ESEA already followed through and unbanned the players.

I did some off-the-cuff calculations just to verify, and it seems all but certain that the prize pot increases will be going to CS:GO Invite, Premier, and the new Open divisions in Australia and Asia-Pacific.

Still a pretty cool thing to see, though.

More teams getting bans, and it's been clarified that it's an indefinite ban subject to review:

Source: http://www.esl-one.com/csgo/katowice-2015/news/update-on-the-offline-qualifier-including-disqualifications-invites-and-more/

No can do (at least for now), but I've got a related project in the works. Hopefully what it shows will help some Open teams from getting discouraged by their results.

It's over in a flash, don't fret.

It can work either way. In a draft system, players are distributed to the teams via a draft (where players pick in a predetermined order), and then players can be traded during the course of the season. There isn't any concept of money in such a system.

I disagree. One restriction is caused by game mechanics, while the other is totally independent of game situation. It's the difference between a player being temporarily unable to buy an AWP because their team did not save or win enough rounds to do so and a player being permanently unable to buy an AWP because of a decision made pre-game. In the former instance, only the team faced with the decision is directly affecting the choices available, and that too based on their performance, while in the latter instance, both teams have a direct effect on the available choices, with the game's progression having no bearing.

That distinction is significant because in Dota, where you see the pick/ban stage, the strategies of the game are primarily based on the heroes played, and so placing more weight upon these lineups through a pick/ban stage is ideal. In CS and TF2, however, the strategies of the game are primarily based around the map, which has a partial effect in some classes/weapons being more powerful than others. When the meta is based around a certain subset of classes and weapons because they're the most effective, it doesn't make sense to allow teams to arbitrarily eliminate those weapons (and consequently the ability of players to affect the game with their mastery of said weapons) just for the sake of increasing variability.

When I was referring to all else being equal, I meant that every map is played with the same set of rules - the AWP won't be allowed in one match and banned in another (but is limited by its high cost), and similarly the soldier won't be allowed in one match and banned in another (but is limited to two per side). Obviously the games are played differently, but the ruleset stays consistent across maps, and map selection in both plays a significant part in determining the course of a match.

As for class/weapon restrictions, certainly, but my point is that it's not a part of active team strategy, and whatever is done is part of an attempt to further balance the game, not as an attempt to add strategic complexity.

The main problem that I've always seen is that TF2 doesn't have a perfect correspondence with Dota to justify a pick/ban system with classes or weapons. In TF2, the meta heavily revolves around classes while the game's balance is more dependent upon weapons, but in Dota, both revolve around heroes. Thus, a Dota-style pick/ban system in TF2 will not work as well because there's no perfect correspondence to the role that heroes play.

In this regard, TF2 more closely corresponds to CS, where the game's variety revolves around maps with all else being mostly equal. You wouldn't have a system where you would pick or ban weapons in CS, but you do have a system where you pick and ban maps, and that system already works well with TF2. How exactly will substituting a class or weapon pick/ban system for the current map pick/ban system solve more problems than it creates?

The stats you can pull from ESEA include time, so you can always do stats like kills per minute, damage per minute, ubers per minute, etc. if there's a major issue.

Correct me if I'm wrong (since I haven't played it before), but I believe fantasy sports is purely based off of stats and doesn't take into account which game a player is playing in (so Tom Brady won't be penalized just because the Patriots are rolling the Raiders or something like that), and as a result part of the strategy in fantasy is starting certain players based on how you think they'll perform that week. I would think a TF2 fantasy league should work the same way.

Again, I'm nowhere near an expert on fantasy so feel free to call me out where I'm wrong.

It's definitely possible to make one, and quite a bit simpler than UGC because of how accessible stats are on the ESEA site.

The difficulty comes down to setting a format - how do you draft players onto teams (given that an Invite team dies each season), how do you regulate which players will start (so that a team can't start 6 medics or something ridiculous), how do you award points for stats, etc.

Would it be a cool project? Definitely. I would love to contribute to making this happen, but the issue is (as always) having the people who can dedicate their time to seeing it through to completion.

The hacker in me wonders how I can lay my hands on that source code, but I wonder how useful it would be after over 7 years of updates.

Where did they even get this old source code anyway? Putting "acquired" in quotation marks seems shady.

The ESEA scrim servers seem to have some interesting features that could potentially be useful, plus I'm paying for this so if it can be taken advantage of we might as well try to.

And practicing the conditions that we'll have to play might help a little bit.

What's great about this is that all of us who have already filed tickets and had them closed can't file others without risk of being banned for support system abuse.

It looks like the newer tickets are getting actual responses, though, which is nice.