when there is no voting process, no transparency, no methodology. what can anyone do other than whine?

http://i.4cdn.org/a/1545450497243.webm

https://www.strawpoll.me/17107843
https://www.strawpoll.me/17107844

MY opinion on as a sub-open player is that b4nny is a RETARD and bonk and sopa popper should always be banned!!

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gay jail

great unlock

https://clips.twitch.tv/IgnorantOnerousJaySuperVinlin

Sad we have to have discussions like this. If valve even cared about comp they would adjust all the unlocks, instead of making us use whitelists

alto thank you for reminding of when angryofficer became better than invite scouts by using the soda popper

How are we meant to work with valve when they offer such scant communication? If Jill or some other valve employee made even a short post on the forums it would make these whitelist changes a lot easier to swallow instead of mysteriously making changes and disappearing for another year, with items MAYBE being balanced in the next update. I don’t expect them to make any promises, even a vague post such as: “we are currently considering the rescue ranger, Natascha and soda popper for balance changes” would go a long way to assuage the community

remember when valve made weapon balances and we could unban some items? We should do that again

well that would require the TF2 team to meaningfully update the game and we all know where that stands

unbanning all these weapons just makes the game unfun at lower to mid levels because of how easy it is to exploit stupid shit when you're playing with bad people. imo it doesn't "ruin" anything at higher levels because fundamentally people in iM+ and Invite are playing a different game than what's being played at open to lower iM levels. unbanning these items just makes it less fun for people to play and will be the reason why this game is going to lose even more comp players.

Y do ppl think valve will love us if we hurt our selves

we are that crazy girlfriend

I've been out of the loop for a while and only skimmed the last few pages, but to my understanding it seems that b4nny and some others(as seen in a screenshot) discussed about the banning/unbanning of certain unlocks such as bonk?

Was there any large community poll/survey recently looking for the opinions of the players on whether an all the unlocks should either:
1. stay banned for next season
2. maybe has potential to be unbanned
3. could try unban for next season
or etc. in any shape or form? This matters because for a long while there had been a certain opinion or perspective that I have somewhat sided with and seen in some posts in this thread, which is in relation to the argument about "unbanning more unlocks so that Valve sill support us" and other sorts of arguments/debates.

At this rate, Valve isn't going to support us any time soon from much indication or listen to us that much, and it's possible that it's never going to happen as many believe. During the time/era when Valve was doing amazing things as a company in general and for their other games, TF2 didn't get much of a further push for the competitive scene, what makes us think that in even more recent times where the company(in different areas/aspects) has lately been "making some mistakes" Valve/TF2 team will even work to help support competitive TF2 in a larger contributing factor?

Aside from that, I think one thing I noticed is that some people have acknowledged for a while now or more recently that competitive TF2 only has a few years left or has a limited amount of time left and that they want to play the game while it still has players playing, the balance/style of competitive is still being played, and generally it's still fun to play and that the unlocks that are banned/unfun stay that way. Competitive TF2 is great and some people often play it for a reason, whether they enjoy a competitive environment, the meta is fun, the style of play is preferred compared to pubs, or a mix of all those or something else. The competitive TF2 community is still a small community, of course it has perhaps gotten either smaller or larger over the years as we may lose some players and gain new players over time.

Ultimately what I'm trying to say is that it is important to take into consideration of what many of the players think rather than just a specific # of specific people(Invite or whatnot) who will get to decide what gets added or removed to the game that people enjoy playing for a reason. Multiple players of varying skill levels(Invite, IM, Open, or etc. from EU) should be able to put in their feedback/response in some way so that way we can see not what only the "top/important players" are leaning towards in the opinions of banning/unbanning, but we can see a popular vote at the same time to see what a good # of the community thinks. Everyone should have a fair way to say something and show their feedback, because it's not just X number of people's game(referring to those who got to discuss it internally), it's the community's game.

When I was running occasional large scale surveys on the subject of unlocks (which seemed more important because of the global whitelist) it was obvious there was no significant appetite for this kind of change amongst the rank and file, or that the number of people who wanted to go restriction free were significantly larger than those who wanted to ban everything.

Of course b4nny interpreted neutral research into community sentiment as a personal attack on his agenda, and for the most part many of the admins involved weren't particularly interested in the results either otherwise the lists would have been tightened. Popular opinion has always pointed to a more conservative approach, there has never been unanimous or widespread support for these changes. I seriously doubt that has changed.

In the opinion of certain community leaders, no doubt all of these people were and are idiots.

Remember the endgame to this line of thinking is playing vanilla MM rules for literally no reward, unless you buy into some unhinged magical thinking. If it has any effect it'll just drive players away, and there is no horde of would-be competitive gamers waiting for bonk! to be allowed to replace them.

sdq

Its just less items banned
Its just no items banned
Its just no time limit
Its just no class limit
Its just best of 3

"Well if you allowed this, why not this now?"

All of those little allowances stack up over time.

if what Pete said about the invite meetings is true, then I think all changes should actually be fully voted on by the entire invite community from now on as opposed to the apparently very biased meetings deciding on the outcome.

This probably should have been done a week ago.
Community input form
Response Sheet

I think your input form shouldn't assume it as we're fine with the current whitelist because i already think there are too many items allowed which effect the game negatively i.e winger

Wat do invite/prem players think about making a short brief video/twitch clip on their views and then we sort of string them all together to see how everyone thinks kinda like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcKFWpwFLUU

but about TF2 whitelist

u just say: i don't agree/i agree with this shit ... because... can be a quick 30 sec thing

The point of the forum is to address the issues with the currently banned weapons. I honestly don't know of any other weapons that could break the game as much as the weapons listed. Also pistol and pretty boy's could be viable in a lot of scenarios over winger? Idk disgusting scout main here. EDIT: I'll probably at some point make a forum over the entire whitelist but I think for right now the forum is long enough.

Even if they change the white-list to allow the Bonk; it won't be good enough for most scouts to swap out their pistols. The only way I could see the item getting use is a dipshit to pop it and run behind the enemy team for a gimmicky distraction play. The time the drink takes to consume prevents it from being a "get out of jail free card" in most situations. It'll be occasionally annoying, certainly. However, I don't think the change to the white-list is going to be as game breaking as some others in this thread have made it out to be.

Whatever you think of the balance issues, there are certain unlocks that are annoying to have in the game because they just look completely stupid. The laser beams from the cow mangler go completely against the aesthetic of tf2, the wrap assassin was literally created to be a memey Christmas weapon, and the scout being able to fly around like with the soda popper with his gun going bright pink and making a high-pitched squeak is also completely ridiculous. Imagine that halfway through an awesome, fairly serious LAN fragvideo like this one you get a clip of someone doing five jumps with the soda popper, ugly pink gun, dumb noise and all. High level tf2 takes a lot of skill and dedication to master and putting in such bizarre and poorly-designed items undermines the whole concept of tf2 as a competitive game.

https://i.gyazo.com/40b308fd2e723bf0e105f428116824cf.jpg

I don't mean to piss in anyone's cornflakes but Competitive TF2 currently has as much interest as it did in 2009-2010.

What's more interesting is that in 2016 our #1 Twitch personality overlapped "Competitive TF2" in interest and remains steady. This shows that people are playing less and watching more.

We had a shot at being a big beautiful esport but if you look at the chart anyone can see that the ship has sailed.

This is a passion project and the twilight years are upon us – let's make it for us and not for them.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2007-01-01%202018-12-30&geo=US&q=competitive%20tf2,b4nny

If it’s going to ‘certainly’ be annoying, what is the point of unbanning it if it’s going to be useless otherwise? You’ve just made the game more annoying for no benefit