Changes Were Looking at Making in the Short-Term
Based on this data and your feedback, here are a few changes were looking to make immediately to Competitive Play:
- Initial match time for Assault, Escort, and Hybrid maps will be reduced from 5 minutes to 4 minutes
- Sudden Death Timer will be reduced from 2m00s to 1m45s
These adjustments should make Competitive Play games a little shorter, giving you the opportunity play more of them. Theyre also fairly quick to implement, since they dont require a lot of additional work to the core of the system. As a result, youll see these go live with Competitive Play and our Summer season (assuming we like what we see on the PTR).
Changes Were Looking at Making in the Long-Term
In addition to the above, and because weve received a lot of positive feedback on the new Assault map format, were going to try to apply the same time bank system to Escort and Hybrid maps.
What this means is that, if both teams push the payload all the way to the end of the map with time leftover, youll go into a second round on the same map. Well remember how much time was on the clock for each team, and then youll have that amount of time to push the payload as far as possible. At the end of this second round, well also look at how far your team pushed the payload vs. how far the enemy team pushed their payload. Push it farther than the other team and you win.
The only ties that youll encounter in the time bank system are if a) neither team pushes the payload at all (an exceedingly rare edge case!), b) neither team manages to capture the payload (this is limited to Hybrid maps), or c) both teams manage to push their payloads all the way to end of the map in overtime. If were seeing ties happen less than 9% of the time in Assault right now, we should see even fewer Hybrids and Escorts resulting in a tie using this format.
