clorgHow is this any fun? Any good team will just ban the essential blatantly overpowered/dumb items like wrangler etc, and once it becomes the meta of what items to ban everyone will ban them just like league. At least with dota2 they ban the really good heroes first then start banning off of what the other team is picking. This on the other hand makes no sense at all and you will be playing with dumb weapons that would be banned in the regular format. Please explain further why this is a thing.
It is a thing because we want to make those weapons you call dumb weapons viable.
And just as Robin walker wanted, we want to have much more variation in competitive play, because that sounds like an awfully lot of FUN.
But you know different people have different tastes, so you don't have to like it.
kKaltUuI've given up on pick&ban matches. After organizing quite a few of those I figured it's more effort than necessary.
Let me explain a bit:
Whitelists are built with the intention of adding blocking broken weapons and having anything else up for grabs.
Unlocks are not needed for 6v6 classes, most people here have roots in 6's or have played it up to that they begin to understand that meta. Medic / Scout / Solly / Demo / Sniper are all classes that can do well whatever the situation. The problem lies with those other classes. Focus an Engineer and you already limit him.
As seen in the No-Wrangler ONC, engineers were struggling in finding a way to make themselves as useful as they were with the Wrangler.
Same thing for the pyro, spy or even heavy (GRU / FOS / Sandvich). The fact is that all pick & ban formats we tried (which went from banning 2 weapons up to banning 36 weapons, aside from the pick variants we tried next to that) weren't enjoyable for the players on both teams that played a class with an important ban.
The last problem we faced was that players were getting tired of the system. Playing fat kid / pick&ban takes so much longer than a normal PUG or mix.
Mind you, we even had the alpha version of whitelist.tf (credits to my teammate Wiethoofd) to make whitelists which were added to the server instantly.
I have more points to make but frankly I'm too stoned.
Anyway if you can make this happen I salute you, just keep in mind not all weapons and classes are equally as important to ban or pick.
About this taking a long time, we have made it so that 5 persons from each team bans 1 weapon each, so we won't have any discussions about what to ban, each person choose whatever he/she likes. Also we might give them 10 seconds each to choose to hurry it up (really they should have decided that before it's time to play).
If this doesn't work out we just have to decide it on our steam groups page or something before the scheduled matches start.
Then about some of you getting tired of the format I can't say much about. It might be that it just weren't these particular persons taste.
I still think it sounds like an awfully lot of FUN. So I'm still going to try my best to make it happen.
Anyway it's great to hear that some people actually have tried this, because it seems like you can't find anything like that when you search on Google.