CTF has always had potential.

Here are my posts about it.

Personally I can see CTF being put into the map rotations.

I would like to see more maps being put in where it reduces stalemates and forces players to commit, rather to wait for a clear advantage.

reduce the timer

We could try snowplow with stopwatch? It's basically payload but you don't need 2 people capping the entire game since it's with control points. But it's much more lineair than Gpit (which is the only A/D map I've ever seen in 6s)

I would like to see a koth map in 6s that isn't viaduct. Just try to make one with a spire as the cap point.

But first, people would have to agree to scrim other things than 5CPs. I remember when turbine or gravelpit were allowed I could never get a game on these unless they were the maps of the week in etf2l.

Faster flag returns and a spawn time penalty for the winning team would reduce the need for dedicated defenders while also weakening the ability to just cap and then turtle. Shorter return timers would also allow stuff like needing your own flag returned to cap an opposing one (which lets you deny backcapping with a good push).

CTF would be horrible, if you cap 1 or 2 flags you just get 5 man defending your flag, and if they try to push you with 6 you just have 1 scout or spy or w/e backcap the flag.

koth_sideshow

With traditional maps, yes. That's why CTF would need a bit of a rework - greatly reduced flag despawn timers, different map positions for flags, and switching to a "most caps in X time" rather than "first to 3".

What if the CTF worked more like Doomsday? Have a neutral intel in the middle that both teams have to fight for (which doesn't unlock for a certain amount of time), but have the cap be on the enemy's side so they have to push in. It would work sort of like 5CP (although one person would need to cap), but if the intel is dropped for too long the entire round resets (which helps prevents stalemates).

I'd like to at least see it attempted. Also the player outlines would have to be disabled.

That sounds a lot like Pass Time, could that work as a comp gamemode?

I think that 5cp is fine because of the flow of 6s but it doesn't mean that other game modes would not work. In my opinion the reason we don't see more of other game modes is because: one a lot of this community hates change so its hard for us to try new things but also its because there isn't very many good maps for other game modes. i think that we could have at least more koth if there was more good maps like viaduct which is an amazing map to play and spectate because of the lower amount of stalemates compared to 5cp. We did see ctf kind of work in etf2l with turbine and i personally really liked watching old matches of gravel pit (i joined the community after it was played unfortunetly). maybe we could give those another go or find some new maps of those game modes that we like as well.

tldr: if you want to see other games modes we need to stop making for many 5cp maps and try to make more maps for other game modes. we already have so many 5 solid 5 cp maps that making one that will actually be played is extremely hard.

There would still be a stalemate before they push for the cap, so maybe if there was a countdown from the moment someone gets the intel, they would be forced to push without waiting.

I've never actually played ctf, but i get the idea of the problem reading the above. Would different intel spawn locations and reduced flag despawn time solve it?
4 different spawn locations, if the intel has not been picked up for a couple of min or if you cap, it changes location to one of the 4 at random. That would make it as fast paced as it gets, no?

Pass Time could be interesting. Not with any of the current maps though.

I always liked Mannpower's cap method and grappling hooks, but the power ups were incredibly dumb ideas.

Just a thought but, why do we count 5cp map wins, not round wins? Is it just left over when some maps in the map pools could only really be played for map win?

Teams can do this right now except you have to watch it for 10 minutes instead of a shorter amount of time. It would lead to an equal amount of stalemates which don't last as long, not more stalemates. Not to mention it would provide more incentive for the attacking team to try to quickly break the stalemate in a more aggressive fashion instead of just sitting there for 10 minutes trying very safe options like sacing a roamer until they get lucky. So either it stays exactly the same or teams get better at pushing last; it definitely won't get worse.

CTF needs grappling hooks otherwise the gamemode is extremely unfun. There is literally no reason why you don't give the intel to the most mobile class possible(either solly or scount), and then it becomes a game of "who can catch the enemy scout/solly". It also has the exact same problems with teamcomps that 5cp has.

5cp is a garbo gamemode that nobody is willing to get rid of because Stockholm syndrome. Literally the only reason the 6's meta is so stale is because 5cp is the primary gamemode.

Attack/Defense maps need pro versions, right now the map design falls apart when you have 6 coordinated players on offence(This is why OW ranked uses timebank, as an alternative to creating pro versions.)

Payload would work, but you'd need maps designed for 12 players instead of 18-24.

KoTH would also work fine, but again you need to design maps for 12 players.

Attack/Defense and KoTH give you the highest potential for class variance and unique strategies. Payload is a DM check, where the team with better fraggers wins. CTF is 5cp with the twist of not having backcaps.

5cp
Only issues with it are that it encourages stalemates, as there is no incentive to push because of the time limit. Being in a losing situation has no weight like something like CSGO.
How I would fix this is by giving each point a 3 minute time limit, and at the end of the time limit if no team caps the final point, teams get an accumulation of points based on how many points they capped, so say that Blu is losing by a small amount of caps and was attacking last, but Red turtled the fuck out of it. Previously it would have been really difficult to win in that situation as the time limit would take away any urgency to not lose, because even if Red drops a round in that situation they still have others to fall back on. But if they do not push out in the new system to extend time limit, Blu gets the round advantage of 4 points vs 1 point. This puts the onus on the losing team to push out, and the winning team to push in to get more points, and it doesn't push as much dependence on the last point over other points as much in certain situations.
Obviously would probably need work, but I think it would fix the very few problems that 5cp has.

Koth
Main issues are with players not wanting to learn how to play other Koth maps in 6v6 in my honest opinion.
There are quite a few koth maps that would work great for the mode, but unlike 5cp where a generic >try to push with uber >work flanks for picks strategy works in most situations, koth requires teams to learn a whole new holding and pushing strategy for certain maps. And I don't think people are willing to learn it, which sucks.

CTF
Has potential, but classes like the engineer and heavy make the defensive squad a lot more useful than anything that an offensive squad would be like. Maybe it could work with some clever level design (like CTF_Landfall but a lot smaller) where teams don't HAVE to split up into two squads, but I heavily doubt it will result in enjoyable gameplay.

AD
People don't like AD because it's not a dynamic fragfest, it's a slow, deliberate push and pull between a choke point. It's probably only really Viable if someone works out a way to make retaking points a thing, like CSGO. Because the main issue with AD modes is that once a team has a point, that's it. The defending team has to fuck up ONCE and the attacking team can fuck up thirty or so times within the span of 10 minutes.
I had a smaler solution to this with my Koth A/D map, where teams had to hold the attacked point for a minute to lock it down, but I never got around to finishing the end of the level. If there is some outcry for such a gamemode I might have another whack at it though.

Pass Time. Mannpower, PD, SD, Payload
Broken on a set of varying levels. In order,
Takes agency away from one out of 6 players, is really easy to kite others with the speed boost. Engineer is too good.
Maps are too large, Grappling is OP, Powerups are dumb, Engineer is too good. (this comes from a guy who loves mp)
Random deathmatch, no strategy, a team gets WALLHACKS LOL
Do I need to explain why this is stupid.
Need to commit a person to the cart, could work if levels where designed with 6 in mind but still wouldn't be any better than an AD map with the same effort put in.

I wish people would understand stalemates are a SYMPTOM, not the actual problem with 5cp. 5cp has stalemates because the design of the format requires you to have a team that is average at attacking and at defending, rather than being great at one or bad at the other. When you excel at nothing, the optimal play is to do nothing. Compare this to A/D and KoTH, where you can tailor your composition and strategy to either attacking or defending.

your reasoning isnt right. You should read the old sigma guide. You will read that when no team has a clear advantage (picks/uber, i'm talking about +2 advs not +1s), making a move is a risky business. Therefore teams do low risk plays such as suicide 1 dude, or they do nothing at all.

So the solution is to give a clear reason for one team to make a move. koth/ad does it with a timer, and in 5cp it has to be done with assymetrical zones where one team has a positional advantage so big they can afford to push at a very low risk. Therefore, pushing and capping would be the norm, and a successful defense would be an exceptional play worth to be praised. A bit like basketball.