Shoutout to Heny for for being an amazing tournament admin. Its a real pleasure to work together with you.
Shoutout to everybody from production for making it an amazing event.
Shoutout to everybody that came up to me to introduce themselves.
Shoutout to Maurice Moris for eating a lime and dying.
Shoutout to everybody that put up with drunken me.
Shoutout to Ashaneru for spending countless hours working on the LAN servers even with the unfortunate events.
Shoutout to proky for drunken admin talks.
Shoutout to my bank just dying during the LAN.

Hope everybody had a great time, see you next LAN!

Yes, the lesser of all reasons.
Your application was poorly written. To put in perspective we've had applications from 13 year olds that were better . You mentioned that you have no AC experience in TF2 and your only other reference was that you where "great at catching" cheaters in minecraft.

A note that I mentioned to you in case you wanted to re-apply with a better written application was that people see you in an immature light. This because of your childish application as well as the way you handled yourself at cphg. You ran around drunk most, if not all, evenings at cphg going as far as falling drunken asleep on the floor in front of the main stage and having people take care of your drunken ass. This obviously doesn't leave a good impression.

Hello everybody!
Recently we ran a poll for the global whitelist. We feel like this was decently successful for the short notice and limited publicity and are happy with the results and engagement we got from it. In the future we will most likely look at running a larger poll with better timing and publicity surounding it to allow for further optimization of the whitelist.
Now onto the good stuff, the actual results and the changes that these are going to entail.
Firstly, the whitelist changes:
- Unbanning: Atomized, Dragons fury and Mantreads
- Banning: Diamondback

You can find the full updated whitelist here: https://whitelist.tf/10008
Here are all the percentages that each weapon received:

https://i.imgur.com/YKKps6i.png

A final thank you to everybody that filled in the form, we do really appreciate it!

Hello everyone.

We're trying out a new thing where we're having a generalized form for gathering some base data for future changes of the global whitelist. This is just for some of the weapons that currently get brought up frequently but if the feedback we receive through this is good we will most likely expand on it and keep on doing it.

https://forms.gle/z3psYDLbf9YUDjQL7

In order to make sure that everybody has some rough outline of what the pro and cons of the weapons are there is a rough description and arguments that have been listed by players and admins that have chipped into the conversation so far.

------------------------------------------------------
Below are pro and con arguments and the current status in the whitelist, This status has not changed yet.
------------------------------------------------------

Winger (Unbanned) - https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Winger:
You have to give up a lot of your clip size (12 -> 5) for an additional height gain in your jumps when held out. The shots also do a small additional amount of damage.

Pro and con arguments

• The reduction in clip side causes the secundairy to lose a chunk of its usefullness in fights. The small increase in damage does not make up for it.
  
• Giving additional jumping height to scout, which is already considered the strongest class, is overkill considering the class's base movement.

Atomizer (Banned) - https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Atomizer:
The bug where you didn't need to hold the weapon out fully to use the jump is gone.
You can do a third jump when you hold the weapon out but switching to the weapons is 50% slower then to other weapons.

Pro and con arguments

• The scout that runs this weapon is no longer able to build uber with his medic.
  
• Pulling out the weapon will allow you to get onto better highground but you need to make yourself uncapable of shooting for a while to do so.
  
• An additional jump doesn't grant you that much extra height considering that the Winger is already allowed.
  
• Giving additional jumping height to scout, which is already considered the strongest class, is overkill considering the class's base movement.

Cow Mangler 5000 (Banned) - https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Cow%20Mangler%205000
You gain unlimited ammunition and a gimmick alt-fire but you deal 20% less damage to buildings.

Pro and con arguments

• Having unlimited ammo makes the weapon just a straight upgrade. The decreased damage to buildings is negligible.
  
• Having unlimited ammo makes holding pure spam battles.
  
• The alt-fire is just a gimmick but due to it putting people on fire and mini-critting, which removes damage fall-off, it is an easy spam option that can one-shots light classes.
  
• It makes the game more boring and easier.

Direct Hit (Unbanned) - https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Direct_Hit
You have borderline no splash damage but your rockets are way faster and deal 25% more damage. You also minicrit airborne players.

Pro and con arguments

• The removal of splash damage and increase of rocket speed causes the weapon to be more aim based compared to other rocket launchers.
  
• Your usefullness in spam fights decreases heavily.
  
• The damage increase allows for one-shotting light classes.
  
• The aim required at mid to close range is limited.

Mantreads (Banned) - https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Mantreads
The bug in regards to them has been fixed. They haven't been tested or ran after they got updated.
They allow for better strafing and cause you to be knocked around very little while in the air. You also deal damage when landing on somebodies head.

Pro and con arguments

• They are very situational.
  
• You're giving up the gunboats to run these.
  
• The knockback reduction is too big and you can't avoid people bombing you with this.
  
• They would add an interesting dynamic for last bombing in on last.

Dragons Fury (Banned) - https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Dragon's%20Fury
This weapon hasn't been allowed in the global whitelist before.
Rather then a consistent stream of flames you shoot out a flame "ball" that puts people on fire temporarily. Hitting people that are on fire will do increased damage. If you where to hit every shot you would do more damage then with a traditional flame thrower. Airblasting cooldown is increased by 50% making the weapon not as strong in defensive scenarios.

Pro and con arguments

• The slower airblast cooldown makes the weapon rather weak in the main usage of pyro in 6v6. Which is holding lasts.
  
• The increased damage compared to the other flame throwers is limited and also requires the user to hit all of the attacks.
  
• The "ball" that it shoots blocks out vision, but so do normal flame throwers.

Loch'n load (Unbanned) - https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Loch-n-Load
You have a slower clip size, explosion radius and the pipes shatter on touching a surface but your projectiles are faster and do more damage to buildings.

Pro and con arguments

• The weapon has less clip size and due to the lack of rollers it can be used less it spam down chockes
  
• The increased projectile speed make the pipes easy to hit directly

Iron Bomber (Unbanned) - https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Iron_Bomber
Your rollers bounce very little, have a smaller explosion radius and explode 30% faster. The projectile is also slightly faster with how the source engine works.

Pro and con arguments

• The difference is very minimal.
  
• The weapon is a straight upgrade due to you being able to place your rollers more consistently as well as due to the non-mentioned projectile speed increase.
  
• The projectiles are harder to see.

Crusaders Crossbow (Unbanned) - https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Crusader%27s_Crossbow
Ah shit here we go again.
You can heal people for 75-150 health with a fast moving projectile. The weapon reloads automatically even when not held out. It also still builds slight amounts of ubercharge.

Pro and con arguments

• It makes medic a more interesting class
  
• Coordination within fights to get arrowed quickly can allow for a serious advantage
  
• The coordination that is required is limited and just people yelling "ARROW"
  
• It makes it so that playing off of damage is very difficult
  
• It makes the game slower and more boring

Solemn Vow (Banned) - https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Solemn_Vow
It allows medics to see the health boxes of the enemy team the same as a spy can.

Pro and con arguments

• It allows for a medic to call out focus calls based off of what health he sees on enemy players.
  
• It removes the need of ubercharge tracking as you can just look at the enemy medic.

Diamondback (Unbanned) - https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Diamondback
It has a minor base damage penalty but can charge crits after getting a backstab or killing a building with a sapper.

Pro and con arguments

• You need to be able to get a backstab before getting a crit hit as buildings rarely are present in 6s.
  
• You get a free crit hit after getting a backstab making it possible to 2-shot light classes afterwards
  
• The weapon barely has a downside

Yes, its quite expensive. So people often try to cut off what they can when they're on a budget.

Some things that come to mind are, as mentioned already, the indoor camping or getting an airbnb with a group of people. Bringing a laptop to play on or trying to find a friend that can bring a spare(You can normally rent a monitor separately if you wish to). Getting odd flying times to lower the flight price. Or possible looking at not directly flying to Birmingham and hitching a ride from the airport that you do go to.

cu@

Shoutout to all of the organization for a very smooth tournament
Shoutout to airbnb/Tracksuit boys (Pete_, Maxi, Cnoz, Hobnobs/thomas46, Wandum)
Shoutout to Maxi for wanting to eat a hamburger every day
Shoutout to Wandum for unknowingly walking around with a L33T sticker on his back for most of LAN
Shoutout to my team, LAN culture, for breaking my curse of ending last every LAN
Shoutout to SUOMI
Shoutout Villdjack for letting me borrow a LAN cable
Shoutout to kodeeey for letting me borrow a mousepad
Shoutout to DeeDee for collecting autographs
Shoutout to alcohol

We used to drop teams that went over the hijacking/skill contribution limit before we polished the rule 3-ish years ago. Punishments range depending on the severity of the rule break.
Within playoffs the skill contribution/hijacking rule breaks always lead to default losses.

The fact that you're defending it in this manner really makes it seem like "We would only get a minor warning so we broke the rules to get to playoffs". Which is the overall feeling we got from this case as a whole. The default punishment is light, mainly because people mostly accidentally break the rule. Teams that do it consecutively or with clear intent get punished harsher.

The people have been shifting about and still do from time to time. It generally consists of a head admin from ETF2L, UGC and Ozfortress.(And formerly tri)

As to the other points that have been made I'll give some of my personal thoughts.
The initial whitelist was done super rushed and input gathered for it was from a very selective group of players/people. The base idea of having all non-bugged and non-overpowered weapons in the whitelist was done with the premise that valve would be able to get more data, balance the weapons based off of that data and to get closer to ingame matchmaking. The second part of having a global whitelist being nice was that international LANs would be less awkward.

Its been 10 months since any changes to any weapons. The ingame matchmaking has had barely any improvement after release and is disliked by everybody. This kills off any need to try and open up the whitelist to weapons that are annoying/obnoxious. As by doing this we're just ruining the gamemode that we've built up and in my opinion slightly ruined by trying to cater to valve.

The international part sadly enough got killed by ESEA but as there is still interest from the remaining leagues there is no reason to not keep it going for the time being.

The base premise for the "non-bugged and non-overpowered weapons whitelist" has always been broken as the crossbow is arguably one of the most OP weapons in the game. There have also been bans marked as overpowered while their only strength was stalemating(Natascha/Rescue Ranger). I personally feel that we should aim for a more balanced whitelist that primarily focuses on being competitive and secondly fun.

Although we haven't fully settled on what goal we want to achieve with the global whitelist. I dont think it will be far fetched from that one as its close to what we've been doing so far.

Although fun/competitive is very objective, it is still something most people have asked for in ever single whitelist discussion ever since the first global whitelist. I personally think this is largely because a lot of the people that play this game do so as a hobby. The scorch shot and detonator dont add anything to the competitive part and negates from the "fun" part. This is relevant as some teams in our lowest tiers run pyro full time.

I always gather feedback on the whitelist from Prem players before I look at proposing/giving input on changes as the core base is always the competitive part. Making everybody happy is impossible, making as much people as possible happy is still a goal that we should strive for.

The Global Whitelist™₍ₘᵢₙᵤₛ ₑₛₑₐ₎

Hello everyone,

Yes, we’re still here!
Although there haven’t been any real changes to weapons this past year, we’re still trying to optimise the whitelist ever so slightly. This time around, we’ll be doing away with weapons that are generally disliked due to various reasons.

The weapons that will be banned are:

Scorch Shot & Detonator

After last year’s Jungle Inferno update, afterburn damage was increased to compensate for the reduced afterburn time of flamethrowers. This meant that the Scorch Shot and Detonator received buffs without the introduction of any downsides.
With their increased AOE damage, extreme spammability, ability to remove stickies and afterburn’s effect on healing rates, we feel these weapons are now out of place and will be banned as a result.

Future

Moving forward with the global whitelist, we’ll be aiming to smooth out the process in a way that allows for updates more frequently.
This will take the form of either cutting down on weapons that become obviously unsuitable for 6v6, or allowing weapons to be used only after thorough testing and discussion.

-Your Global League Administrators

Thank you to Joe for proofreading.

Polls already closed

Okay, I'll defend myself real quick because Jedi is just going to fully leak the conversation anyway.

Firstly, yes I find dealing with these kind of cases retarded. They're a waste of my limited free time and I'd rather spend my time on actually hosting/managing the tournaments rather then having the deal with petty drama. Its messy and takes a lot of time and effort to properly look into.

This case in particular is stupid because its basically telling a player that knew he would be banned that there are indeed consequences, which in this case is an indefinite blacklisting until the video is gone. I tried to understand his train of though before fully applying it but he seems to not have any remorse or understanding of what he reuploaded even after I gave him the details to the case which will remain private for the rest.

I'll copy-paste a section that I've commented before as to why we include off-site content.

I'll add onto that, that generally off-site is ignored unless if its directly linked to ETF2L.

This case is a nice example as Jedi is talking about an ETF2L admin case. The platform where this is done has little impact on that. The largest issue with the video in itself at this point is that its spreading misinformation. This because it was only a small part of the reason why the original player got banned yet it constantly gets depicted as the only thing that he did wrong.

What?
This is one of weirdest analogies I've ever seen. Yes you can get banned for going against what an admin says. The request of the admin will not be anything ridiculous and if it is then the position of that admin will be questioned instead as we work as a group.
Your super simplistic example is made as ridiculous as possible. You could replace the cactus with any other element and it would still hold true.

"An admin told me that I would get a minor warning if I use 2 pyros during a game. We used 2 pyros during a game and got warning."
"An admin told me I would get a default loss if I abuse a bug. I abused it and now I got a default loss."

Your punishment is an indefinite ban that is just directly linked to your own stubbornness at this point. So there is very little discussion that is still relevant to it.

On a different side note that I do want to address. We have been slacking a bit with some recent admin cases as well as lack of cups. Mainly due to some lack of motivation and communication. We'll be paying extra attention to work on these in the near future. Working with volunteers that do this in their spare time will always make it difficult but we'll always aim to make the league better.

Having been one of the tournament admins on both I61 and I63 I personally feel like the actual tournament organization was messier then last year. This mainly because this year it was more of our own fault. As reference: last year we where, until last minute, forced to use a tournament system that wasn't functional in any form. This caused us to switch to toornament last minute so we could properly host the tournament. Our bracket, teams and groups where already known well on time. We didn't have LAN servers because they where not prepared properly by insomnia and once we had the base setup sorted for them they kept on taking up more and more memory eventually crashing after 10-20 minutes. This finally caused us to only have a couple of LAN servers with a machine that we brought and had setup. The open tournament had no LAN servers whatsoever.

Last year's preparation was largely thanks to heny. Miss you my man.

Now onto this year...
Out of our control:

• We where initially forced to use a dashboard to manage the servers which kept on bringing issues with it. We had planned into the schedule to test the servers well in advance but twiikuu's flight got delayed for 3 hours so he wasn't able to take care of it on the Thursday evening. Twiikuu then took most of the Friday to get the servers up and running and we finally had them operational for the last rounds of the group stages.
  
• toornament was having some issues throughout the day going as far as deleting one of the open group made fixtures. This was all fixable eventually but definitely caused some panic.
  
• The league of legends grand final went the full series and ended up delaying everything on the main stage after it due to poor planning. They went about 2 hours over their scheduled time. (don't blame the cs:go dudes or the players themselves)

Now onto the actual issues/mistakes:

• Me and dr.happiness where not sitting next to each other making communication extremely difficult. This because insomnia expected us to be seated with production and essentials expected us to get seated with the other tournament admins.
  
• Me and happiness had to scavenge for our pc parts on the Friday morning to get our setups going.
  
• On the Friday morning I got told: "Oh, we have a whole rule page on toornament. We copy-pasted the league of legends one and edited it". Giving me no time to properly read through it.
  
• We had to manually sign up some teams to the toornament page because it wasn't clearly communicated and they hadn't signed up themselves.
  
• The essentials discord is a mess and wasn't properly prepared for communication. From me not properly having access to ping all the team leaders to make them aware of situations to me not even being able to give the right roles to team leaders so they could get access to information. Certain teams or their team leaders where not in the discord shortly before everything was supposed to start. Players apart from their team leaders couldn't get into the channels that we where using for communication/announcements. This should have all been taken care of before the event.
  
• People still didn't know we had a public schedule on Friday afternoon after the games where already well on their way.
  
• In the middle of the grand final I had to go confirm on how the prize money organization was going to work. Nobody in essentials had any idea yet. We luckily managed to get this sorted properly.
  
• During the final the communication between production and staff on stage/the players was super limited and not well prepared. We where doing all that was possible with discord, me on just my mobile phone and dan in the back at production. One of the best examples is us missing the start of Granary. The internet of the production had dropped and, although they where 5 meters away, we had no clue on stage and ended up starting without them being close to ready.
  
• For the grand final we for whatever reason gave the time for when we can start with stage setup as starting time for the actual match. In a best case scenario the setup of the players easily takes 30 minutes(setting up peripherals, installing mumble, configs setup, ...). If any form of issues arise, which is almost always the case, it can easily take an hour.

There are a bunch of other things. Insomnia itself seems to have had some troubles with their organization after parting ways with multiplay. Talking to one of the head esports organizers after the finals made it seem like they are not too happy. Mainly because they had no clue on what the TF2 tournament was like in terms of general status but where getting some complaints.

Because you cant blend together 2 colors in css. You can only blend together 2 images or an image and a color. As these are supposed to be minor overlays that highlight who goes through to playoffs but not remove the separation of rows I recon an image was used.

Although the old design did only use images for 60-75% of all backgrounds so it might as well be that. I'll probably make it a background-color only item with some additional css.