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The season has begun, we have heard your feedback regarding the Provisional Tiers and Restrictions and have tried to make sure that things are more suitably adjusted for the Final Tiers and Restrictions, which are now released. We have also read and taken all the feedback you have given us via the feedback form we asked you to fill out from last season & the feedback received from the Premiership 6v6 team meeting we held and we are happy to announce some new changes! Below you can find all this information regarding all these topics!

Weapon Unbans

In our feedback poll, we listed quite a large amount of weapons that we noticed being mentioned within the community and decided to poll a vast majority at once to perhaps find some answers about what the community truly thinks about these weapons in 6v6.

We also held a meeting with the 8 current Premiership 6v6 teams for further insight onto some of these weapons and the impact they may have on the flow of the game and the potential they have. Most notably the weapons that ended up being the most split in terms of votes were the Wrap Assassin, The B.A.S.E. Jumper and The Market Gardener. There was also the Experimental Cup ran by EssentialsTF to test some of these weapons out. Here below you can see the results of the polls for Weapon Unbans:

As you can see, the votes between The Wrap Assassin, B.A.S.E. Jumper & Market Gardener were all relatively close votes, with notably the Loch n Load ban being relatively well received from last season, so it will remain banned. However, after discussions with the Premiership 6v6 teams and taking all the feedback and reasonings into consideration, we have decided to make the following changes this season:

• The Buffalo Steak Sandvich is now Unbanned.
• The B.A.S.E. Jumper is now Unbanned.
• All other listed weapons will Remain Banned.

The decisions to keep The Market Gardener and Wrap Assassin banned was not taken lightly. However, it was concluded that The Wrap Assassin promotes very spammy gameplay from the Scout which is hard to punish and has little to no counterplay if utilised correctly, with the fast recharge allowing up to 80 damage or more per ball, including bleed damage.

The same goes for The Market Gardener in terms of little to no counterplay. Although it may be a “fun” weapon to use, it was determined that the weapon is simply too broken in terms of mechanics to unban for now. Being able to fly at very fast speeds with a melee that can one-hit kill a majority of the 6v6 classes is near impossible to avoid if you’re not ready for it. There is also the issue of “jump bugs” that further make this weapon less desired to be unbanned. Although the idea of trying a Market Gardener unban whilst the gunboats plugin is disabled was thought about, it was decided that the current state of soldier is better off without the Market Gardener.

So we have opted to keep these weapons banned for the time being. However, it was agreed that unbanning The Buffalo Steak Sandvich and B.A.S.E. Jumper would perhaps introduce some new ideas for strategies and gameplay changes for this season. We look forward to seeing what these whitelist changes will bring to the table.

Weapon Bans

We also polled a few weapon bans for the upcoming season, these weapons being The Solemn Vow, The Winger and The Beggars Bazooka. This section ended up being a lot more straight forward however, with the community mostly agreeing that these weapon bans are not necessary for now, as well as Premiership 6v6 teams agreeing that these weapons are not impactful enough to warrant being banned.

So for now, we will not be banning anymore weapons for this 6v6 season. However, we will still be monitoring weapons unbanned for this current season and keeping an eye on feedback we receive regarding other unbanned weapons that people would like to see banned for future seasons.

Plugin Changes

We also polled some Plugin changes for this upcoming season and the season before, most notably the gunboats plugin and a potential “pause timer” which would extend the end of a round to perhaps give teams more time to discuss things like the next mid fight, strats or what went wrong in the previous round, as a nice quality of life change. Looking back at the poll feedback, there was quite a relatively even result between Higher divs and Lower divs regarding the gunboats plugin, but an overall agreeance on a pause timer:

After a lot of thought and discussion, it was decided that in regards to the gunboats plugin, the removal of this plugin promotes smarter Soldier gameplay, with Soldiers now having to think more about their bombs and decision making, further reducing the promotion of “careless” bombing into people and jumping out taking minimal damage. So we have decided to keep the plugin disabled for now.

However, with the idea of a “pause timer” being well received, we will be implementing the pause timer used at PoLANd.tf. Since it was well received at the LAN, we figured it would be a good addition to our configs for the upcoming season, so we will trial it out and see how it goes across all divisions:


• sm_gunboats_always_apply 0
• bonus_time 17

Note: currently as of now, there isn’t a known solution to the timer continuing to count down during this extended time. If a solution is found for this, it will be implemented.

Conclusion

We want to thank everyone who provided us feedback from last season and for this upcoming season, we hope you are happy with the chosen changes for the upcoming season and we would like to encourage that more people submit feedback to get the best results we possibly can for each season! We have heard your feedback regarding restrictions and the provisional tiers and we have tried to correct them and make things fit as best we could. Unfortunately, we are not perfect. But we do our best to try and correct our mistakes whenever possible and actively try and communicate with the community better.

We hope this season goes well and that the new changes are at least overall well received and that you have fun playing the season! We look forward to receiving your feedback at the end of this season also and seeing what went well, what we can change/add or what perhaps wasn’t done as well as it could’ve been. Good Luck!

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