One of the main points for them is to gain structured neutral feedback about weapons that is both positive and negative. Afaik they still want a weapon pick/ban system of some kind so they can find out both what people like playing with and what they hate playing against. On that basis it'll be no white list but with the potential for a pick/ban meta to evolve over time. If it happens to be enough to get rid of the most serious offending weapons then competitive type white lists will probably be established naturally.

I don't think it's that simple really, the notion that it's for the scene as a whole, for the excitement of an international lan, and to maintain a global TF2 event is a big motivator. It's not always tied up in personalities or individuals to that extent, a significant number of people would donate and want to cover the event whoever the teams were as long as they would be competitive.

The fact that people might withdraw that support in whatever form (whether it's as a leading organiser or simply giving a few dollars) because of personalities is a serious net negative. The line of people pissed off with froyo which appears to consist mostly of those selflessly giving their time for nothing keeps getting longer. Draw your own conclusions.

Some random stats from the i55 fantasy game. The ten players most often purchased in order were:
Flippy
Bulle
WARHURYEAH
enigma
TheFragile
-blaze
alfa
clockwork
Zebbosai
Mike

The least often purchased were:
duwatna
Herr_P
serotone
Shrugger
Bdonski
scrab
kaptain
rando
NiCO
KnOxXx

Two out of the top three teams finished the game with Alfie on their teams

Warhuryeah had the highest average damage output of any demoman in the invite group

Oz Fortress
Should now be up to date, thanks to brodogs for getting things together for me

i55
The i55 game is over (obviously) and 3 days furious roster management resulted in
Namtac's team Nice Meme in 1st
JotaP19's team Banana Split in 2nd
hg's (of course) team IBabe in 3rd

With the next ESEA season fast approaching I'm hopeful of getting the next game organised soon

The existence of alternative solutions was a reason why I haven't really pushed it, having something that's easy to stream was the main motivation but I think with steam login it might be easier to use and be more widely adopted.

If there's enough interest I might make it good enough for general use, it's pretty rough and ready at the moment but it could probably have some value analysing a map for/with team mates.

Stark deserves more recognition. Without him nerdRage aren't in the final, vote for toxic Tony

Heading into tomorrow team budgets should now be increased by 15000 across the board to compensate for the likelihood of cheaper players going out early. I may make an adjustment again for the final depending on who makes it.

You should have 24 for the tournament after the first selection

6 hours left boys #gratuitousbump

Bump for the day shift

Because budgets are tight when the knockout phase gets under way it will soon be impossible to field a complete team of active players. I will probably increase the budgets for all fantasy teams overnight before the knockout rounds so there's more flexibility.

Even if I upload a log days later it will still award players points as long as they were on your team when I say the game happened. I try my best to be accurate, but server times can come into it so I have to trust the log report, but apart from that as long as you leave some leeway between transferring players so you don't get caught out by a couple of minutes here or there you should be good. I'll be trying to update them reasonably quickly over the weekend.

I'm finding it difficult to keep up with as it's handled by forums for the most part and I think their challonge brackets have fallen behind, playoffs are included in the whole competition though so it's not over yet.