no

Engie mains will tell you it is

i watched the best team in the world + uncle dane try and fail to push upward last against a vacc machina. its burned into my brain

mad milk

need i say more

Possible, certainly. Fun, not so much.
Some weapons like bonk, machina, mad milk, vaccinator, etc need major reworks even after years of them being in the game (not that it was never attempted by Valve, but the many changes to vacc for example were insufficient every time).

Valve has at times taken 4+ years to balance some weapons that were insanely broken (anti-headshot danger shield). Others like the sun-on-a-stick have been useless for 8 years.
It's also been a long time since the last decent weapon balancing patch (though it did show somewhat competence from Valve's side, maybe only because they did what comp players told them to).
There's no way for us to know when or if ever some of the problematic weapons will be changed. And if it'll be for the better once it happens

Overall I'd say the weapons are in a somewhat balanced state compared to past years (anti headshot danger shield era for example it would've been an even bigger snorefest to have a koth map in RGL's no whitelist league), but simply because it's in a better state than before doesn't mean it's where it should be just yet

there is not a single thing in all of TF2 that we can do, including removing the whitelist, that will get pubbers to start playing competitive tf2

To be completely fair, this wasn't due to the unlocks they were running. It was mostly due to our team really not knowing how to push that last point. Upwards last even in HL is really annoying to push against people who get a proper hold set up. Our team didn't run Vaccinator (I forget if we had a sniper during last) and we held it even better than they did.

The only complaints I have is that there are certain unlocks that are mandatory to run. The Disciplinary Action and Machina are pretty much mandatory to run if they're allowed. Jarate + Mad Milk has caused zero issues for us. We never really played against a proper engie main on a proper team to see if Wrangler + Rescue Ranger was absolutely broken.

pubbers will play comp if they can win hats for free by doing it

like if valve had craft hat drops in the in-game comp mode people would play it whether it was broken or perfectly mirrored real comp

im sure there's shit that valve could do to get people to play in-game competitive TF2 but we already hand out clout medals for every form of 3rd party competitive right now, and pubbers don't play 3rd party competitive. tf2 in the public average gamer eye is just the funny casual silly game where heavy says pootis

do you honestly think pubbers care about medals? they care about shiny quirky fedoras

if there was some lime-colored jester hat that people could get for playing comp, they would do it

the charity medals are always huge and i know several of my pubber friends say they donate explicitly just for them, as well as the same pubber friends making teams to play in ready steady pan for the medal

regardless, unless they gave you a large amount of hats for winning (which would further ruin the game's economy which im sure valve cares way more about than us), pubbers would stop playing pretty fast

when u think about it mad milk, jarate and the vaccinator are the only truly broken weapons in tf2
every other unlock is just super situational or a gimmick that'll only work once

I think we should ban gunboats and bring back shotgun roamer though

I've been playing highlander recently and I can tell you that the wrangler is actually next level aids to play against

I honest to god forgot engineer exists when I made my post LOL
fuck the wrangler and the rescue ranger too

I really want to hear why at least the vaccinator is broken. When I ran the weapon almost exclusively against the same team we beat in RGL, we lost 2-0. The half that I tried running the weapon again, we lost that half. The halves where I actually made an effort to stay off of it, we won. Almost extremely convincingly. While almost the whole time they chose to keep running the weapon (even with another medic). I think if a weapon was actually broken it would actually provide a better advantage. You absolutely 100% would need to run them. I don't find anything you listed is broken because they are not necessary to run and didn't add much when you do.

I feel like vaccinator is getting kinda overrated, it's really really good at holding last and it got banned pretty much entirely due to vacc last holds on uber disadvantage as far as I'm aware, but wasn't everyone immediately swapping off of it after defending last?

Part of the problem as well is maps like upward are absolutely not suited for 6v6, too much ground to cover, too many positions to deal with etc etc

Unfortunately it you want to look at what is balanced and also care about what is fun, a lot of the core mechanics of weapons are just not fun. Like you can tone down jarate, but it still fucking sucks that as you walked through a choke some dude from the back of the point clicked while looking at the sky and now you take a fuck ton of damage.

Fun is completely subjective but I agree that for leagues that bring no incentives to most other than "hey play this game you like a lot" then fun is obviously the most important factor. I personally really don't mind unlocks and would only ban a select few. I know I also have bias as I pub frequently still and have been playing highlander for a really long time. I would much rather hear "it's not fun" than someone pulling some stupid theory out of their ass on why a weapon is broken.

ironically(?) I would say for certain things (flamethrowers and detonator/scorch in particular, but there are prob others) it's the hl players/pubbers who complain about them way more for being unfun or braindead. by contrast I don't think I've ever seen pubbers complain about mad milk when that shit is straight busted.

of course it makes sense that those groups complain about them more because you're way more likely to see full time pyro in pubs/hl than in 6's but my point is more that there are some things in this game that a lot of people, no matter how you experience this game, hate solely for being "unfun" or easy/lowskill (think w+m1 complaints)

Vaccinator is broken because it makes last holds way easier by just equipping a different weapon and I don't find that as a good mechanic, outside of that it doesn't really have much use

Stop right there. It may be useless for competitive but it's actually one of the best melees for scouting around in pubs. Don't try to hit burning people with it. Instead take it out after you kill the pyro who ambushed you and you have a better chance of making it to a healthpack before you burn to death.

So basically the crossbow. Btw did you run vitasaw during rgl?

It's only broken in restricted 6s because of the class limits; In no restriction 6s you might not be able to do a 1min30 round with your cookie cutter + uber advantage into last but you can stabilise on 2nd then do more weird shit like getting two ubers

All this 0 restriction talk is getting pretty redundant. Valve really doesn't seem to care about what we're doing. If they're going to support us they'll probably do it whether we play 6s the way they envision or not because they know we'd drop everything we're doing in a heartbeat to play it their way if they announced a major tournament with a substantial prize pool.

At this point we shouldn't be trying to make 6s more accessible. That's their job, not ours. Our job should be to keep our gamemode fun enough to survive the eternal wait for Valve's helping hand, which, by the way, is nowhere in sight.

I'm going to get a lot of flak for saying this, but a lot of the weapon bans seem to primarily be a result of other weapons being banned, or a result of classlimits. Removing weapon bans and classlimits introduces new counters to weapons that are supposedly "overpowered". How much did we see the Base Jumper in RGL 6s and would anyone consider it to be worth banning in RGL 6s? From what I can tell, the more open nature of the format makes this weapon not an issue.

What about the Detonator, was it such an issue that it needed to be banned? When you stop banning methods of extinguishing, resisting fire damage, or increasing the amount of healing on a team, afterburn becomes less of an issue. Same with Scorch Shot.

Did anyone even use the Reserve Shooter or Sydney Sleeper? Did the Buffalo Steak Sandvich ruin the game? Of course not.

Note that there are exceptions that straight up need to be nerfed, such as the Machina for example.

balance in a vacuum is pointless, you must take player enjoyment into account or the game will be aids. it's not one or the other

That is true, even with your example of the steak. Thing is when most teams run 2 demos permanently, teams wont bother with heavy to mid because it's simply not worth it, but me as like many others I dont like playing against 2 perma demos