Forum

Quoted from AnimaL

Make two seasons at the same time, one with unlocks, one without.. And you are allowed to play only in one.

If you think you’ll put effort and schedule well your commitments in both, why shouldnt you be allowed to play it? Most people now play 6v6 and 9v9 at the same time, and find the time to play with both their teams.

Quoted from Leif

[…]
If you think you’ll put effort and schedule well your commitments in both, why shouldnt you be allowed to play it? Most people now play 6v6 and 9v9 at the same time, and find the time to play with both their teams.

yeye i figured it out by myself, yay :D

Quoted from envy

[…]
Great way to say “whinny-kids-unlocks-cup”.

I dont really mind about unlocks, as I enjoy Vanilla tf2, but please give me some strong arguments on why people that may way to play with unlocks should be called “whinny-kids-unlocks-cup”. Because to my eyes, you seem more whinny than those that at least discuss about it.

Quoted from Leif

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

and this still forces us to debate which unlocks to allow, and once that is finished if any weapons become approved then why should they not be approved for everything

2 different leagues to choose from

Very Bad Idea. I don’t want to go into mass amount of reasons why so let me just sum up the biggest reason..

Splitting communities.
Said communities conflicting.

Quoted from Vali

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 agree with everything the OP mentioned.

I also find it confusing that the position presented by the forums and its admins appears to be that all unlocks are allowed and you must argue as to why they should be banned.

Would it not make more sense to start from the position of the current rule set and ask people to argue why an unlock should be allowed? What does an unlock add to the game? What function does an unlock serve? Is its impact already achievable through the existing classes/weapons or through teamwork and co-ordination?

I would go as far to say that there is a pro-unlock agenda at work in the admin team. This overly complicated, convoluted forum solution tucked away out of sight during the quietest period of the competitive calendar and the conditioning of the responses through this “argue why they should be banned” standpoint have all the makings of a political conspiracy.

I must also asked whatever happened to the result of the unofficial unlocks poll? Were they not in line with the pro-unlock propaganda I see peddled before me?!

Poppycock!

Can I ask the number of unlocks there currently are, I have lost track.

Do we have to argue against each one on an individual basis?

I also think it is easier for viewers, who don’t know anything about 6v6, to understand the game without unlocks. So to test this, can we do a poll at i46 to see if the CS:S players etc think it is easy to follow. Something like that.

I really do not see what unlocks add to the game, the few unlocks that actually get used in NA (Gunboats/BB/EP/PT(it that allowed still?) on the main classes are so few, does it actually “breath new life into the game”?

Although I realise that anecdotal evidence is not too helpful, in my team we have recently completely switched up styles to great effect, to one that is rare among teams we play. There is still tons to be explored in TF2.