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« on: July 12, 2015, 09:58:41 pm »
Capture Point maps have generally been left out of competitive play in most tournaments. When Guns of Icarus was added to MLG, the only playable maps were Deathmatch maps, and the SCS, which is the only regular event at this time, is only Deathmatch. The only big CP tournament, the Aerodrome, has since changed to its own custom type after its organizer expressed distaste with Muse's current CP direction. Muse has made many changes to Capture Point in the last few patches. There have been a lot of good things going on to improve CP in these patches, and I believe Muse is going in the right direction with this. Capture Point is in a better state than it was before the patches, as it is easier to regain points after they have been initially captured (one of the initial complaints about capture the point), and games do not drag on forever. However, I believe there are still quite a few critical flaws that really keep CP maps out of the favor of many of the experienced and new players. Most have been around since the beginning, but one in particular stands out as recently added by the new Muse patches. These flaws are the long capture time, the small number of points in the win condition, the map rotations, the spawn advantages, and the load time advantage.
The long capture time was one of the main offenders as to why points could not be taken back from an enemy. It would take a long time to get the capture moving, and enemy ships could come in and interrupt you during this time. As a solo ship, one would have to spend about 15 seconds uncontested in order to capture a point, or 30 seconds if they needed to neutralize it and then capture. This also means that teams who were anywhere between 50-75 points away from winning were almost ensured victory as long as they were alive. The increase on the respawn timers helped the situation, but the issue remains that it still takes a very long time to capture a point alone. This is alleviated by the fact that stacking ships on the point doubles/quadruples your capturing speed, but this also makes more ships more vulnerable in that small capture area. One suggestion to handle this would be to make neutralizing a point faster, but to leave capturing the same speed. This would allow teams to come back when they have to take a point back. Another idea would be to make both faster, but this runs the risk of fast ships being too good on Crazy King maps where they can capture before the opponent can make it there. A third idea is to give the first ship a bonus to capturing speed, so that you can capture points faster alone, but not affect the speed when there are multiple ships on the point. For example, a 1v0 (or 2v1, 3v2, or 4v3) could capture the point at 1.25x their current speed, while any other capture rate could be at the same speed it currently is now. A final idea is to make capturing much faster, like 2x the current speed, but not have it persist. That is, if you have a 1v0 on the point and an enemy ship gets on the point to make it 1v1, the progress you made towards capturing or neutralizing is lost. This last idea seems great for faster paced points that change hands more often, but may unfairly punish mobile ships that need to get off the point sometimes to evade fire.
The small point win condition is the one flaw that Muse introduced with the new patches. While CP games were taking a very long time before, the 2v1 change on top of the point reduction means that there often is not enough time or opportunity for teams to come back once they lose the point, especially in King of the Hill. This may be remedied by simply allowing the points to change hands more easily, but even that may not be enough and may warrant an increase in the point total required to win to pre-patch numbers to give teams that need to attack a captured point the chance to do so effectively.
The map rotation point requires much more work, but is fairly straightforward. With the majority of all tournaments running as 2v2 tournaments, there is only one map available for CP: The Labyrinth. Given the vast Deathmatch pool, organizers quickly see Deathmatch as the much preferred type to run their tournament. One solution for this could be to run more 3v3 tournaments, where the CP map pool is more in depth and there is more variety. The other solution is for Muse to develop more 2v2 and 4v4 CP maps for more variety in map choices.
The spawn and load time advantages are probably the biggest issues right now, and last is definitely not least in this post. Currently, depending on which random point is selected in Crazy King, the spawns can be vastly imbalanced, giving one team essentially a free point for at least 30 seconds. Usually, if the enemy team rushes over to contest, the first team is already stationed well and wins the fight, snowballing from there. If the enemy team doesn't contest, that's a free 150+ points for one team. This can be looked at to simply start form a neutral point instead of a random point. The load issue involves people taking longer to load into the game, causing them to lag behind other ships going towards a point, also often costing their team the point. One solution involves making points uncapturable for the first minute. This would solve both of these problems, allowing the teams to fight on more even footing. Another solution for Crazy King involves making the first point in a neutral location instead of random.
All in all, CP maps can easily replace the camping and timing out of the current Deathmatch format by forcing teams to go after an objective and fight over something. CP maps provide a lot of life to the game and promise that ships are not running and hiding from each other. However, a few flaws in what is otherwise a great mode keep a lot of the community skeptical. Fixing these flaws will open up CP as a competitive mode that can stand up to both audience engagement and player participation.
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