ward3d What other game has restrictions like class limits and weapon whitelists today?
Smash? Hell it has even more restrictions considering literally all items are off lol. Imagine if people in the smash community suggested that they turn items on because it's more familiar to the casual player/outsiders who only see smash as a party game. Turns out that allowing uncompetitive things when you're trying to make a competitive game solely for the reason that "it's part of the base game" is a fucking terrible idea. Not to mention that cs was about to ban the r8 revolver before it got fixed. I really think you're overestimating how complicated the idea of "it's banned because it's broken or uncompetitive" is.
NurseyI'm completely willing to deal with the very minor negatives of unlocks that will barely scratch the meta of our game if it even means it'll help out even the tiniest of bit. It feels like I'm trying to stay optimistic while most of those around on this site are trying to take any enthusiasm away.
People like b4nny always spout this shit about players needing to sacrifice their own enjoyment of the game "for the greater good" but literally what benefits are there at all to unbanning uncompetitive unlocks? You already admit that unbanning these unlocks only brings potential negatives to the game itself, and at best affects nothing. I remember during the initial global whitelist push (which btw NA has totally abandoned, what happened to people like SLIN saying that the communities should have 1 whitelist lmao) the proponents were saying that unbanning unlocks will also attract new players. Unfortunately, that has not been the case and the pattern in player numbers went basically unchanged pre and post global whitelist, so it'd be a little absurd to think that an extra few unlocks would make any sort of change. Where exactly are these supposed benefits, no matter how small?
NurseyI highly doubt there's anyone currently playing this game that thinks there's a miraculous event we can make occur to make us a relevant esport.
The reason people jokingly bring up "Valve major" is because appealing to Valve was a big reason for the mass unbans within the global whitelist, and considering it's been two years since then and the comp tf2 community has absurdly little to show for it, I personally am quite cynical toward that particular line of reasoning.
Kind of a side note, but believe me when I say I've spent a LOT of time talking to tf2 players who have never touched any competitive format, ranging from the average pubber to the casual comp stream viewer to people who vehemently antagonize anything even vaguely related to comp, and I've met maybe 2 people who actually avoided comp because of certain unlocks being banned. Once that unlock got unbanned (gunslinger for both), they still avoided comp because turns out full-time engineer still sucks. The reasons why people don't want to play comp are either because they can't play their main full time viably and/or they hate 5cp (oftentimes these two things are tied together) or they only enjoy the chaos of 12v12 class stacking pub tf2 on maps with infinite sightlines and awful chokes.