Forum

Good idea but imo poor execution. By segregating it to a separate forum you’re losing a lot of the potential casual discussion and audience from people that will neither bother to sign up or regularly check it the same way they might the main ETF2L forums. While the hope is to avoid trolling, by making the bans separate to the main forums there’s no real downside other than having to go through the effort of requesting to sign up. The same level of deterrent could easily have been achieved through moderation (you state you’re planning to heavily moderate the idea box anyway) and long-lasting forum bans for infractions.

The 6v6 unlock discussion section is a bit of a mess too. Only the Escape Plan, Boston Basher, Gunboats and Crusader’s Crossbow deserve their own separate thread for discussion. The rest of the discussion should fall under two different topics: “Should x class be viable?” and “Should we allow underpowered/useless unlocks?”. There is no reason to discuss on an individual basis the merits of unlocks for a class that is currently situational at best whose vanilla unlocks allow them to fit that situational role. What unlocks for these classes should be doing, if anything, is moving them from a purely situational role to a viable role, and there can be plenty of discussion on what unlocks would allow this to happen, the effect on the metagame and why it might be a very bad idea.

I have some sympathy for having it in a place which can be moderated slightly better, but it was a mistake to put it online before they sorted out the single sign-on part. Why should I register again just to have the same discussion we have had for ages? And why bother to discuss weapons that are clearly under or overpowered?

This thread is good and you should feel good

Quoted from Matt

Its an absolutely dreadful idea to put it on a separate forum, why not just have it as a section on the regular ones? I saw a reason given as worries about forum bans here? what a load of nonsense, getting banned on here is a joke anyway.

exactly – just do like a hidable forum section. you talk shit or act like a fool – you cant see the forum anymore and thats it imho

Quoted from AnimaL

I don’t understand how forum that allows you to register and write in without linking steamid to etf2l profile to verify you are someone who isn’t just talking shit is better than etf2l forums.

Every user is approved manually, if someone does not belong to the community, he will not be approved. That is also why you were asked to signup with your ETF2L nickname.

Quoted from AnimaL

[…]was i? well i got approved with disposable mail and fake name, so well done

Good. Then write something useful :)

We will hopefully implement a steam open id login system in the next days (weeks?) but for now we thought, waiting for that is not worth it as the signups for the next season will probably start in ~3 weeks and we need to have some rules by then.

Since the discussion about unlocks is endless, could you just do a separate Season for them? Make it shorter (6 team per div?) because anyway there will be much less team applying than the standard Season so people are not forced to play with if they dont want to and, on the other hand, it gives the opportunity to both teams that want to try unlocks as well as Vanilla and new players to approach competitive TF2 in a different way.

May be instead of 2 HL season do 1 HL season + 1 unlock season after HL as well as the standard 3 season/year since I understand it requires a lot of commitment for both the admins and the players.

Example:
September – December: S13 — HL S3
January – mid April: S14
end of April – mid June: S15 — unlocks Season