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War Paints are not allowed as submissions, because we can not showcase them in any way.

These are full texture replacements, not patterns like traditional warpaints.
You can showcase them by replacing the default weapon texture and replacing its vmt with the sample vmt given in download.

Unless there is an issue with that.

tl;dr (short answer): Basically what Jugador said. We have Valve limitations we cannot overcome which is why we're not accepting war paints.

Long technical answer:

The war paint textures are hard-coded inside some file starting with protobuf (forgot the filename) on the client. The way war paints are rendered is the item has an attribute (protobuf_def_index) with a number that either the item server or the mvm server relays to the client, which the client then looks up that number in the client-side file to find out which texture to render.

As the above paragraph implies, it is impossible to make players load your war paint texture because this logic is entirely client-side. Even if we made the client download your files from fastdl, the tf/downloads folder takes the lowest priority (it's /custom first, VPKs second, root third, and finally downloads last) in the mounting order so they would find and load the stock texture first. Lastly, even if that did work, some people may not be happy to see their favorite skin got replaced by yours (without their consent) so it's a no-go in any case.

And like Jugador said (and implied), forcing clients to manually install content is a crapshoot and they may not want your paint to render outside of our campaign servers (which it would render in every game the player is on since it's installed in their client).

Weapons and hats work because the client grabs the name of the model from the server (NOTE TO SM PEOPLE: this is not strictly correct, it's the model index but it's the same thing in effect) and renders that, so we can showcase items. The client does not do that for war paints, so we cannot showcase them.

One way to hack your way around this limitation is to bake your war paint skin into every weapon possible and compile a model for each one (and make the mdl reference a custom vmt file), but not only is this tedious and obnoxious but also it will make the fastdl payload even larger. Feel free to explore this option if you want. Maybe you can make war paint models of some (but not all) common TF2 weapons in this way? (e.g. stock weapons or weapons popular for MvM) If you have no idea how to go about the modeling idea, then ask someone to collab with you to do that modeling recompiling tidbit (which shouldn't be much work).

If you go through the model recompilation grind and the payload isn't massive (don't have a number in mind, but I'd say over 5 MB is excessive), we can give you medal points for your war paint and feature it on the server. If you choose to grind that, I recommend sticking to stock and common MvM weapons and not doing it for every weapon possible. (You might even be able to put your paint on weapons that currently don't support war paints in this way.)

I actually feel bad as he prob worked hard on this.

It took me two days to do the twelve weapons. As I said the textures aren't the projected patterns like normal warpaints, but actual retextures for stock weapons.

But if warpaints aren't allowed then no worries, I just thought that map makers would like to have used the textures on the robot weapons perhaps, but admittedly it would take changing the material paths in models which I haven't done.

as a back up you could try and get it officially added lol.

it's on the workshop and its doing rather well for a warpaint.
I have no worries.