Its weird to say "changes are being controlled by a small group of people" and in the same paragraph also acknowledge why this may be a good reason ("awful balance takes" referring to open-mid players). Plus when you look at the number of votes for the Gunboats Plugin less than half of the votes were D1 and D2, when you take into account that Prem Players are most capable of exploiting the Plugin and took up the majority of the vote its pretty clear as to why the Admins ultimately sided with the Premiership vote when it was closely tied. Is it representative of what the majority of players may think? Probably not. But simply brushing the justification aside because Flares thinks its stupid is, in fact, just as stupid. I'm not even sure of this, but did Flares even ask the Admins directly about the weapon bans?

Woolen did a great job in his video as he made sure that whether he agreed with a ban or not, he presented the ban as is and its reasons, consulted the admins, and let the audience decide whether its justified or not. Flares comes into this video without this objectivity and instead paints the Admins with a very large brush. Speaking from experience, Admins often disagree with which weapons get banned but when they do they have a extensive discussion before going ahead with anything.

The problem here is that when we TRY to explain these bans, and ETF2L do give examples from players and in the news posts for the justifiations, Casual/Low-tier Comp players just put their fingers in their ears and insist that there is this vendetta against anything even slightly off-meta.

New players aren't really going to be all to aware of the discrepancies between whitelists, when they are still grappling with the basics of competitive play. And I would be shocked if the difference between a casual playing competitive and not is whether or not the Loch-N-Load is banned, there are FAR greater issues with competitive play that are active roadblocks between casual and competitive. Those are things that we could actually work on instead of this belief that weapon bans do anything to increase accessiblity in the scene. As weapon bans have loosened signups have actually declined, but in reality the whitelist has very little impact on engagement in the scene.

I think you have a point to have an article or page making clear current weapon bans as right now the only way to find out is through Whitelist.TF which isn't ideal. But that would do so very little to actually change peoples mind. Just going through the comments on Woolen's video its clear that even when you provide a legitimate argument, Casual players will still parrot YTber's or Reddit's talking points because they themselves don't understand the complexity behind what goes behind a weapon ban. Hell, even most competitive players don't.

Again, I think we need to have a candid discussion about how we go about a weapon ban and what it means to cross that line between ban/unban. I am all for a good healthy discussion here, but presenting admins as morons just doing whatever Prem Players tells them really doesn't do anything but further villainises Volunteers taking up their valuable time to keep the scene going. Lots of people are willing to sit back and moan, but do very little in actually trying to make a change. Run an experimental cup, post it on TFTV, get a bunch of youtubers for a shout out, see if you can get something up on KritzKast or ETF, and get some data and feedback. Hell we're in an off-season, it wouldn't be hard to do it.

TL;DR: Video is argued in bad faith, diminishing any valid points made. We do need to look at EU's approach to weapon bans, whilst acknowledging that the Whitelist will always be a compromise between the huge range of opinions on balance in competitive play.

As someone who has been involved in whitelist discussions before, during, and after the Global Whitelist this video is a pretty poor and biased view of ETF2L's approach to weapon bans. Yet, I do think that there are certain weapons that have been banned recently that should get another look and I believe that we have lent a bit too heavily of the "X weapon is not fun to play against" argument in recent years as opposed to functional impacts on the pace or flow of gameplay.

But this video makes no attempt at even considering the other side(s) of the argument outside of "ETF2L Bad". The most blatant case of this is when they talk about the Global Whitelist and how unrestricted it was and lament that its no longer adopted. When it was ESEA and the NA scene that made the first move away from it, ultimately destroying the precedence that all of us had been working hard to establish. Whats the point of a Global Whitelist when a Region/League does its own thing when they don't like the current bans? I continue to hold the belief that the end of the Global Whitelist set us back years in terms of progress.

And of course it makes more sense to trust Prem Players' view on the game over an Open Player. Whilst I do believe that Non-Prem Players should have a voice through polls and forum discussions, top players have a better insight into what can disrupt the flow of play and how best to exploit these weapons. I think some of the more questionable bans can be attributed to a circlejerk pushing the ban forward with no-one else really pushing back on it.

We do need a honest discussion in EU about how we approach weapon bans at a higher level. What crosses that line between Bannable and Unbannable? Like the Wrap Assassin was unbanned for years and only gets banned once a couple of prem players use it more frequently. Now you can argue about whether its justified or not, but ultimately you cannot put that ban in the same category as something like the Mad Milk or Wrangler - its FAR less impactful. But this video makes such a bad faith attempt at having a good discussion that even when some valid points are made, they still come across as ignorant of the equally valid counter-arguments. There is no right answer as to what is and isn't a good weapon ban, its all entirely opinion, and pretending there is some objectively correct whitelist is not the way to encourage a healthy debate.

I think an intercontinental LAN is certainly possible, the problem however is that its going to be very expensive for someone. Whether thats the players flying over, or the organisers having to front costs for venues etc. If you are spending more to fly over to compete than you would get for winning the tournament there isn't much incentive to attend outside of the competition / community aspect.

So you doubt the quality of the evidence to submit to RGL, yet are willing to put that same evidence to the public with some strong accusations out the gate? There is a reason all of the organisations have places to report people, so that we can fairly evaluate the evidence and make rulings without the court of public opinion placing weight on the scale. As MarioManz mentioned there is a thread which clearly outlines where you can submit reports of misconduct.

If what you say is the truth, this is a incredibly irresponsible way of doing it.

I don't have much to really add to the larger debate aside from the fact that AC usually is a lot more complicated than people on TFTV make it out to be, and that the same people complaining will never put their names forward to actually being an AC admin and making the 'clearly obvious' changes that can be made to the process of AC.

I'm mainly wanting to point out that this suggestion is incredibly dumb. Like, what is the point of having someones Steam DMs 'open' for people to send evidence to and to act as a middleman? The logistics of that don't even make sense, is someone supposed to friend every team leader for every division each season on the off chance that they send 'evidence' that could just be sent in a ticket? Who organises and gets people to send steam IDs, or are they supposed to just accept any friend request? Or to create a steam group and do stuff there which at that point is just another forum and adds complexity.

Its really not hard. If you have evidence or suspicions that someone is cheating, make a ticket. If you "no longer care enough to open up the rgl ticket system", TF do you expect the Admins to do? There are legitimate criticisms you can weigh against the AC team and this response, but presenting a solution when you can't even be bothered to do the bare minimum is ridiculous.

We've got confirmation from Valve that they will be adding medals in the next Update for DreamHack Atlanta and the DreamHack Community Clash that took place the month before. When they are added we'll be distributing them as soon as they are available. Massive thanks and shoutouts to Valve (mainly Eric Smith) for being accommodating about this.

So the team and I have had a check and unfortunately these medals were not distributed as of right now. Usually we avoid saying that we would be providing medals until we get confirmation from Valve that the medals would get added to prevent false promises. The fact that they were promised yet no medals were added to the game is a serious error on our part and for that we wish to apologise.

We have contacted Valve to see if they would be willing to add these retroactively so we can distribute them, but I want to say at this point there is no guarantee medals will be available for participants for this event. Going forward we will be making changes to how we plan events to ensure things like this which can get missed does not happen again.

Hello all,

We at EssentialsTF are undertaking new projects and as such believe it is a good opportunity to explain where we are taking the organisation over the next few years and how that is likely to effect our events and coverage.

The first project of ours is to ensure financial sustainability for TF2 events and coverage, from purchasing equipment, renting venues, and supporting volunteer expenses; there is plenty of costs that come with running tournaments and coverage in TF2. To do this, we are committing to producing frequent and high-quality streams and content where possible and as such we will be covering as much of the upcoming and future ETF2L seasons and affiliated tournaments & events. Streams will go live on our Twitch page as per usual, and VODs will be uploaded on YouTube promptly. In addition, with the hard work of our staff we'll be working through a backlog of events and getting them up on YouTube. The upload priority will be on recent events such as the ongoing ETF2L 6v6 Spring 2024 Season, with coverage of the poLANd.tf 2024 Winter LAN, i71, i69, and other past tournaments following.

Any money raised through our efforts will be directly re-invested back into ETF projects, whether that is LAN, Online Coverage, or supporting community projects. We'll be exploring other content and revenue streams in the future but for now our focus is on consistent and quality livestreams.

To manage this undertaking, we're looking for people to join the ETF Team! We're currently looking for people to support:

• Social Media
  
• Content Creation (Video Editing and Graphics)
  
• Producers
  
• Casters
  
• Developers

If there is anything here that you think you can help with, we'd love to hear from you! Contact a Team Leader via Discord with a basic background of any experience / skills you think would be useful for the role.

Finally, there have been a fair number of questions regarding an ETF LAN this year. As of right now there are no confirmed LANs and we would encourage that people avoid booking tickets for events or hotels in advance until we make any formal announcements. We are committed to running a LAN in 2024 and we should hopefully have more information later this year.

We're open to any comments, feedback, or questions as per usual. Either contact us on the ETF Discord or reach out to me or any of the Team Leaders. The rest of the team and I are incredibly excited about what we are creating and we hope that you look forward to what we do.

Links
Website
Discord
Twitch
YouTube
Twitter/X

Bumping this thread since it got kinda buried under the whole alt situation.

I am still looking for participants for this study and would like to get this done soon, I would be willing to extend the deadline for applications but there would need to be further interest. There have been a number of people who have expressed interest as individuals which is appreciated, but this study requires full teams to take part as how you play as a team is a key component of what I intend to investigate.

All relevant information is in the original post although I am open to any queries you may have.

This request is now closed, thank you to those who have made enquiries.

Hello all,

I am currently undertaking research as a part of my doctoral studies and as a part of that I am doing a follow-up study investigating expert video game decision-making that is similar to the one I made a request for a while ago. Taking part would require participants to record one of their matches (either a scrim or an official) and then sit in a 1 hour recorded interview in the following days/weeks (you should allow 2 hours of your time). I am looking for full teams to participate who have competed in any of the following league divisions and above, or equivalent:

• European Team Fortress 2 League (ETF2L) - Division 2
  
• Recharge Gaming League (RGL) - Advanced
  
• ozfortress (OZF) - High
  
• AsiaFortress - Division 1

All team members must also be over the age of 18 and have access to a computer or device capable of conducting a video call and recording video with a quality of at least 720p at 30fps. Taking part in this research is entirely voluntary. It is up to you to decide if you want to volunteer for the study.

I will be happy to respond to any questions you may have in this thread, but if you want the full details of the study I recommend that you reach out to me and I will send you documents with everything you would need to know. All necessary information will be provided and you will have at least 24 hours to review all documents before any scheduled interview/study.

The deadline for applications will be the 28th January.

If this is something that you feel that you would be interested in taking part in and you meet the above criteria, feel free to reach out to me through my Discord (DrHappiness#0897). If you would prefer to contact me via email, please send me a private message where I will send you any contact details you require. I will not be sending any documents through TFTV.

That aside, I thank you for your time.

DMCA Notice

If this is to be believed (I have no idea how to verify this), but it seems that the reason this got a DMCA takedown notice is that it ported TF2 assets to Source 2 and redistributed it on s&box which doesn't have a license for using Valve assets. While I think its weird that TF2 assets being ported to Source 2 is a problem, there does seem to be some justification.

Kinda similar to when OpenFortress and things like that got DMCA'd for using leaked source code.

Edit: According to the TF:Source 2 team, they contacted Valve and got confirmation that this DMCA claim is legitimate.

I am glad that I had the pleasure to work with Ohia because she was a fantastic, committed, and - most importantly - kind individual. She had tremendous drive in trying to improve the scene in their own way; interested in all the different aspects of the TF2 volunteer space, from adminning to production and casting. Their passing is a massive blow to the community and is something that I'm still processing, gone too soon.

The messages here shows the impact she had on others and their infectious personality is one that I will dearly miss. My thoughts go to the family and friends, rest in piece.

TL;DR Casual Mode sucks, Quickplay sucked a bit less, Valve dropped the ball.

I agree with him that Casual mode kind of ruined the sense of community where people could hop in and out. But I do think he's looking back with rose-tinted glasses a little bit. Quickplay wasn't exactly newbie-friendly and its 'wild west' nature meant that your experiences could vary wildly. Can you imagine the current day bots with access to sprays? Although at least with quickplay, you weren't stuck if the server wasn't your thing; you could just leave.

Casuals not great, but Quickplay wasn't either - people just point at everything in and around MYM as the reason TF2 as they remember it died, when that wasn't the case. Valve's failure came with not developing Casual further and making finding alternative ways of playing easier (Community Servers). The server browser is ancient and really needs a rework.

In my view Casual was supposed to bring a 'standard experience'. "You playing the game for the first time? Here's the basic way to play TF2". From there, people wanting something different could look towards community servers. The intent is fine, but the execution was bad and no attempts at fixing the issues it created were made.

No one thing from an update 'killed' this game, its just that MYM was a turning point where it was clear that Valve as a whole (not the TF Team) stopped giving a shit.

Honestly, anytime I've stood behind players on the stage for an Insomnia Final has been pretty damn memorable. The one standout moment is i63 with Se7en winning Granary in the last moment. Watching a wave of people in front of you leap up and cheer like that was something to behold.

Its pretty cheesy to say, but seeing people having a great time at LAN and making their own memories is the most gratifying feeling for me. When you can say to yourself that "I helped make this happen", that feeling of accomplishment is a huge reason why I keep doing this, years after I thought I'd stop.

LAN is awesome.

TBH its impressive how Zesty Jesus can consistently put out bad takes. The man (and this is genuinely true) believes random damage spread should be left in the game because theres enough randomness in the game that it doesn't really have an effect. Bruh.

Also welcome back King.