I've done some analysis and posted it here

I'll repeat it here as well, the intention is NOT to identify unlocks that might be worth releasing from the ban list and looking at some of the items that haven't attracted many votes should show why interpreting these results in that way would be a bad idea.

If there's interest I might repeat the exercise with all unlocks, and maybe simulate a pick phase as well. There are limits to this though, given that votes are anonymous but it's possible to do some different types of analysis on that as well.

I think it was Clockwork that also made a good point about the Pyro (although he didn't put it exactly like this), it's specialism is giving people who have no fps experience at all a way to play the game.

I think that's correct and it should really be positioned as a class players move on from once they get a certain amount of experience and learn to aim. That it has a niche use in terms of denying uber pushes into certain last points is probably about as much as it should be capable of at the top level.

So yeah, fuck pyro

Valve don't endorse any existing competitive mode because no mode has the numbers playing that gives them confidence in it. This chart

http://imgur.com/1OSJUFM

does not lie. TF2 players do not play competitive to the extent that we are collectively little more than a statistical error. There is more interest in Versus Saxton Hale and cp_orange than competitive. It's not that Valve don't like the meta, it's that the overall player base doesn't and we've had enough in game announcements and news posts that most players at least know something is going on.

I've done my own study on this with both TF2 servers and CSGO servers. The CS ones had 88% of the population playing defuse mode maps (de_) in the competitive rotation, and CS has many times the numbers of players that TF2 has. It's a completely different world, alternative modes that are supported in client are an afterthought for the community. It is completely dominated by the primary competitive format, the polar opposite of where TF2 sits.

If Valve want to keep developing the game having competitive events that create highly viewed streamable content is a great idea but they're not reacting to a popular groundswell of grassroots opinion. That's why they (probably justifiably) have little faith in existing competitive formats to become mass market successes and they're experimenting with their own version from a very basic level.

It's correct that the speed of changes is the primary problem though, it will be pure luck to hit on a winning format with one update a year. If the development method is to iterate changes and collect feedback.... where is the next iteration?

I'll ask your permission next time

Although most players agree the Vita Saw is a bad addition to the game, it seems like people would rather prioritise stuff that is frustrating in direct combat than something that messes with the tactical aspect of the game.

That theory doesn't explain Mad Milk though. Maybe there's an element of scout unlock banning fatigue

The casting team would 5-0 every team that's actually playing

Thanks to everybody that has responded so far, you are champions. I've quickly run some initial analysis on the data gathered and there is some interesting reading.

http://i.imgur.com/n3dSy4j.png

Crit a cola, Atomizer, the Quick Fix, Reserve Shooter and Wrangler lead most people's banning priorities list. It may be a backlash caused by exposure but it does show how divorced from community sentiment the idea of unbanning the Quick Fix is.

In this world however there'd be a very good chance items like the Buffalo Steak Sandvich, Fists of Steel, Solemn Vow, Sydney Sleeper and Guillotine would make it into a lot of games as they just don't attract a large volume of votes. That means annoyingly hard to kill heavies, but they'd also be covered in piss and getting a guillotine in the face so maybe it all balances out?

Looking at voting tendencies, Crit a Cola being such a widespread ban would be less likely to have a much of a relationship with any other unlock. However it has a fairly strong negative correlation with ban votes for the disciplinary action. Possible Soldier's union at work?

The most predictably correlated banning pair are the GRU and Fists of Steel, although the GRU are a far more commonly banned item.

Projecting the vote distributions into a game situation these are likely levels of voting in any given game (still assuming that only items on the current ban list would be targeted)

http://i.imgur.com/DhE38Ng.png

Looking at this the minimum level for accepting a ban looks to be about 6 votes against. This is also logical as with 5 "ban points" available to each user for a single item it prevents troll banning unlocks the vast majority want like gunboats. However with a standard deviation of around 7 many unlocks like the BASE Jumper, Vita Saw and Bonk! would still appear in games around a third of the time with more acceptable unlocks occasionally being banned instead. Only Crit a Cola, Atomizer and the Quick Fix would be kept out more than 95% of the time.

Early indications are that a vote ban would probably need more options available to produce a more stable meta

I'd love to get more data to give a better analysis, so if you haven't filled it in I hope this might change your mind. I might run this again with more unlocks at some point to give a broader picture of both how a pick/ban might play out and get a better overall view of unlock sentiment in the community.

One of the things you can do with the data is get an idea of the kind of distribution you would be likely to get if people had anonymous votes for this kind of system, and that can give you a guide to what kind of number of votes or weighting and scoring preserves the 6v6 meta a reasonable amount of the time, as well as which unlocks are likely to slip through (although obviously if you had the full range to vote on it's different).

I'm not trying to push for more unlocks to be released or anything, just get a more detailed picture of the community perception of those that remain banned. I agree it's probably cut about as far as it can go with maybe only a couple of marginal candidates left.

This also potentially gives some idea of the worst offenders/most unpopular in a completely empirical way if Valve are interested. If there are enough responses then I could also look at correlations in voting patterns, "people who hate this also hate...", those kind of things as well as assessing the differences from the other questions. There's a lot of stuff that can fall out of it although admittedly it might only be of interest to me

e: that last point could be an interesting factor in matchmaking, in that you could match people with varied voting patterns instead of accidentally matching people who always ban scout unlocks who then end up with parachuting soldiers and heavies to mid being quickfix healed.

Blame the global whitelist illumimati. We're all just pawns in their evil game

Unfortunately in google forms there's no combination of validation that works well. I did try

If you feel you would like to play Gru Heavy in 6v6 feel free to make your choices accordingly. Nobody will know it's you

Hello gamers,

I have made a short and easy to complete unlocks survey with the idea of identifying which currently banned unlocks are most shunned by competitive players and possibly why via a "simulation" of a weapon ban vote. It's pretty short because you only get to choose a few options so it shouldn't take long and the options are restricted to currently banned items. You do need to login to google to complete it but don't worry, I'm not collecting any personally identifiable information

Survey is here, fill it in. What have you got to lose?

For those who like to justify their choices there's the potential to nerd essay your reasons for them as well, well thought out reasons will of course be worthwhile

If some interesting data falls out I'll post some analysis, and because it's structured there's the potential to send some feedback to the development team (and who knows? Maybe even the global whitelist illuminati) that might be useful to them.

They also made it clear when enigma and others had a meeting there but there's no direct documentation, just their report.

This would only really work out if comp.tf also shut down operations. To combat content farms most search engines consider the earliest source of content they find to be the authoritative version and will classify copies as meaningless in their results, frequently ignoring them completely. Comp.tf's content outstrips the new liquipedia by years in those terms, so although it might fill up the wiki it doesn't produce certain types of organic traffic.

Because of it's status liquipedia can expect to get significant organic traffic, it's content to be considered significant, trustworthy and authoritative by search engines, and I imagine it judges a certain amount of success of it's wikis in those terms. If the content is unique there's a good chance it outranks comp.tf on the same subjects.

If comp.tf shut down and forwarded the domain to the liquid wiki in a specific way (I'm not saying they should, just what would have to happen) then the copied content would be considered the new home.

If someone wants to copy content over, rewrite it in your own style first to make it unique. Anything from sentence level down needs to be altered, having a different number of paragraphs also helps. Having the broad direction be the same and the progression of arguments follow the same pattern is no problem. No search engines are intelligent enough to discriminate on that basis.

Liquipedia probably wouldn't be impressed

It's not