most A/D maps favor defense heavily. This is fine in theory since offense only needs one major win to take a point and defense needs to win several. But it makes the game into a perpetual last push and you end up with way more downtime than 5cp or koth. The generally long timers (designed because pubbers are bad) dont help it much either.

Gravelpit in particular had some shit point design. B was way easier to hold than A and it was very hard for defense to switch between them (its made for pubs to have players at both points). The C area was massive and the height made it difficult to reach the point from many areas.

but fwiw thereve been very few tries to make ad maps for 6s. i think that if people really wanna go for it then the defenses should be weaker with shorter timers. That doesnt work in pubs because people expect offense and defense to win a fairly even amount but in stopwatch its ok if offense is stronger to make things more fast paced cuz the timer is more important.

why would you wanna play a slower game than it already is

Although a lot of people might tell you it's because of turtling, I don't think that "stalemates" or seeing people attack a stable hold are all that annoying to watch/play. Often times it's really fun to see players attack a hold and looking at the decisions each of them make in any given team fight.

More-so, I think it's the fact that if a push fails on these maps, and their respective gamemodes, there's not much pushback. On 5cp or koth, you might be able to have a complete turn around in any given moment where the defenders now get a chance to bring it all back. It's more dynamic, and is usually much nicer to watch and play.

That being said, I don't think a lot of current a/d maps are that well suited for competitive, to begin with. Pickup placement, defined routes, and general balance seem to be all over the place for most of them. It might help if they were more streamlined and if there was a better way to test out more maps (looking at mapchamp), but currently the pool we have for them is pretty small.

Edit: Even bigger than all of that is the timer system for deciding rounds is inherently flawed.

its not fun

nobody pugs it

nobody scrims it

u give up 33% of the map by default

engi/sniper/heavy are encouraged

historically its a huge upset map because winning comes down to getting 1/2 pushes correct regardless of how badly ur getting rolled the rest of the game

Honestly I don't get the whole "it's stalematey" argument to begin with. In 5cp stalemates are a real problem; it's possible for both teams to stand to lose more than they could gain by pushing and then spend a long 5 minutes poking at each other until one team gets bored enough to push anyway or bring out offclasses, but in payload and a/d, there's one team whose sole purpose is to push. I don't see why stalemates there would last longer than the time it takes to build an uber.

other than that, mason knows whats up

Literally the only point that mason made that is valid is the fact that its a big map and a single push can win it. The rest are subjective or totally useless. As I have been saying for literally years, gpit is a map we need to bring back into thr map pool because of how it plays and the thinking it forces teams to do.

People think attack/defense is boring, but then we have 0-0 30 mins LAN games.

Subjectice

Thats because it isn't played

That's because it isn't played

This is only on the A/D maps we have right now

Engi/sniper/heavy being encouraged is not a big deal,because they don't slow the game down, I actually it's good to give them a gamemode where they're good at

Yeah but for this you have stopwatch so it doesn't matter if you cap but how fast you cap

He means that compared to 5cp the result can be pretty random, because a worse team could potentially get lucky on their first push of B, wipe the enemy team, and cap C instantly - getting an unbeatable time.

I didn't play when gpit was in the rotation, but I've heard people didn't like pugging/scrimming it back then either. While I can't really argue that it forces teams to think, I'm not sure I like the type thinking required. At first, it will require teams to think about which point they'd like try to defend more, but sooner or later one point will become the "meta" point to try to hold on to, and the other one will become little more than a time sink. Beyond that, what kind of thinking does it require that any other a/d map doesn't? Plus, I think there's an argument to be made that encouraging permanent offclasses is bad since it makes teamfights less interesting.

Also, at least until either a or b becomes the standard point to defend, pugging on this map will almost always be a shitshow.

In fact Edifice made the point design better. It was very easy to switch around between A and B and the C tower was easier to push, so I don't see why we can't try it one season at least.

When it was in the rotation nobody pugged it or scrimmed it.

Perma off classes are ultra boring unless you're a sniper main in which case you can kill yourself.

So hypothetically, if you were to make an A/D map from scratch, what would the very general overlay look like? An offensively favored map, with three or four points to capture so the results would be consistent? Just have it be sequential captures. Have it so while offenses are favored, they have somrthing to lose with failed pushes?

The format sucks
In EU we play attack, defend then defend, attack. Then if its a draw we play another round

It takes like an hour

Nobody pugs it because its not a good pug map in general and nobody wants to pug one map for an hour
Nobody scrims it because you can scrim 2 other maps in the same time so why bother

@11

So here is the thing, it is 100% possible to defend both points with rotations as proved by Mihalys Flow and pyyyour with their iron man strat in season 11. Saying that you have to hold a single point is a large part of the problem when it comes to people not liking gpit. People just don't want to put effort into thinking outside the box for stuff. Another example is the tiger forward hold on C. Doing it totally changes the dynamic of the map and how it plays. I fully believe that gpit is a map that has many ways it can be played, but very few people actually put any thought into how it can be played, and saying that its a bad map just because people are too lazy to use their brain for once it not an good reason.

Is gpit perfect? God fucking no, it has its own issues. But is it better then metal or grans that we have in rotation right now? Quite possible, or if not better it is at least on par.

Would changes to the format itself help at all? I personally like the idea of forcing rounds to be shorter (3-4 max time between point captures) or allowing Red to retake a point to give them a risk-reward scenario, but I certainly don't have any competitive background to vet those ideas.