SpaceCadet, I'd encourage you to volunteer your free time to do whatever you want with it! If you feel like there's a problem that's worth your time fixing, you're free to start that up.

I'm spending my free time organizing this because I think that it's important that we unify the competitive community. I've noticed that other esports have consistent rulesets around the world, and I wanted to make an effort to have something similar for the comp TF2 scene. I think that we have a long way to go, especially since we haven't reconciled map lists or even rulesets (Europe still plays best of two 30 minute maps while NA plays one map for up to 60 minutes) but it's a work in progress. The whitelist was the first step and considerably easier to manipulate than the rulesets or map lists. We can consider talking about those things in this meeting if we have time.

Also Bear we're working towards it but progress is relatively slow since I don't exclusively work on this in my free time. We talked about mirroring the rulesets at the last global whitelist meeting but ETF2L had to recode their website to make it happen, and NA wasn't willing to change the way they do things.

Here's one line of thought that someone could potentially go down:

1) Banning weapons and creating class restrictions creates our own little pro mod, even if our game is only slightly different from the main game.
2) Pro mods tend to be unsuccessful as far as esports go, especially since you don't get much developer support for your pro mod until it gets really big. This also explains why we haven't had many weapon balances thrown our way.
3) Unbanning weapons will bring our game more in line with that of the existing competitive game (matchmaking), reducing the barrier of entry for new players to join.

We're all pretty aware that our pro mod is much different than the existing TF2 game though, so I'm not surprised that there is resistance to remove these restrictions.

To be honest, I think that most people who read these forums don't really care that we've created a pro mod, since they enjoy the pro mod. That said, everyone realizes our community is relatively small compared to the larger TF2 scene. Again, this is consistent with how pro mod populations typically go. There's conflict between people who want to keep the pro mod a pro mod, while others want to do away with the pro mod but bring everyone with them. It's weird.

If you really wanted to play a game with no unlocks though, I might recommend that you start your own league with no blacklist and no class limits... nobody has done that yet.

FAQ

Who is invited?
The event is public and everyone can stream it.

How long do we expect this to go?
It's really difficult to get people from around the world to meet at the same time. We're going to try to limit the meeting to an hour and have a hard cutoff at two hours.

Will TFTV stream it?
No as it doesn't match our usual casted content, but we're sure someone will be streaming it if you want to watch one of their streams.

Who is allowed to talk?
Anyone can type in the chat channel, but the voice channel will have limitations due to the number of people that we expect to attend. Anyone can listen to the voice channel, but the only people allowed to talk in the voice channel are MR SLIN (host), league admins, and premiership/invite players. If it gets too rowdy we'll impose more limitations so please keep it civil.

Who will be voting on the whitelist?
Ultimately the league admins will decide the whitelists for their respective regions using their league's rules. The goal of the meeting is to bring everyone together for a discussion so that everyone ends up with identical whitelists.

Which leagues will be attending?
ESEA, ETF2L, LBTF, ozfortress, UGC, TFCL. If you're not on this list and are a league admin who wants to represent your league, DM MR SLIN.

If I am a premiership/invite player and want voice permissions, who do I contact?

• ESEA - Tri or Saam
  
• ETF2L - Crasp or Aoshi
  
• ozfortress - Obla or Fozzlm
  
• LBTF - Aratinga or Boomer

Please try to arrange for voice permissions ahead of the meeting to help alleviate the inevitable rush come Saturday.

Meeting time is subject to change but many admins have already confirmed attendance.

When we put together the first version of the global whitelist, we had unbanned a ton of stuff that stayed banned for ages simply because people were too lazy to reevaluate them. I think an interesting outcome of that experiment was that it forced people to try using some of this stuff and take it seriously. We saw serious use of things like the cow mangler, gunslinger, which are potentially game breaking weapons, but we also unbanned like 30 other weapons that nobody cared about.

While I'm not trying to traumatize anyone again with atomizer/base jumper scrims, I do think there's a bunch of stuff that is probably unjustly banned. The solemn vow? Probably not game breaking. Flying guillotine? Same.

My point is, don't panic. Let's just have a global whitelist meeting and see what comes of it. We'll consider banning some stuff and unbanning some other stuff while at the same time trying to keep the peace across the community. The most important thing to me is that everyone worldwide plays with the same weapons.

man why did this thread have to turn into a bunch of personal attacks. cut it out guys.

aight thanks everyone for your input, if you have more to say go ahead and post it but i think we've seen enough opinions here to move forward.

I feel like you are mischaracterizing what I'm doing. I'm simply trying to get the entire competitive community to agree on something, and then I put my opinion out there to start the discussion. I then say "But we should definitely work towards shrinking the blacklist (expanding the whitelist) further, if for no other reason than reducing confusion" and then don't mention Valve at all. So I'm not sure where you're coming from, but that's besides the point.

The point is, I don't really care what we do. I'm just trying to get the community to talk about unlocks, and then make a decision heading into the next season. Sorry if it came off any other way. If you want to keep things the way they are, that's fine by me. At least we got to have a chance to have this discussion, which is the main complaint that we got last time we did this.

For the record, last time we put together a global whitelist I didn't make any decisions regarding which weapons were to be banned, and then when the community said they wanted to revise the list and add atomizer and base jumper to the blacklist I was more than happy with that.

For those of you guys who missed the discussion tonight, I think what we said was, let's add Rescue Range to the blacklist and maybe remove some stuff that doesn't need to be banned like the Solemn Vow.

Right, I see where you're coming from, but I also got feedback like this:

Check out some of the feedback yourself:
http://www.teamfortress.tv/36168/global-whitelist-unveiled/?page=5#126

Anyways, I'm not trying to derail the thread. Just figured I'd make a post and open up a conversation is all.

Hey man just trying to include the entire community in the discussion this time around. Feel free to ignore the thread. We could always just do nothing and leave things as they are right now, but I know some people want to tweak the whitelist a bit between seasons.

That's an awesome idea. Let's discuss it for a bit and then open up a poll so the community can decide.

Should we be trying to keep a small blacklist or should we just design the game however we want to play it?

The initial argument for removing the item blacklist was to get our competitive game to merge with Valve's competitive game so that our competitive game has broader appeal. The problem is, development of Valve's competitive game has been slow and Overwatch currently seems to have greater mass market appeal.

So many people are asking, what's the point?

With the upcoming ESEA/ETF2L/ozfortress/UGC leagues starting up soon, should we be making significant changes to our blacklist or should it stay relatively the same? Minor changes can be addressed in a different thread and I'm mostly concerned with tackling the larger issue of the direction that we should be taking with competitive blacklists.

My personal opinion - at the end of the day, we all want the leagues to keep their whitelists/blacklists synced up. Nobody is disagreeing with that. But we should definitely work towards shrinking the blacklist (expanding the whitelist) further, if for no other reason than reducing confusion. Having a blacklist of 50 weapons is confusing and doesn't really make significant changes to gameplay anyways. Right now we're at ~20. Pretty good, but I think we could go further.

The truth is, we already have a lot of weapons in the rotation now that I feel are very, very strong. Crossbow, gunboats, and escape plan are three examples of extremely strong unlocks. So strong that everyone uses them. My personal feeling is that making more unlocks available can increase the variety of the game. Some people might not like the changes to the metagame, but the comp scene will live on either way.

What are your thoughts? Let's try to reach a decision within a week or so (ESEA reg closes Jan 22).

http://whitelist.tf/competitive_6v6 for the current whitelist.

if you're not going to this LAN you're missing out

Yeah you can see I stopped running this a bit back. I thought it was a fun show idea and it was going really well. The hard part for me was that running a weekly or biweekly show to discuss comp TF2 proved to be too frequent since the community is small and there isn't as much going on to fill a one-hour show. We could have done it once a month or something but I kind of fell off with it. To make things more complicated, one of our cohosts quit the community so that was the final nail in the coffin. We could probably recruit another 4th but the show is a low priority for me.

I think your topics are interesting but half of those things are in development with no public news and the other half is just speculation. A show about just speculation and what could be done with no actionable items would drive me nuts. It's the equivalent of backseat driving (Valve should do this, Faceit should do that) and I don't think it's very productive. Entertaining? Maybe. Productive? No.

I can give you my thoughts but they're probably best on another thread instead of necroing this one.

WoW

http://puu.sh/sz7tn/bee5e3571a.png

STV is still broken though :(

submitted a ticket

http://puu.sh/sz5pQ/3d4e48e85e.jpg