What does CTF need?

we need wool

we need mcpvp

 

I think the recession of the Team System's numbers can be connected to the fact that as time goes by veteran CTF players leave, and as the skill gap is so insanely high the newer people in the community can get demotivated to getting involved in the team scene, which causes a lack of new players to replace veterans who leave, leading to a decline in team activity. In theory, though, this could also be connected to the constant nerfing of classes. Back in the day, most classes were OP enough to the point where the bar for being considered good at it isn't very high, so someone can decide to play CTF regularly, discover, say, Pyro, think "oh this is fun, I think I'll main it", and whilst they're not as good as the top players, the class's OP mechanics balance out the player's lack of experience so that the player can still do well enough to be accepted into the team scene, meanwhile nowadays the classes are nerfed to the point where it takes lots of skill to be able to play a class to its competitive potential, skill which most newcomers simply don't have, or haven't got enough experience to achieve. Sure, they can get into the new we-accept-just-about-everyone teams, and sometimes the other teams if they get recruited, but if they go into the former then it's unlikely that they'll be able to get up much further (there are of course many exceptions, but majorilly this is the case). So all-in-all, theory is that nerfed classes makes bigger skill gap which makes less new people to team scene which makes team scene slowly get smaller.

 

Why has the number of teams gone way down? The answer is obviously player count. As the number of players has gone down on brawl overall, ctf obviously has declined as well. It's not just ctf or brawl, it's minecraft in general. The overall popularity of the game has diminished since around 2014. So, the game mode needs better advertising.

 

I think the biggest problem in terms of team numbers, which Deps touched on above, is that as an old team disbands (for example RR and Defy), what has often happened is only the best, most dedicated members of the team join a new team, while the rest leave the team scene or become much less active. This means that for every team that disbands, the remaining long-term teams benefit from it, which means that the remaining teams which exist are typically made up of veterans who have been playing matches for years. If a new team starts up, they will likely struggle against the older teams and this can make it really difficult for the newer players, but back a couple of years ago, there were lots of new teams so a new team never had to fight TT or DF, but now they have little other choice. What the team scene needs is a good system to encourage new players and although a couple of teams are doing a great job, losing matches is the easiest way to put people off competitive.

 

i dont care about the team scene. teams weren't a thing until late 2012 with TRF and TBF and even then most players weren't in a team or ever heard of them, yet CTF was at its most popular around that time. shouldn't be catering to the 'team scene' anyway, since classes that new players or bad players (me) find fun (engineer) are banned & is equivalent to catering to a small subset of the playerbase (which usually end up with changes favorable to that subset). agreed with blueguy, although i dont miss the days of iron door spawns or literally being able to wall off an entire passageway with engineer turrets and necro spawners - probably a good thing you can't do that anymore

 

Agree - old CTF was janky but at least you could remain competitive. That's why so many noobs use Archer.

Honestly I could write an essay about this, but it won't make a difference because anything that goes against the CTF committee's philosophy is ignored.

Edit: me and the committee are cool now :v

 

game is stale imo. so few major updates over the years. imagine if games like league/overwatch/fortnite never had any updates, i doubt they would maintain strong playerbases

that didnt rlly answer ur question so to answer it i think there needs to be some big nerf/buff/new class to change things. lots of ppl were playing when the new map wave was added, like 70-80+. now its back down to ~30 because people are bored already.

the "meta" in ctf has been the same for ages. its imo based around high mobility classes, soldier for capping, ninja for def. elf is a bit of a step in the right direction to changing it but wind(?) element cant stop all the mobility of ninjas and soldiers by itself

 

I think it would help if class ideas were actually looked at rather than just completely ignored or are allegedly "considered" but nothing becomes of them. Some of these people actually have good ideas, and putting it into the hands of people who actually play the game regularly is a better idea than letting people like chickenputty decide what's "best for ctf". I also think people should stop overthinking new ideas to make them seem stupidly overpowered. It could be done with literally any class, so instead of dwelling on every reason the suggested classes WOULDN'T work, maybe at least try them out.
This may not increase the playerbase much but it would bring much more variation to the game and, as mentioned previously by others, the game is getting stale, the classes are never changing, there's no new players coming, the overall meta is never changing - the only thing that changes are the maps which don't attract players at all really.
An example showing that additions change the meta more than changes/tweaks is in Overwatch. When Brigitte was added the entire meta changed, the game became much different and people had to think of ways to overcome the new meta/counter it. I'm not especially good at Overwatch, nor am I super informed on it, but it definitely shows that additions can completely change the overall gameplay.

There's a few of my thoughts on the matter ^^^

 

I heavily agree with dan and admiral here. We A: should be trying out different ideas that could work, instead of trying to theorize the best possible idea, and B: should cater so much more towards casual ctf. Make regular ctf fun and exciting, while still making it competitive and not totally broken. I think a big problem that's been stated by basically everyone is that the skill gap is way too high for newer players. Focusing more on the general ctf game instead of competitive ctf will highly benefit ctf. Add on top of that more testing of ideas and therefore more updates and changes. That's personally what I think ctf needs.

 

brother fear not for your prayers have been answered - some verse

https://www.brawl.com/threads/73051/

 

Don't blame it on Putty. He doesn't decide what to update on CTF, he is given the ideas and if everyone agrees, he puts it in no question. If anything, lack of communication between our staff team, and the committee can be an issue. As we have learned in the past, things are kept which is not a good thing.

 

Being someone who has been playing since the good days of 2012, I do agree that the game was more fun back then. The team scene came about by the hand of players wanting to play the game competitively. With the team scene being built around the gamemode and its classes, it makes sense that the teams would adapt to new classes/updates/tweaks/changes. A video game, an event or gamemode within a video game, is there to be fun; there for people to enjoy. Making changes to the game based on a competitive view isn't right. The game should be changed for the casual experience while the competitive scene is taken into consideration.

What Jay said is correct. Putty is not the one who decides what is best for CTF; Putty is approached with agreed upon ideas by staff. He approves ideas that have been brought to him and then has them implemented. As for not taking in the community's ideas, take a look at the elf changes.

 

I’ve found a lot of other games far more engaging than CTF. The only real reason I return to it is because I like making maps for the game.

 

I couldn’t agree with that much more^^

My personal reasons are as follows.

1) I miss the casual days man, when people didn’t try so hard to be the best and just played the game to a healthy and fun competitive level(yes, I know this is an opinion). Now, people advanced so much with these specific techniques to PVP and I just don’t find it as fun. Then the people who don’t want to do those techniques find alternatives. I can understand others like to get better and better, it’s human nature to want to advance and I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. This is more of a personal preference and not an actual problem.

2) A lot of my friends aren’t playing as much, and what kept me here is friends. This community had people my age populating the servers when I was most active. People my age who are easy to relate with, get along with, and well, grow up with. I grew up with a lot of the people here more than I’ve grown up around real life kids. Of course it can’t mean nothing to me, but if they aren’t playing as much, especially as an offense support main, it hasn’t been much fun without those people.

3) As for regular play.. (maybe this is just me), it also feels like there just aren’t many cappers anymore. The fast paced gameplay I loved so much with CTF feels lost. Maybe because(like a few threads stated recently), whenever I log on most of the server is trucing. Not here to say I never truce, but when it’s all I see nowadays, it’s hard to enjoy a game when the game isn’t even being played.

 

Personally, I want you.

 

But even greater, I want you.

 

Yes ^
totally not micro-post bumping ok

#BuffNation#NewNation#NewbLivesMatter

And at the very least we should keep this current state of CTF (or this new proposed one) through the use of temporary purchasable boosters and even keep at least 1 match server that way.

 

And annoying the **** out of us with map boosters. Don't forget that part.

 

The reason why there should be more buffed classes is the same reason why every new player, and a large number of players play archer. It's fun, the game is too catered towards the team scene. If buffing classes really bothers people that much, can't those changes be left off the match server? (it's happened before) Maybe make a week or a few days where new class buffs, or just new classes in general are tested. Set up some polls, and see what happens. It kinda sucks to think that the game is sinking and it looks like nothing is being done to grasp newer players' interest. Rn the mentality with the updates appears to be "Let's just try to hold on to these few regs in the team scene while we still can." Tbh, these people probably aren't gonna be here forever. It would be a wiser decision to try to bring in new players to keep the game alive, with stronger classes and new classes