Most of this sounds pretty good and winlimit 5 can definitely work for this, but I think a short round timer is definitely not the right way to fix stalemates because it allows the team that is not in control of mid to simply stalemate into a new round where they can have another midfight.

always preffered winlimit over windifference, its more intuitive from an spectator point of view and stops matches from being unnecesseraly long
the situations where windifference allows for a comeback and the first team to score 5 points actually loses are super rare too

Nobody scrims Viaduct because learning how to play Viaduct is only relevant one week out of eight. Splitting 5CP and KOTH evenly would be fine to solve this, it doesn’t have to be all KOTH or no KOTH.

Also pretty sure the reason Viaduct isn’t pugged is that it’s the best Scout map so whichever team has shittier Scouts will ban it. Viaduct pugs are fine.

I think people are overlooking the fact that having a new midfight is often much riskier than pushing with a clear advantage.

When the round timer is close to expiring, you are more likely to see offensive teams going all in. The lower the total round timer, the more often this will happen. If the offense's desperation push fails and they lose a large number of their players, the defense can either choose to push on the advantage that has presented itself or throw away the advantage they have to hold and reset the round, forcing a new midfight which is inherently harder to control than whats already before them. Sure you could win the mid and get control that way but you never really know, maybe you reset the round and you lose the mid and you're right back where you started, or even worse you lose the round in a roll. The reason parking the bus works right now is because the round timer is so far away from expiring that they never have to face the consequences of resetting the round and risking losing a new mid fight, they only have to run down the match timer.

Obviously constant desperation pushes could negatively disrupt the flow of 6v6, so something like a 1 minute round timer might be too low. But in general the shift to micro time pressure like KOTH as opposed to macro time pressure like match timers creates a much more fast paced, exciting and enjoyable game that could potentially even have more strategic depth than what we have right now.

Here's an analogy to consider: say you're rolling two dice every minute and every time you roll doubles you score a point. Probability-wise this should take about 30 minutes before you get to 5 points. Now say you're rolling two dice every 12 seconds instead, and you still score a point for every double. After 30 minutes, sure you've gotten way more non-double results, but you've easily gotten 5 points by then. More rounds starting also means more rounds being played to completion.

Besides, I've heard many people profess their love for midfights, as they are extremely action packed and climactic afterall. At the expense of less long stalemates is more midfights really a bad thing? Let's try it and find out.

Shortening the round timer is certainly going in the right direction but as it stands there isn't a server command that can control that. It may be possible with a sourcemod plugin but esea wouldn't use it due to the additional support that maintaining sourcemod requires. This is an adjustment that would require the participation of the TF team.

It's not about the actual affect the changes will have on the game, the logistics of having such a reform are near enough impossible to happen unless there is a drastic change in leadership/investment or movement at the top of all the competitive leagues.

Not going to happen on the back of one TFTV post no matter if you're ideas are good or not. Unifying the ruleset in the current mess and divide that is competitive TF2 will have a minimal effect if any. I do agree the one thing the game needs if you care about it growing as an eSport (lol) is a fresh reform, but the logistics are not there in place, and the sort of work that needs to be done should be happening on a community wide scale in the background, not begging valve to nerf the Pyro.

I'm with b4nny on testing the shorter time limit. If this is good thing, maybe the influential players can get in touch with valve and we can get a game command that control round timer.
Or course the testing would be with a mod.

It would require a large adjustment as well, there IS actually a command to adjust it however due to how the Round Timer actually works in TF2 you would need to apply the command multiple times for when people complete objectives and it's cheat protected. The command is "ent_fire team_round_timer addtime X" with a - if you want to remove time.

The Round Timer in TF2 is currently a map entity, therefore maps can set their own round timers and set how much objectives modify the round time. This means not only would you need to apply the command multiple times, but you'd need to apply it dynamically based on the objective. This makes changing it much more difficult for the TF2 team.

That said, the easiest way to do this (and it would still be time consuming on anything not already a custom map) is to have someone make a custom map with a custom round timer entity. Not only can you set the default roundtimer in the entity logic but you can set a custom maximum round timer and change how much each objective adds to it. If b4nny or anyone else wants to test it and knows a custom map maker willing to make speculative round timer changes in a fork, this is your best way of doing it.

A great example why I think a win difference is better than a winlimit is the recent Froyotech - Ascent match on Gullywash. Without the winlimit Ascent still would've gotten 6 minutes to get two rounds (http://logs.tf/1961439). As you can see most rounds were around 2:00-2:30 minutes long, so two rounds in 6 minutes is easily doable.

The game was so hype but it just ended while it could've been an even better game than it already was.

Exactly, the issue with winlimit 5 (in my opinion) is that it can cut short very exiting matches.

Would you rather have 1:10000 matches cut short or the matches that have dead time cut significantly? You have to realise that for this to matter, both teams have to get at least five rounds; that's three minutes per round on average. What are the odds of that happening between two top-level, equally skilled teams? In fact, I'd be amazed if anyone could point out a single LAN match between top teams on European rules that ended at 5-5 or with the team that hit 5 first losing outright in normal time. Think of it: probably the craziest comeback ever on European rules was TCM vs Immunity, but Immunity would never have hit the winlimit if it was played on Rewind II rules. TCM would still have won, nothing would have changed. I don't understand where you guys are conjuring up all these hypothetically ruined legendary matches from, because statistically they are either literally non-existent or virtually non-existent.

One thing I have to say, Ascent had like 4 or 5 backcaps screw them. And I personally believe a team should be punished if they allow such a thing to happen, if it weren't for the back caps the games would have lasted longer and the scores could very much be different

EDIT: I'd like to add that, you are assuming that ascent would be able to convert2 round wins in 6 minutes (which they could but froyo could do the same as well.)