https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlPb8vsvcoM

:(

Yeah that 16th street mission station is pretty bad. A lot of people in that area are real messed up. Not sure I really understand why that asian chick was freaking out so hard though (maybe he was touching her?). If you frequent that area much at all a naked crazy dude shouldn't really come as that big of a surprise.

Duwatna's stream confirmed for most reliable invite gossip

really though don't listen to ma3laa's crazy rants

Yo let's get some predictions up in here. I'm going 2-1 for my homies on Bonus.

I'm not explicitly defending them. Just pointing out that we'd essentially be opening the door for people who, in general, probably have zero comp experience to have a say in what weapons need balancing. While comp players would love to see items like enforcer get a strong nerf, would we be just as accepting of a degreaser nerf? This is a weapon that is basically necessary to bring pyro up to a level where it can compete with other classes. And even then pyro gets outshined by almost every other class at the higher levels of HL.

This is why I'm afraid that we might be opening pandora's box if we sign off on this ban picking system. What if an enormous amount of basically pubbers and low-level comp players (because high level players won't use it) start banning things like sandwich and degreaser to the point where valve decides to nerf them? Is it fair for the comp scene to start being directly affected by the whims of pubbers?

Idk there are a lot of legitimate concerns about this whole thing and honestly I don't think until Saturday is enough time to sort through and test all this shit.

Do people think it's likely that anyone would use one of their six weapon bans to ban something like the degreaser? Same goes for things like escape plan, kritz, etc. Is it necessary to make these items unbannable or will they naturally almost never be banned because why would they when there are lots of more egregious weapons out there?

Honestly the more issues that get brought up, the more I start to wonder if picking bans is even such a great idea. At the same time though these bans don't really affect actual comp so do we have an obligation to honor that separation by allowing a much looser system or in the interest of preserving our gamemode as it makes the most sense to us do we force certain restrictions? At some point as well we have to respect that the final decision is up to Valve and from what Robin has expressed he seems to be really against restrictions.

I think for now we'll test the picking without any limitations except for stock weapons. But we can probe Valve to see how open they are to allowing some unlocks to be auto-allowed.

Another issue as far as testing goes is if we have comp players picking bans the logical conclusion will be that they'll pick all the weapons that are already on banlist. Of course if there are 13 weapon bans for UGC and only 12 weapons can be banned then automatically at least one of those 13 will be allowed. But that might not really be enough to see any drastic changes in gameplay. I guess experimentation in the range of 5-8 choices per team at the least is necessary to figure out what the right value is.

Almost every HL player already has a pretty solid understanding of what every item does because when these items get released we have to decide whether or not they should banned. But you could be right, maybe the size of the list would take too much time for people to sort through and decide what to ban. That's something that can only be figured out by testing.

It's highly unlikely that any league would ever adopt this system of players/teams picking bans. It would purely be for valve's interest in acquiring data to focus their item reworking efforts. The affect to UGC/ETF2L would be in the form of a weapon like enforcer being changed in such a way that we would be ok with unbanning it. Or there is the possible risk that an item that we thought was fine the way it is could receive an unexpected nerf. That might be less likely but I suppose it's still a possibility.

In the end we might decide that weapon ban picking idea would be counter-productive to our interests as comp players or that it's just not a good idea period. Could anyone speak on how set valve is on implementing that specifically?

I just don't agree with this because if we're going to say that the UGC/ETF2L whitelist (or parts of it) is offlimits for banning then what will be left? It kind of defeats the purpose of picking weapons to be banned. The whole point is that the decision to ban certain weapons is left up to the players. If we just come in and say no you can't ban those then what's the difference between that and us just implementing preset banlists.

From what I can tell valve wants to use a system that they can control to determine what unlocks players really despise in a competitive environment. As opposed to just going on the word of the admins at UGC or ETF2L. I'd imagine that the popular bans will fall more or less in line with the already established comp banlists, but I think it makes sense for valve to want their own data to judge rather than the word of a relatively small amount of community members. Their time is quite limited after all.

Also a LOT of unlocks get used in HL. Soldier alone has about 7 or 8 that see regular use. I would say more in the range of 40-50 unlocks get used frequently.

Disregarding the sniper and spy set hats, UGC has 13 weapons bans so it makes logical sense to have 6 weapon bans available to each team. So each team is allowed to ban 6 weapons (I think the sniper and spy set hats should be autobanned). This lobby system I think should ideally have an option that people can check to say they want to be a captain or not so when they get into lobby it'll randomly pick from the pool of people who have that option checked. Then obviously the captain will decide the bans with input from the rest of his/her team.

The map choice should either be set by valve or voted in by the players but that will have to be done before the weapon bans.

As far as what's in the running to be banned, I think the stock weapons should obviously be exempt, but other than that I don't see a strong reason to have anything else be exempt. Maybe someone has a reason why certain unlocks should be exempt? Like what purpose would someone have to ban kritzkrieg or degreaser over something like wrangler or phlog or whatever.

The thing to be kept in mind is that this process/system is completely separate from UGC/ETF2L so none of what happens in this system will affect those leagues. It's evident that valve wants to use this as a way to identify what weapons need tweaking so that we can unban them in actual comp, as well as providing a platform to promote competitive in general. Does anyone think there is a fear that valve might change a weapon that doesn't really need changing (like for instance a degreaser nerf)?

Ok because I'm a little confused about what you/valve is expecting from us, or like what our goal is. Just figure out what's the best system for banning items? I just wanna make sure before I spend the time setting everything up that we have a clear objective.

Me and the other guys from team bonus already have the system and connections in place for high-level HL pugs. We can test out some of these ideas, but who should I be in contact with to make sure valve gets the feedback they're looking for? From just talking about it with some people briefly we're thinking about a kind of Dota/League system where each team is allowed to ban X number of weapons (maybe 5 or 6?). As far as the set hats though (the spy and sniper ones) we think those should just be banned outright because seriously those are just dumb and valve shouldn't need statistical evidence to figure out how OP they are.

What about adding team colors into the health box somewhere? I forget what team I'm on sometimes =/

maybe you just look gay =/