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The Season 23 Preseason Cup is meant to be a fun cup for teams to practice with their teams in maps, that potentially could be included in Season 23 already now, but with enough positive feedback may be considered even more likely for future seasons/cups.

The maps are:
cp_logjam – http://etf2l.org/forum/maps/topic-29427/
koth_coalplant – http://www.teamfortress.tv/10687/koth-coalplant-koth-ash-redux
cp_gravelpit

We welcome any feedback on the above maps as they have been played, whether if people want old maps like logjam and gravelpit used in previous seasons to come back again or not, or to welcome new additions in such as coalplant.

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We have also released a provisional test whitelist for testing purposes in preparation for Season 23 that can be tried out in the upcoming preseason cup. The additional weapons allowed include:

Scout
– Pretty Boy’s Pocket Pistol
– Candy Cane

Demoman
– Tide Turner
– Persian Persuader

Engineer
– Pomson 6000

Sniper
– Cleaner’s Carbine

Multi-class
– Panic Attack

In addition with these new added weapons, we have also decided to ban Eviction Notice for Heavy due to the buffs received for the weapon in the recent major update for TF2.

We welcome any feedback on the above weapons, or on any changed weapons already allowed from Season 22. Please make sure you have tried these weapons in a competitive setting before giving feedback.

Please remember that “this weapon is broken and OP” or “this weapon is dumb” is not helpful feedback for us, and an explanation of why the weapon should be banned would be better.

The whitelist itself can be found here: http://whitelist.tf/5101

why not allow eviction notice? u shoulde make people ready for hwg on mid, or u think gabe will ban it on mm?

1) I don’t understand how you can allow the pomsom even if it’s just for a fun cup. Engies are gonna be run for sure on gpit and losing the ability to pop right away due to some random spam (which your pocket can’t tank cause it goes through him) is catastrophic for a solid push.

2) I assume it’s gonna be the old gpit that’s gonna be played. I know there have been some experiments with the cap times and stuff but since there are no _rcx or _bx suffixes it should be the default valve map right?

3) Big props to organising this cup as well as experimenting with new/old maps.

Quoted from Chill Collins

1) I don’t understand how you can allow the pomsom even if it’s just for a fun cup. Engies are gonna be run for sure on gpit and losing the ability to pop right away due to some random spam (which your pocket can’t tank cause it goes through him) is catastrophic for a solid push.

Pomson doesn’t go through people anymore. That was changed ages ago though.

Coalplant is a sick map, even more fun than viaduct imo.

Quoted from Bloodis

[…]

Just to make things sure, just being hit by Pomson does not reduce ubercharge unless it’s closer than by about 1500 hammer units, at which point the Shotgun itself would be more effective. After a longer distance than about 500 hammer units you can not drain 10% ubercharge anymore so after that it doesn’t take longer than couple seconds to get it back.
Seeing how much it does affect in the cup and can possibly affect to the season itself will be seen from this cup whether or not should it even be allowed for the season.

Pomson is not overpowered, but it is a bad concept for a 6v6 weapon and is much better almost all the time. Shotgun is never going to be more effective on Engineer than the Pomson, because Engineer in 6v6 is used every time as a defensive class on last. You are holding with equal uber or disadvantage, and waiting for the enemy team to push. Whether you use the Pomson aggressively to spam and equalize a disadvantage or more passively to give your team an opportunity to drop the enemy medic once they have entered, it will be run the majority of the time be defending teams using an engineer.

At the range of the average engineer defensive position to a choke point, it does around 4-8% per shot. The rate of fire is also very fast, allowing you to spam around 4-5 shots when a team is entering. It also has a very slow projectile which doesn’t require a skilful shot to hit; we’re not talking about rails across the map here or fantastic prediction, the engineer just spams a choke point without aiming at all and occasionally the medic will get hit. This isn’t the basis for a skilful weapon, this is just spam with a high reward. It’s the reason why people hated the loose cannon before, but requires even less positioning and timing.

In the situation where you’re using it aggressively on last, with a moderate uber advantage, if you do tag the medic from a distance about the size of most lobbies you will have negated a big portion of that uber advantage. They will still have one, but for every shot hit you decrease the time your team has to kite the uber by 1-3 seconds. This is not rewarding a play that took any thought or mechanical/DM skill to execute, it’s just random.

The fact of the matter is that this weapon will not have a big impact. It doesn’t penetrate people, the projectile can be dodged and the ubercharge can be built back up in quite a few situations. But in a random few games it will have a big impact – an entire last push will be ruined due to 1 or 2 shots from this weapon, entirely by chance. It’s not a weapon that changes the playstyle of engineer. It’s not even a weapon that buffs engineer. It’s just a weapon that will occasionally fuck up a push for no good reason.

It’s a bad concept for a weapon in 6v6, where things revolve so strongly around ubers. And before someone tries to counter that by saying this is a good way of changing that paradigm – the way to change that playstyle is not to arbitrarily make some ubers not work or force people to pop through every choke on a last push.

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I also think your reasoning for banning the eviction notice is completely retarded. I mean it’s not even a bad decision with thoughts I can follow like the pomson one, which I merely disagree with. It’s just retarded.

Why would you ban a weapon that just acts the same as another, but a bit worse, with the reasoning “oh you guys can’t handle that many changes at once”. Even if we can’t handle that many and there are excess confounding variables then don’t ban something old. The obvious answer would be to keep something banned! It’s incredibly patronising and doesn’t make sense, I don’t believe that was the reasoning.

No whitelist please. The time has come…

Quoted from ondkaja

Is the engie close to the medic? Focus him down and get a free sentry pick. Is the engie far away spamming? Dodge the projectiles, they are slow as fuck. Pomson is fucking dreadful, you are more likely to be able to make a play with the shotgun than you are with the pomson.

It’s not about making plays, it will just be the default to spam the choke the med is coming through with pomson. You’re pretty limited to dodge in a chokepoint, that’s the whole point of them. It doesn’t matter about the speed at all if one is coming at you as you go through a door, you can’t see it to dodge it, just lucky timing.