Or I've been away from the game a wee bit too long. :)

Progress decay is indeed an important factor, glad it was brought up. The wiki suggests that the decay rate is inversely proportional to the capture rate; so the longer the cap time, the faster the decay. Badlands is the outlier at 2 seconds stock, most all the other maps are at 4, and it's possible that's the most rational place for the goal point to be at. You mentioned Badlands specifically in that quote, so I figure that's the map where it's the worst.

The map layouts themselves are another key factor that hasn't been discussed yet in this thread either. It's impact is huge and obvious. There's definitely a trend with the designs of final points where the layout is cramped and there's typically only two points of entry. Giving the attackers more options and more of an advantage when reaching a scoring position could go a long way to produce higher scoring matches. It's one of the more difficult routes to that end, but it should definitely be investigated, if anything is.

Well it would depend on what purpose you're trying to achieve. You're right about it being easier to defend and push off from your main. Having the longest cap time at the goals, with a gradient towards the center with the shortest time, would have the effect of producing very fluid end-to-end play, but would be low-scoring since it would dramatically increase the difficulty in getting a goal. It would produce a very soccer-like feel, but it would become super easy to gain even a two goal lead and turtle up. The severity of the effect would depend on just how much you increase the main timings, but that would be the result, to a degree.

The best metaphor I can reach for right now is that the timings on capture points act like a gravitational pull for the flow of play. The longer that timing is, the more that the flow of play will get stuck in orbit around that point. The more time a team has to spend at a point to capture it puts a higher limit on the minimum amount of time it takes to go from goal to goal, and there's a certain threshold where the timings become long enough where it's prohibitively hard to string multiple caps together in quick succession; the stock timings cross that threshold at 6v6.

That's why I landed on adjusting for the intermediaries to be the longest cap times, but still have them shorter than they are stock. It would place the strongest gravitational pull on the flow of play towards respective scoring positions, in a way that makes 'parking the bus' anywhere not a smart choice. This will create fluid play in the middle of maps, really open up the game, allow teams to get into scoring position more frequently, and score just as easily (or easier) than they can currently.

( ..continued )

Reducing these timings in general is an obvious first step; less time needed to cap any of the three non-goal points makes for more fluid play, and gross mistakes more punishable, making large leads less insurmountable regardless of time remaining. A maximum time of 1x/8-10sec feels like it might be good. If it's also made easier for scouts to drop in behind the main squads and put up caps, it will require teams to constantly cover more of the field, having to be constantly mindful of their forwardmost control point while staging an attack, instead of just reacting to a back cap on the chance it sneaks through, since the cap times are so high. This would bring smaller sized fights more to the fore and reduce the propensity for full-team stalemates, since it wouldn't require a full team push to effectively make a capture and shift the action in either direction. Teams would have to simultaneously play offense and defense in the middle portion of any map to a far greater degree than is required currently due to the heavy timings.

The second step would be to make the capture times for the intermediary points longer than the times for the center point. A maximum time of 1x/4-5 seconds could probably work. (Stick with me here.) This change would create that 'vacuum effect' that would pull teams into the attacking half of the map, and would make pushing for a full cap the best choice regardless of the score. Let's go point by point down the field to illustrate the effect:

Even with a lead, only defending your main is not a good strategy with the final point always being a short cap, with 1x between 2-4 seconds - and if we're mucking about with timings, should probably always be 2 seconds. A better position is to at the least have the intermediary point, and have that extra 8-10 second buffer.

But these intermediary points are always more exposed and harder to mount a defense on directly. A failed defense on an intermediary would almost certainly result in a full cap for their opponents. Sitting in defense of an intermediary would leave you far too open to giving up a quick score.

Pushing ahead then is a better choice, but a central point with a quicker cap time than the intermediaries is almost a worse position than just defending your own intermediary - a botched central defense could also quickly result in a cap. A really quick central point would keep things fluid in the central part of the map, opening up the possibility for fast breaks into a scoring position or all the way to the full cap if you catch a team particularly flat-footed.

It would then, strangely enough, make your opponent's intermediary point the most rational place to mount a defense, because it provides enough buffer time after a wipe to prevent a cap. However, your opponents intermediary isn't really anyplace to mount a long-term defense at all. The most rational thing to do from that position is to score yourself and extend your lead, if you have one.

The specifics here, as in my points above, are probably not optimal, but I think the general idea will likely stand up pretty well under some playtesting.

Fair enough point. Really on balanced maps, there's hardly any reason at all to change sides, the differences have no discernable effect on gameplay, and it'd actually be a small win for spectators and commentators if teams didn't change colors over the course of a match.

Well I did admit the class limit thing was probably stupid up-front.

I am also pretty much a nobody these days around these parts, but I hope that might change.

I expect that last statement to largely be the case, but if the only concrete thing that actually comes out of this article is an earnest debate over the specifics of the format, with around six years of competitive play under the initial format decisions to draw from, then I'll be quite happy. :)

The propensity for 'parking the bus' without a scoring cap, if the rest of the current game mechanics were left untouched, is certainly a valid one. But that would lead to the conclusion that the format as a whole, everything considered, encourages passive play, with the 'first-to-five' rule being the singular thing that pushes teams to play agressively and not sit on leads.

I think there's room to shift other things around towards the end of producing higher scoring matches; making it easier to score and more difficult to sit back would on the whole produce a consistenly better pace to matches. An optimal solution would make it easier to score in a shorter amount of time, discourage the formation of stalemates, and would create a sort of vacuum effect towards your opponent's goal - that is, in any given situation, the riskier play is to sit back and defend the current situation, and the more rational play would be to push forward towards the next point.

Here's the current stock control point timings - we've always accepted these as gospel, even though they're clearly meant to balance for teams more than double the size of 6v6. These timings have enormous consequences on the flow of play, but have been largely left unquestioned. Could these timings be tweaked such that they would either punish pacifist play, reward constantly agressive play, or both?

I think a hockey-styled pace is a great style to try and imitate, but I totally disagree that's the feel the game currently has. If anything, with the stock capture point timings, the pace is actually most analgous to American football with first downs and positions resetting as capture points are taken one by one. If it can take the better part of ten minutes to score, it's because it can take a long time to get into scoring position; and just as long to break the stalemate on defense, because there is so little opportunity for fast break play and to take the action to the opposite side of the field quickly.

( continued... )

Lots of missing the forest for the trees here in this thread, imo. This situation might be a rare instance of a 'trickle-down' economy working.

That said, I think the reaction would have been better, and discussion would have been more focused and fruitful, if Robin's dig at 6s was omitted. Beyond being unnecessary, it's simply an incorrect assessment about what makes any sport interesting over the long term; changing tactics is a small part of that, but the shifting landscape of dominant players and teams within relatively unchanging constraints of the game's rules and dominant approaches is a much larger and significant factor. If the only reason you watch an esport is to see massively new tricks, then sure, you're going to be disappointed with everything.

Regardless, it's super easy to come away from this thread thinking that 6s now has its days numbered, and is to be sacrificed at the altar of Highlander so as to sell more stuff. It's partially true, but the end effect should be a far more interesting and robust 6s game as a result of Valve's focus on gathering data from Highlander PUGs.

Watch Newell's keynote from DICE a couple months ago. Valve is quite deliberately positioning themselves towards a future gaming landscape where "all the games end up being part of an connected economy" on the other side of "a fairly significant sea change in the way we all think of what a game is." That was basically half of the talk linked above.

And you can't guide thriving economies at any scale without piles and piles of good data.

And really, that's what I think the primary goal of a Highlander-oriented PUG system is: not as a direct endorsement of 9s as a superior format, but actually a recognition that it's the most efficient way to gather data about item balance and use. It's the best way to gain actionable data from the largest sample size of relatively skilled players. Valve should also be able to easily use such a system to A/B test new weapons or nerfs/buffs to existing weapons, by randomly assigning the tweak they wish to test to sets of individual pugs, allowing them to track the effect in a controlled environment that's a bit more serious than a pub, but isn't so weighty that people would abandon a match simply because a single-match tweak was dropped into it.

In the end, the goals align - both the 6s scene and Valve benefit from a larger item set that is well balanced against the rest of the game. It allows players and teams more individualized approaches, and allows Valve greater monetization. Just so happens the best path for that is through Highlander.