it kills stuff. The Wrap Assassin is significantly better at every other situation because it does damage and doesn't make you 1shot by rockets. This thing is actually completely useless.

I'll try to explain in a fair way.

Some people think Valve will help grow 6v6, and if/when they do, they'll want to sell a game that has no whitelist. In this world, by removing the whitelist, we remove this barrier and make it easier for the transition to happen.

Other people think Valve has no interest in growing 6v6, or that they tried doing it with MyM, failed, and got discouraged from doing so again in the future. In this world, removing the whitelist serves no purpose since it deteriorates the existing 6v6 game.

That's just ignoring the problem though, the whitelist exist for a reason and we need valve to fix the broken weapons before we can get rid the whitelist. Having no whitelist would be a good thing if a whitelist was not needed, but it is in the current state.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/382340717692977157/398638030417821706/unknown.png ban dragons fury now pls

A better look of current fireball:

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/343889520791650304/398659907811016715/image.png

How it actually should be:

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/343889520791650304/398660338637340682/image.png

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/343889520791650304/398660687720874015/image.png

If a pyro who has been building phlog charge for free with scortch shot or detonator hides behind a corner and kills a few people with 0 skill required that is pretty shitty and should never happen. Even if overall the phlogistinator is an underpowered weapon it can be very strong if you get lucky. That doesn't make the players who died bad, it makes the weapon shitty for competitive.

If TF2 means enjoying yourself then I would suggest boycotting any leagues running whitelists/rulesets you find unfun. All it takes to make a small league between yourselves is a challonge account and a google spreadsheet.