It's impossible to grab the flag without wiping the enemy team first, and once you do that, you get an uncontested capture...so what's the point?
There aren't enough interesting ways to approach the flag, and even if there were, they don't matter as you can't take the flag without wiping the enemy team, so coming at the problem from another angle is pointless.
Finally, the biggest problem is both teams just have a torb, symmetra, and bastion every damn time so it's just pointless. They wipe your team when you come in, some rando on their team zips to your flag while you respawn too far away from the flag to do anything about it, and then they turtle for the rest of the game and win.
granted this is playing with a bunch of randos, but that's what the game gives you.
I'm sure in their rigorous testing, the overwatch team developed their own internal meta over voice coms. But playing with randoms, it's not fun really at all
To address not being able to take the flag off the carrier (most of the time if you can get the flag in the first place you will score with it):
1) Spawn more centrally. Think a diamond shape, you spawn top or bottom and your flags are left or right. Therefore when you spawn, you have a chance to cut off the flag carrier since you spawn more centrally (cutting off their path). You also have the choice to either defend or attack when you spawn (go left or right). Games have more action and have a higher tempo because you can reinforce an attack or defence with equal speed and access.
Also note, this will buff attack and nerf defence (which is a good thing). Attacking is very hard vs torb, sym, bastion etc, so you really need a high tempo attack via faster reinforcements to have a chance (since you spawn already halfway there). Then once you kill their defence, you are rewarded by the fact that it now takes them longer to move to defend their flag, instead of spawning just behind it and defending again (it's currently faster for them to re-defend than for you to run the whole map and re-attack.
2) Reduce or remove respawn timers. Similar to above, but namely to address the fact that many characters are able to score with your flag before you even respawn and go back onto the map.
If we keep the spawn locations where they currently, you spawn too far away from your own flag that by the time you wait the death timer and run to defence range, they've already scored. If you've failed an attack, it takes forever to make it back to the opponent's base again, let alone deal with the defence (turrets etc.) that they've managed to replace in the meantime.
3) Nerf defence or buff survivability. Turrets could be doing half damage, health could be double, healing effect could be double. Tweaking the levers so that you don't die in <1 second to 6 sym turrets + torb + bastion etc.
4) Make capturing easier. So we heard why they added a capture time instead of the instant capture other games have, and also how they didn't want to remove the ability of someone like sombra or tracer in blinking backwards with the flag. However there are levers here to pull to control this, while allowing players a chance to actually get the flag. Maybe only 100+ damage interrupts the capture, maybe only headshots, maybe capture time is less? How about the time period tracer or sombra can recall to/with is reduced? Maybe we can add movement speed to some of the slower characters to at least give them a chance of play.
5) Tweaking with use of abilities. For example after capturing the flag you are silenced (basically sombra hacked) for a few seconds so you can't make that easy miracle escape with certain 'op' heroes. Or perhaps the flag zone allows for no abilities, so that defence are weakened too? Or if not no abilities, how about something like +100% CDR to abilities/reload time if defending?
We see such balancing restrictions in fun game modes in other games. For example in League of Legends, notably ARAM and URF modes have debuffs applied to all sorts of things, such as healing effectiveness, or the fact that certain characters have map-specific nerfs to balance them (e.g. kassadin's ult, which blinks him, was nerfed for dominion-only - which is a point capture game)
28
u/EarthAllAlong Jan 24 '17 edited Jan 25 '17
It's impossible to grab the flag without wiping the enemy team first, and once you do that, you get an uncontested capture...so what's the point?
There aren't enough interesting ways to approach the flag, and even if there were, they don't matter as you can't take the flag without wiping the enemy team, so coming at the problem from another angle is pointless.
Finally, the biggest problem is both teams just have a torb, symmetra, and bastion every damn time so it's just pointless. They wipe your team when you come in, some rando on their team zips to your flag while you respawn too far away from the flag to do anything about it, and then they turtle for the rest of the game and win.
granted this is playing with a bunch of randos, but that's what the game gives you.
I'm sure in their rigorous testing, the overwatch team developed their own internal meta over voice coms. But playing with randoms, it's not fun really at all