I would just call ppl who do this shit and cringe.

Also iirc bootie time and bombinomicon are banned not just cause they are annoying but also cause they omega break spy (disguises have no feet with the former and i think latter just breaks DR or something).

Sometimes u can only convince your parents to download one game on the family pc

pov u step into mexico

I would 1 million times people do this and blatantly lie then send in more chatgpt slop please god.

Granted I'm not a humanities TA (or anybody that needs to read actual essays) gotta be way worse for them

Is there an objective pre-set cutoff needed for an unlock to be banned (or unbanned for that matter)? For anything on the extreme it probably doesn't matter but for anything contentious in the future adjusting the threshold post-hoc after looking at the data would obviously be pretty bad. Not trying to claim that this has happened before or anything, just wondering.

As an example for Smogon (unofficial pokemon singles) the threshold for ban is 60%+ among people who make the requirements to vote. It's harsh in the sense that people who do not make recs do not get any say (though this is def a necessary evil for a game like pokemon); a "smoothed" out version would just be to weight votes by division but the choice of weight, like the cutoff itself, is arbitrary. But at the very least pre-specifying something is better than doing it afterwards.

Yeah HL 8:30 I've always wondered how the west coasters make it work; if you're a 9-5er with an average 30 minute commute you make it back just on time with no time to eat/relax a bit after job or w/e. God forbid you have longer commute, hit traffic, boss doesn't let you clock out exactly at five, work different hours etc. etc.

My only guess is (besides historical inertia) that it works because:
1. Not that many west coast HL players
2. Most players are in school or are NEETs (HL I believe skews younger?)
3. You only have to deal with it once a week on Monday since scrims are on weekends.

But for 6's point #3 no longer holds and possibly #1 and #2 are less true.

Genuinely impressive they managed to fix it so fast.

https://ozfstats.com/about/

Idk if you've seen this before but may be of interest. Log analyzer seems most analogous.

If you're willing to explain more about technical details of your modeling I'd certainly be interested. OP is a little vague (understandably) but I think enough ppl here would be curious about the technical side also.

Unlike the other posters I think like you reece I have a full blown fully progressed version of The Virus. As an example for persona 4 I literally did what you described for p5 on my first run, constantly reloading saves while doing so, because I have extreme mental illness. This was blind also for reference. There's basically no point in doing this (especially since there is also ng+ content lmao) but it would legitimately bother me if I did not optimize my days correctly.

That being said my experience is not exactly the same.

For me I think I'm too far gone because I don't see it as a downside outside of wasting a ridiculous amount of time; tbf this is a pretty fucking bad downside. But in terms of enjoyment it has not diminished for me; I don't really find it stressful and it serves the same purpose as I imagine casual gaming does for others.

I think roguelikes are far and away the best game to play if you have The Virus though. It avoids the problem of "by the time you are done optimizing, the game is over" that you described with minecraft, avoids pacing problems that hyperoptimization can cause for story games like jrpgs, and you can make an argument that optimizing your runs to increase win rate is sort of the "point" of a roguelike and thus preserving the spirit of the game. IME it's also best if you try to optimize a bit on your own first completely blind; get a sense of the game and develop intuitions for what's optimal. From there you can look at other resources/players and if there's differences in what they view and what you view as optimal you can sort of reevaluate why you came to your own conclusion and why they came to a different one.

In unrelated news I have recently gotten addicted to a certain horse girl roguelike so I may need to be euthanized.

If the process is:

then I feel like this is just playing semantics to say tftv doesn't influence any decision assuming that staff would not have noticed if nobody complained on tftv. If in a parallel universe this question does not get put on the survey and thus does not get passed because nobody posted on tftv then I would say tftv caused whatever change to occur, an arguably stronger statement.

Proside is lowkey the biggest troll here; for 6s players imagine if next season they just announced that a new version of metal would be used with no testing with pretty substantial gameplay changes - but don't worry it's being run concurrently (so they don't even have a previous season with data) with brazilian 6's so we're all good!

Actually brazilian 6's might be even better for reference ozfortress HL has 2 divisions total lmao.

Ah okay thank you for the clarification; ngl I have heard about the invite meetings before (iirc it's how the length of the season got shortened?) but I deadass just thought they were done with cause I expected some motion on stuff like the loch otherwise lol.

Why is invite letting a player who can barely place at lan dictate the whitelist? Should be reserved to lan finalists imo.

I am once again asking people to stop using this image incorrectly.

More on topic - I have no idea what's up with RGL 6's specifically but not only are they historically much more conservative with regard to even asking about questions regarding banning unlocks compared to HL (not unbanning though!), they are even more reticent with either conducting or releasing survey results at all (or both).

Take a look at this page of all previous articles and ctrl +f "Survey Results". Starting from season 8 (2021 for reference) all but one season of HL is represented, and some times even the midseason! This has translated into direct action as well and isn't merely fluff; a few seasons ago loch became a problem during playoffs and grand finals. Directly afterward the next survey had a survey about the loch and before the next season even started it was banned. I seriously cannot think of a single instance in which the turnaround was that fast in 6's.

Regarding 6's, go back to that same page, look at "survey results" and see how many articles are about 6s seasons. You will only get 2 results. One was before season 14 (January 2024), the next was season 8 in 2022. Why is 6s, the face of tf2 competitive, seemingly treated as an afterthought compared to HL? I know historically this has been the case (see the whole "traditional 6s" fiasco and the RGL mission statement lol) but man this disparity is bad. I understand tf2 youtubers will make endless videos if an unlock gets banned but controversial opinion incoming: perhaps a community league should strive to serve its own playerbase above all else. There is something cosmically funny about the fact that the format that more closely resembles pubs is less beholden to the opinions of pubbers [who have no intention of playing competitive] than 6s does.

I will push back against this slightly; these are HL survey results about the loch once the aforementioned problematic season concluded. This was done across all divs iirc.

https://i.imgur.com/JtK2AVL.png

Only 15% don't really have an opinion and notably loch in HL was an extremely short-lived phenomenon that didn't even have enough time to trickle-down to other divs (I saw many many questions in RGL discord from main or below HL players about the ban). I would be extremely surprised if the % in 6's who do not have an opinion/don't care is substantially higher.

Edit: Here is a recent survey about unbanning loch; you can see (at the very least limited to people who actually respond to surveys lol) that proportion of no opinion is still around the same range.

https://i.imgur.com/XnduEpV.png

It is pretty bad that whenever I log in and see a relatively new thread with a high post count I instantly assume that it's either 1. new LAN thread or 2. new pedo thread.

That being said while drama is funny I think the biggest loss is the lack of actually thoughtful discussion about the game. Granted I'm not going to lie and say that like 2014-2018 era tftv was a veritable Library of Alexandria or anything but I can use myself as a control and say that superficially my knowledge of 6's relative to my entrenchment in the community was much higher than it is today. Players of all skill levels used to talk about the game. Was the average open player dropping a knowledge bomb? Probably not, but at the very least I got to see opinions and discussions and it's a little bit surprising (disturbing, really) how much you can pick up just via osmosis.

Nowadays insightful posts still exist but they are few and far between which I find quite sad. They are also pretty decentralized (though to be fair most of the truth nukes in the past were buried within like 50 page long ESEA open happenings threads). An example would be loafe and botmode's post in the bagel thread.

This type of 'micro strategy' (specifically talking about one specific class matchup on one specific map in one specific game state) is so difficult to find these days. The broad strokes of the game still exist, and so does theorycrafting (i.e. is this one unlock Literally Hitler?) but I seriously miss the type of nerd essay (meant in the most positive way possible) analysis of one snapshot, one frame if you will, of tf2.

Pains me to think about how much hidden knowledge is squirreled away in random team discords that are archived away or long inactive.

Massive props to wG EU absolute iron fortress mental, very well played by them.

Enlighten my NA burger mind but if this is just referring to Gully c'mon man it's a massive stretch to say that they don't get or play for the config cause of that alone. Like TurboTabs said it's grand finals of lan bro they probably just got excited and had a momentary lapse; you can even see what looks like botmode trying to get off the point once he realizes (marmaloo pointed this out on cast as well).

Aside from waiting until winlimit is set infinite overtime changes risk/reward of pushes but I don't think that really affected g6, it's not like they rushed a push out of last or something and just exploded because of it. IIRC they had maybe one last push on process which they rushed because they had picks instead of waiting for uber ad but to me (granted I am bad) it's not a crazy play to go for. G6 had many good opportunities that they should and ended up going for but simply couldn't close out. While that probably screws you over harder on b4nny config I wouldn't call that "not understanding" the format. But IDK maybe I missed something else.