It means you can't chip damage at them to make them miss or wait longer to take a shot, which other than avoiding sightlines altogether is the only real way to avoid them getting easy picks. On maps like viaduct especially, where snipers are common and sightlines are everywhere, this makes sniper ridiculously powerful and is a massive upgrade over SMG or pretty much anything else (except debatably darwin's).

e: that's why it was banned the first time, thanks viper. It's not anywhere near as bad anymore, but there's still fully charged bodyshots. Even if it's not super significant, I don't think it does any good and just gets sniper to go slower and be less skillful.

It's all down to preference for each, but there is also some "if you play this class or this way you are more likely to like this setting."

Hud isn't completely irrelevant, despite what people say. Positioning and visibility of health/ammo do matter and they depend on things like your monitor size and how close to your monitor are you, how much tunnel vision you get, how good is your peripheral vision, etc. For things like damage numbers, some huds do just straight up do a better job than others for visibility. And some (especially in comparison to the default hud) do provide more useful info and hide pointless info too. But at the same time a lot of these won't change your performance, they just affect your comfort.

Small crosshairs are good for some. The benefit of a smaller crosshair is that it doesn't cover anything up and just gives you a subtle, but clear guide of where the center of your screen is. Some people like larger crosshairs, they do the same but it's more obvious, at the cost of being less precise. Some people like wings on their crosshair, it also makes its position more obvious and helps with lining up shots in the center of someone. Some people like pilot bars to make positions straight horizontal or vertical more clear. I personally use this monster right now, how bulky your crosshair is depends entirely on how you aim.

Sens is what's comfortable. That said a lower sens means you will have a smaller margin of error for when you're using things you want to be as accurate as possible (hitscan). Meanwhile a higher sens helps with fast twitches, which is useful for soldier and demo to rocket/stickyjump. Goes without saying but generally mouse accel is not recommended, unless you're an old quake player who's incredibly used to it.

You're saying it like they either get skill from playing against unlocks, or never get better at anything. People will improve whether things are banned or unbanned. You don't need to play against unlocks to get better or learn to adapt, you learn that just fine by playing normally.

I don't have numbers or statistics, I'm speaking all anecdotally. But I've been on teams with new players for pretty much every team I've been on, and I've tried to help plenty of new players get into competitive.

We do have signup and team numbers to get some idea for though. In etf2l, season 26 has 57 open teams, when season 25 and 24 had 87, and season 16 and 17 had ~100, not counting teams that quit. UGC has as many players in NA steel as it did when it also had iron, meaning new teams have essentially gone from ~200 to ~100 in recent seasons. And while I don't have the numbers on hand for open, it should be common knowledge that they're not getting better. This was always the main reason I heard we were making the whitelist so slack in the first place, and since all we've seen is a substantial decline, I think it's safe to say that it didn't work (whether or not it helped cause the decline, it certainly didn't stop it).

And while low signup numbers could be / are from a lot of things, if there's a decent chance that changing the whitelist could help, we should try it. Worst case scenario, we just give the majority of current players what they want (as we've seen from the polls, where 80% of people wanted a much stricter whitelist).

I disagree. That specific example came from one of my earlier teams. We were seeded #1 in ugc steel 6s (it's fucking nothing but we were all pretty inexperienced) and we just started playoffs. We rolled the #16 team so badly in the first half that we were considering playing without a 6th player, and I think we could've too but we decided to keep all 6. Then we lost the second half pretty quickly because they started running that setup, and we just had no clue what to do even if we otherwise outclassed and outDMed them hard. The third half we started running heavy too, and that worked out better, but we just barely ended up losing. I realize what we could've done better and how we could've made it work, but I am a little bitter that afaik the rest of the team quit then or a season after and never played again.

And since you brought up sandbagging, it would be great if we solved that completely. But it's not easy to regulate either, people will alt or play on new accounts, or maybe someone was just carried in this higher div so he's not actually sandbagging, or whatever. It's extremely easy to make them a lot less obnoxious though, just ban the shit that they're where 95% of a weapon's usage comes from. It's not an issue with the whitelist, but it's an issue that the whitelist can help plenty with.

It will always happen to some degree. It just depends how much. There always was a separation between skill levels, but it wasn't as big or as different as it is now. And while I do feel that this separation being a lot bigger than it needs to be is a big reason people quit (as I've said many times before), this just goes back to the citations argument where the only thing we have to go off of is anecdotes and the team signup decline.

And they still do. They still say "the only reason pyro isn't viable in competitive is because all his stuff is banned" or "I'd play competitive if I could actually use a loadout that isn't stock" or "even highlander is better, they dont ban as much." Even after the whitelist has been opened so much that they're all flat out wrong. What they really mean is that they don't care about competitive and want a reason to hate it, and we'll never be able to convince them to join.

We shouldn't focus our efforts on appealing to them, because we can't really do anything more for them (the whitelist is as open as it's gonna get without rebalances) and we haven't seen any results from compromising for them (as the signup numbers say). The only crowd we need to appeal to is the people who like the idea of competitive, but aren't currently playing for one reason or another.

But the meta didn't suddenly become this fresh, new, unstale and exciting thing when we moved to the open whitelist. I'd say the meta now is more stale than it was before we started unbanning everything, easily. How stale the meta is doesn't depend on how many weapons are available, it depends on how many strats are viable, and unlocks often actually limit those (such as with the crossbow).

And don't forget too that most of the weapons we could ban aren't actually used as a part of the meta. I'd bet you could ban half the current whitelist and see no impact on the meta, only on lower level teams and sandbaggers.

Does that mean it's somehow wrong? Hell, the whole point of the whitelist at the end of the day is to make sure the game is more fun / remove things that aren't as fun, so if the overall community's opinion is "we should ban things", doesn't that mean we should ban things?

I don't disagree entirely, and you have good points. But I think it needs to be said that adaptability isn't taught only through dealing with unlock-based gimmicks. I'd argue it's not even that good at learning adaptability, at least not for the type of adaptiveness you'll actually use at higher levels (where you need to be fast at recognizing and dealing with odd/uncommon/gimmick strats, and unlocks are very obvious to recognize and require dying/going to respawn to switch between them so it's not very fast either).

I'm not trying to say that there's nothing you can gain from learning to deal with unlocks, it's just that I think if they spent the same amount of time playing against more legitimate setups and strats then they'd learn faster and be more skilled by the end of it. And, for the people who need to be "coddled" (I don't really think it's being coddled if you want serious clean tf2, that's why I started playing comp at least), that would usually also mean they stick around. If something unavoidable is making people upset and leave, then adios, but if the entire issue is avoidable by something as simple as changing the whitelist, I don't see why we shouldn't. We don't exactly have the signup numbers to be putting up arbitrary barriers.

It's always going to be different, but that doesn't mean we need to go out of our way to bring more differences. I think it'd be better to try and make it as close as we can, we don't need to have things that for the most part just cause a bigger difference between skill levels without adding much. Especially when the difference we're talking about is mostly in how chaotic things are, and the appeal of competitive to a lot of newcomers is that it's supposed to have as little chaos as possible.

I can't really disagree, it's down to opinion. I'd prefer to ban anything that does more harm than good to the game in general, but that's just me and I don't speak for everyone. As long as we cut down on the current whitelist though I'm happy.

It's not as black or white as that. When you're new and don't really know much about how the game works competitively and neither do your opponents, really dumb stuff can destroy you. You can do well against completely meta setups because that's what all your practice went into, even if you're not flexible at all. And then you can get completely dominated by a natascha heavy + degreaser pyro + dr spy because you have no clue how to deal with something that completely goes against everything you know, even if a more competent team would just outplay them because they have a better understanding of what to do.

I think it's not really reasonable to expect that from new players. There's a good chance they joined competitive because we keep telling them "competitive is so much less chaotic and way more clean than pubs, you don't ever see these garbage unlocks and retard strats." But at low levels with our current whitelist, that's not really the case at all, and the worst part is that some of them work. What they end up experiencing is often closer to an organized pub, and a lot of them will just go pub instead after they see that.

Did they deserve to lose? Maybe, that depends on who you're asking, but whether they win or lose and who deserves what isn't the issue here. The issue is that they're going in matches and playing this chaotic game that's hardly like competitive. They don't like it and would much rather be playing actual competitive. But they can't, because the dumb strats allowed by the whitelist are often more effective just by being something the other team has never even considered, even though it's no fun for anyone.

It's just a lot of extra work to put on new players, when there's not really any reason to justify it. High level players don't have to deal with this stuff, the game isn't changed whether they're banned or not. Low level players are the ones who do face it, and they certainly don't want it. The only solutions for them are to:

1. Get better, which they'd do anyway with or without bans, so it's not an argument either way.
   
2. Practice against those unlocks, which is a lot more work for something that'll get invalidated pretty quickly since they'll only ever see those unlocks when they're still low level. Not to mention it's really aids practicing against a specific gimmick weapon in the first place.
   
3. Quit playing. Which is what a lot of new players do, since the competitive they're playing is nothing like the competitive we play and say is fun, and we basically just lied to them.

It's a "no different" at best, "pretty shit" at worst. Or, instead, we can just change the whitelist and make all of that completely nullified, and not have to deal with it at all. We didn't see any benefits from opening the whitelist, and instead every good thing that we'd thought would happen ended up backfiring, so it's not like we're losing anything by doing that.

England is an actual country, that is also a part of the United Kingdom, which is also a country.

Quebec is pretty out there and definitely borderline. But it's also culturally unlike anywhere else in Canada and in recent times has almost become its own country as well (the referendum in 1995 was 49.4% in favour of leaving Canada, and it's only extremely recently that this percent went down). My bet for why the Quebec flag is included is because of that, but I can't say for sure. Clearly not a Maryland situation here.

It's ugly as fuck

I was using fun like it meant depth (because depth is fun). You can replace what I said with depth, or with skill, or with whatever and it doesn't actually change it; crossbow is far from empty when it comes to depth/skill/fun, but it ultimately removes more than it adds in the game overall. We've seen the game become less deep, less skillfun, and less fun imo, as a result of the crossbow buffs.

It might turn out that way, that's one way you can theorycraft it. My personal theorycrafting is that soldiers will get more heal priority again, because they still need health and survivability to have a presence, and losing your tankiest class means the enemy team would have a much easier time pushing in. And without the crossbow to heal them instantly from a long range, you're going to need to buff them up instead. Doubling to make games less stalematey because someone needs to rotate to give them heals, giving more opportunities to push in and meaning you can't just hold forever like current teams can. But at the end of the day, we won't know who's right until something actually gets done about the crossbow and we see first hand what happens.

As for the demo nerf comparison, we know that the demo nerf buffed scouts. No one can really argue it because that's pretty much universally agreed on. The crossbow is a lot more complicated, and we can't say definitively that it buffed soldiers and nerfed scouts, because while it meant we can keep soldiers safe while far away and without rotating, it also meant that we can dedicate more healing time to scouts and soldiers can't try and make plays as much because the enemy flank is locked down a lot more (because they can just heal up any damage with the crossbow again). You could be right that removing the crossbow would be the same as the demo nerf, or you could be wrong and leaving it in is what's actually buffing scouts (just a lot more indirectly).

I don't think anyone's denying that the crossbow does have some valid things to offer. Maybe not going out of the way to mention it, because you're arguing a point here, but no one's saying "it has literally nothing good about it." It is a fun weapon to use mechanically, even if people (myself included) will argue that it makes the game overall a lot less fun (that said, it's not entirely bad and there are benefits too, but it's a matter of which one outweighs the other). It's a shame too because it used to be a pretty well balanced sidegrade, and fundamentally nothing about what made it good then has changed.

It's just that at this point, with the current amount of buffs it's been given and what it ended up changing about the game, it takes away more than it gives. The game is, imo, overall worse off now than before the crossbow got so many buffs. It would be great if that wasn't the case and we could revert to an earlier version that didn't have the problems introduced through constant buffing, but we can't control balance other than through bans. And if something is overall hurtful to the game, even if it does have good things about it, imo we should ban it.

I'm talking mostly from a spectator pov though, so I've definitely got bias towards the overall game vs individual medic mechanics, but that's just my 2 cents.

Probably should've split "no" into a few more options. If someone said "The current whitelist is way too open, but I don't think it should be that strict either", they might pick the same as "the current global whitelist should actually unban more" which are pretty different views.

For experienced players, yeah. It doesn't really matter whether they're banned or not because they should never be seriously run anyway, or if they are for some reason, you are able to win against it without much issue.

For new players who are still trying to figure out how to play against a completely regular team, you can't except them to be able to outplay extreme gimmicks (even if they're suboptimal at higher skill levels). I've seen tons of new players stop playing because "we could beat them if they weren't abusing dumb shit that shouldn't even be allowed" or "these sandbaggers were so obnoxious with these bad unlocks, they only used them to tilt us", it's probably the #2 reason new players quit from what I've seen (after lack of organization/time, but you can't really solve that in a day like you can the whitelist).

New players are the ones who are actually affected by aids unlocks. One of the biggest reasons we moved to an open whitelist is to try to appeal to new players, so I think we need to seriously look into the fact that it just ended up alienating them.

What are you talking about? Lone medics plowing down everyone with syringes and making it out alive is the most clutch thing I've ever seen in tf2. Syringe plays were great to watch (I'm not a medic main but I'd imagine they'd feel great to do too) when people actually played with syringes. Way better than any crossbow play I've seen imo.

But in any case, if your favorite thing about medic is the mechanical skill of xbow DM, maybe you shouldn't be playing medic and should play a class that actually emphasizes DM.

But the trolling won't be as obnoxious, because a perma spy is better than a perma YER DR spy that abuses them to be even more annoying. Even a perma regular spy isn't entirely bad because at some point you will see someone legitimately offclassing to spy, and you will have some slightly better idea what they're doing, whereas a perma spy running loadouts no one would ever seriously use isn't going to help you at all.

And don't forget that half the weapons in the current whitelist are only ever used for this purpose, so I think it's definitely a good reason to ban them.

That isn't how that plays out though, what's ended up happening is new players feel more overwhelmed by a big open whitelist when what they actually want (arguably even moreso than most high level players, who as we can see from this thread definitely want it) is a clean and concise "this is unbanned because it's a good weapon in the meta." New players aren't going into competitive so they can do whatever with their favorite gimmicky weapons, they're getting into it because they want to learn how the meta works and how to play well, and an open whitelist is just another (unneeded) obstacle.

Another big issue for new players is that when you allow a bunch of dumb, bad unlocks that no one would seriously use, more experienced players who're dicking around will use them just to dominate people who aren't skilled enough to deal with that yet. And that's a huge discouragement for new players. Even just getting wiped and losing a round a minute to a team actually playing is better because at least they see another team do what they're supposed to, fighting against a team of gimmick loadouts is just a frustrating waste of time for everyone involved.

There isn't really harm in useless unlocks for experienced players, but it is bad for new ones. Personally I think that if a weapon doesn't have a clear benefit to being included in the meta, it should be banned entirely, because useless stuff only makes understanding the meta harder for newbies and makes stomping even more pointless and discouraging.

We've tried to see the benefits; telling valve "this thing isn't overpowered" and trying to convince pubbers that "we're not elitists or playing a completely different game, look our whitelist has only a few things banned", neither one worked or had any actual impact, so I don't know why people are still trying to hold on to those like they might start working if we just give it more time.

Well yeah, because the whitelist hasn't actually gotten any better.

It's an issue with windows being screwy with fonts, saying they can't be deleted because they're "in use" even when they're not. Everything else in your folder should be deletable.

Safe mode and deleting, safe mode and renaming after changing permissions, closing windows explorer and deleting through commandline, removing its registry references (scroll down a bit), are all potential solutions. I had the issue once and fixed it, but I forget what I ended up doing.

Been meaning to ask, and since it's banned here but allowed in most whitelists, it's as good an opportunity as any. What's everyone's opinion on the winger? I don't see it discussed much, but at the same time it's not an uncommon loadout choice.