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Hello, I’m a British person.

So in today’s casual IRC flame wars, an interesting topic came up. Team Fortress 2 is designed to prevent stale mate rounds. In any round, the game always gives an advantage to the winning team. This can be in the form of shorter respawn times and being able to capture the next point faster than the previous one. The defenders to get a small advantage… the defender’s advantage. This exists because the attacking team often has to push through a choke point to get to the next capture point. If the winning team did not have these respawn / capture point speed advantages, it would be a lot harder to push in and take the next capture point (having to uber first, go through a choke etc..), which would make a lot of boring games, lower scores, or 0-0 ties.

Now here is the issue. When a team is winning the map, e.g., 3 rounds to 2. And they are also winning the current round (They are holding CP3). The team can potentially sit there and wait. This applies whenever the timelimit in the game has less than 10 minutes after they have capped the middle point. They can wait there until the game ends, and they will have secured a victory, winning the map 3 round to 2.

Because of the winning team advantage, they allready get faster respawn times, closer respawn positions, and can always backcap faster than the enemy team. Now add the ‘defenders advantage to this’, and suddenly you have a really difficult situation on the hands of the team that is behind. They will have to uber first, push through a choke, and they risk getting back capped, and also have to fight in an unfavourable position. The risk for the losing team is actually so great, that the winning team should always be using this option. The TF2 meta game pretty has it pretty much written that if you fail a push into CP3 from CP2, you will definately lose your 2nd CP, and often lose your last CP. If you failed a push into CP2 from CP3, you will definately lose CP3, but you will be able to often hold CP2.

Now the problem with this strategy, is it is ultimately extremely boring for both the players, and any spectators in the game. Because of this, it doesn’t occur so often. It also doesn’t happen too often because of sportsmanship, but also because teams want to win by more points, so they keep pushing. However, this could potentially be a problem in those games that ‘really matter’, e.g. LAN finals / cash tournaments.

The question I guess, is can anyone think of a solution to this problem? Should it just be accepted that this is a tactic that teams can use, or should some sort of incentive be developped to discourage this type of play?

Obviously I have views of my own, but I’ll type them out later in the thread.

http://etf2l.org/forum/general/topic-16116/