HalMR_SLIN, several people have criticized the form in which the previous whitelist meeting was conducted (in particular, that a handful of individuals dominated the conversation). Do those critics have a point, and, if so, do you intend to alter the form of the next meeting, assuming one is still coming?
I don't agree with you on everything; however, I recognize your efforts to do what you believe is right for TF2.
Thanks man. To be honest, I've stopped playing the game but I just didn't want to make one of those "hey i'm gone from TF2 bye guys plus frag me" threads. One of the Aus admins hit me up and asked me if I had a followup to the original global whitelist meeting, and I wanted to keep my promise that yes we'd hold a second meeting and yes we'd take a second look at weapons that we had previously allowed through the first time (such as the Rescue Ranger and Jarate, two weapons that get a lot of complaints). Knowing that I am not playing next season, I decided to let the players dominate the conversation and let them decide what weapons to allow because ultimately they're the ones to have to play with it, not me.
So we held the second meeting at a relatively convenient time for people to attend (it's tough with the holidays). Could it have been executed better? Absolutely. Did I put my full heart and soul into this effort? Not really, to be honest, but I figured some effort is better than none. I'm putting a lot less effort into a lot of my TF2 projects these days since other things are ramping up in my day to day.
As a note about the meeting itself, I feel like most people carried over the thoughts of Valve too much into this meeting. I hardly mentioned Valve at this second meeting and am resigned to the idea that they'll slowly develop TF2 and iterate until they're ready for a sequel. Valve's competitive game doesn't have to be our focus -- we've always been a community that can stand on its own and that hasn't changed. Our objectives around the global whitelist were still to make our game the best game that it could be, and that includes getting everyone on the same page as far as rulesets go.
For future whitelist meetings, I have no doubt in my mind that someone else could take up the torch and do it better than I but I have nobody to pass the torch to. I feel as though if I didn't step up to host this meeting, it wouldn't have happened at all. I'm truly sorry that it ended up being sort of a last minute affair, but this is exactly what happened with the first meeting as well (finalizing the atomizer / base jumper bans only days before the start of the league season). I think it should be a regular thing that the community comes together to discuss -- it just takes effort to make it happen and you have to deal with the backlash of the decisions that are made. Personally, I have nothing to lose so it's cool with me. I stand by the decisions that came out of the meeting and still hope for the best for comp TF2.