Here's some thoughts about what my opinion is about these two topics and how they are connected with eachother in Capture The Flag !

A few weeks ago I ran into a conversation with deji and linkin about Capture The Flag. I have given most of what my thoughts are on the topic and I wanted to share it and give it a permanent writing.
Now I am a bit of a lazy person and each time I copy text from IRC I have to get rid of a lot of all the color parameters and whatnot, and that explains why I just rougly pasted it like that with not much formatting.

It is still a decent read though and I include some of linkin's quotes in my developping process.

Here's the thing:


standing on the flag is a strategy
DEM0N: if you do this that probably mean you were ahead in score thus were better than the other team at attacking or taking advantage first anyway
removing that part of the game made it a complete random course of events that eventually lead to high scores (and for some strange unexplainable reason praised by almost everyone) like 6-3 that means little to how a close a game was or wasnt
or 5-3 or whatever example of scores we have now
People also blame those low scores games due to random spawns that occur much more often in 5v5 because there are +2 players playing. But it also happens in 4v4 and eventhough it happened less, it did contribute to luck much more than 5v5 did
in 5v5 you were atleast practically sure there would be spawns in your way, making team escorts an important part of the game
LINKIN: i think 5v5 would be cool IF:
LINKIN: -bigger maps
LINKIN: -kill bind
DEM0N: yeah kill was always something I wanted but ID won't make it I guess
for some odd reason they believe kill was a flaw and had to be removed.
LINKIN: 'kill' was like 40% of teamplay
DEM0N: I have also already explained before in various posts on various forums why in my opinion, kill gave the game much more depth and reduced the luck factor (funny enough, most people think it made the game completely random, but theyre completely wrong, if they would just think about the whole 'risk' part there is in losing time killing yourself)
also if you dont have kill, you're completely at the mercy of luck
during a cross cap, if you get the unlucky spawn and the opponent gets the lucky one, you are already down 0-1, whilst with kill, you could either choose to run by your feet to where you believe you are needed to be (mid e.g.) and thus not taking any risk of spawning 4 times in a row in base (considering spawning takes 2 seconds, you can lose up to 10 seconds, which is usually more than enough on most maps to make a cap)
OR you can take the risk and kill yourself reducing the luck factor by getting the lucky spawn aswell
Conclusion: less randomness, more depth in the game.

kill might also make you spawn ahead of the map, let's take the example of Japanese Castles. You're bored of spawning in base, and running into incoming enemies ? Making sometimes useless fights that you dont want to commit in ? You're enemy is also probably pissed that you spawn in their way. The solution? Kill. You get the chance to teleport yoruself ahead of the incoming offenders of the other team. Consequence ? Game is faster, pressure on the defenders is bigger, less defense heavy games ? You decide.

another good balance that Kill gives is when you want to kill yourself to give the powerup. It was another underestimated balance.You get the powerup, or even the flag, and you want to give it to a partner. Killing yourself was the only option you had, this advantage you gain by giving powerups to a 'item-holder' or 'pu runner' or whatever was beeing balanced by the fact that you actually died and respawned naked with nothing in hand
LINKIN: true
LINKIN: now you can just drop the flag and still cover :/
DEM0N: it even happened that I killed myself to give a decent weapon to a partner. Now I understand that this might not be a spectator friendly feature to kill yourself, but removing it did reduce the depth CTF teamplay had and thus for most CTF lovers/fans it's another downgrade
thats all that comes to my mind now and if it didnt convince you kill atleast wasnt that BAD, then nothing will (talking to deji).
now CTF is still fun to play and I can live without kill... (and basically, my thought is that 5v5 evens out a bit more the random midspawn luck factor by making games more crowded and thus less random midclear caps.)


Your thoughts ?