Why do you not like CTF?

For what I've found to be the general opinion of the stock ctf maps:

2fort and Turbine are very easy to defend and hard to attack. Double Cross and Well are hard to defend and easier to attack. Never play Sawmill.

It's usually a feeling that the maps are too imbalanced. Which thus makes you frustrated as one team ends up always winning.

There isn't much team work with vanilla CTF. I just find myself on my own and trying to take down 3 sentrys by myself only to be killed even if I accomplish it. It leads to just spawning and dying over and over because all the players are split up and dying to some random person in a spot that I couldn't really predict he'd be. It's frustrating and not fun to play.

I usually play Turbine when I feel like just playing without having to coordinate with my team. I would either go Demo and laugh as I see people walk in my sticky traps over and over again, or I go Kritz Medic and kritz people in the lower hall while they shoot to the middle section.
Turbine doesn't promote teamwork indeed. Payload does a better job at that.

• Only one (or two) people can affect the objective leaving the other 23 (or 22) feeling a little bit useless
• Scouts run one route WAY faster than I can change from my route to the route their taking to stop them, so I never feel like I have a chance to protect our intel from being stolen
• The gameplay is super repetative. The map is symmetrical and to get from your spawn to the enemy intel and back to your intel, you have to run through your base, across mid, through the enemy base (identical to yours), grab the intel, back through their base, across mid, back through your base and back to your intel. You have to run through the exact same geometry 4 times. And then you have to do it all over again!

In short: CTF fucking sucks.

But still, ctf is like in 90% of existing FPS, so if it was really bad...

I do not by any means hate CTF. However I do feel that breaking through defenses is much more difficult and less rewarding than breaking through defenses in cp or koth. At that point I just turn my brain off and run around trying to see how many kills I can get on my strange weapons. Perhaps I am trying to say that I treat CTF like people treat joke maps.

I don't hate ctf. I hate ctf maps.

I would appreciate it if people found a better way to encourage a defense other than turtle in the intel room.

The problem is not with the gamemode it is how people play it.

Everyone wants to go out on the offensive. This really should only be left to the scouts/soldiers/heavies/medics.

Defense is important. Like, SUPER important.

You need a well coordinated team that is as willing to defend as it is willing to attack.
The problem with ctf is that it attracts a lot of new players since it is easy to understand. New players, (and some of you dirtbags) refuse to play the class that is needed because they "don't want to".

Since its full of stubborn players who refuse to defend, what you are left with is an uncoordinated team of selfish morons who only want to try to cap the intel by themselves. I have played together with friends in real life, and I have been to servers that are actually serious about capture the flag. There is a lot of coordination, communication, and the teamwork is absolutely necessary to complete the mission. In fact, more so than in any other gamemode.

The problem with capture the flag is that it takes more dedication and skill than any other gamamode and it is easy to NOT want to give your all when 90% of the team just wants to play their own way and couldn't give a shit about you.



The best game of TF2 I have EVER played in my entire life was when me and 8 friends got together and played 2fort for 3 hours. I will be honest; its not my favorite gamemode, but when you actually give a shit about yourself and your team it is the most rewarding gamemode to play.

(This is all my opinion though, you can disagree.)

For me, it's that the gamemode never feels rewarding to win because capturing the flag as a class that can do it is barely ever a challenge, apart from a few stray battles. If you don't do any capturing of the flag, it feels like you've done nothing to contribute to your victory at all.

I think CTF just doesn't fit TF2's gameplay design well. TF2 is designed around team combat and area control, while CTF seems better suited to player-player combat and a quickly moving point of action. Generally, players in TF2 that try to stand out from the crowd (by running ahead of the area that their team controls, or other similar things) get killed pretty easily, and trying to capture the flag is a great way to put a big target on yourself. Also, the class roles in TF2 make it so that players can't shift between offense and defense very easily; in games where everyone has the same abilities, they can change their role just by moving.

It's not to say that CTF can't be done well in TF2, but other games are certainly better suited for it.

I'm about to go pretty off-topic, so nobody has to reply to this if they don't want to:
What about A/D CTF? or other variants of CTF in general? Or those good or bad, or meh. Why? (Especially a/d ctf, I haven't heard anything on that.)

For me it's a combination of having a difficulty to assault base with the intel that's often near the enemy spawn and will often have a sentry gun or two defending it, along with the fact that you have to rely on a single person who gets the intel to get back to your base. If that person isn't very good or is trolling they can cause issues, while on other modes like payload/koth/CP if one person is screwing around it doesn't matter, you can still attack/defend the objective.

i love ctf (especially ctf well) because it provides very strategical gameplay
im a spy main and one of my favorite things is to sneak into the enemy base that has 3+ sentries up ... and systematically wreck it

alternatively ... i like playing on ctf most when im engie, because I don't have to worry about moving my stuff every 30 seconds ... i usually build up in a good spot (typically the intel room) and then move on to the secondary objective of putting a teleporter exit in the enemy base

on the flip side ... my least favorite gamemodes are koth and payload race

koth ends too fast ... theres no point in building up a kill streak or a sentry base because its all over in 7 minutes anyways

and payload race has no clear battle lines ... its just everyone everywhere

tldr:: ctf provides long games, clear battle lines, and a static objective ... which I like

side note:: im also working on a ctf map atm (the one i submitted to the 72hour mapjam) i'm detailing both sides very differently even though the map is symmetrical ... hopefully it will cut down on the repetition.

40 sentry guns around the intel = why bother playing

40 sentry guns around the intel = challenge fucking accepted
unless im playing pyro

Well, there's gotta be a custom map that reduces the chokiness of the intel area, right?

Right?

KubeKing4556 said:

Well, there's gotta be a custom map that reduces the chokiness of the intel area, right?

Right?

Click to expand...

Yep and that's the problem - you have to have alt routes that will give a player a chance to pick up the intel. i.e Demo can shoot guns before doing his grab attempt or another class being able to sneak in and grab before getting shot. There has to be some sort on incentive to be able to grab it. Dying before you can even get close = no fun.

Something I've noticed from playing both Turbine and 2fort a lot is that in Turbine, you see a lot more of players who aren't scouts going into the enemy base together. I feel like there's a subconscious psychological effect going on with the wider hallways and the more open design overall that's encouraging players to do that, rather than send in lone scouts.

CTF isn't a bad mode if you're working as a team; heck, comp used to play 2fort! The trouble is encouraging players to work together even when they're not all constantly on their headset coordinating their moves like a platoon of soldiers. Most other gamemodes not only do this better, they tend to play well even when that fails.

Consider also the way 5CP identifies the team that's "winning" (the one that has more control points) and rewards them (shorter respawn times, forward spawns) to push them along to a decisive victory. CTF does nothing of the sort. A forward spawn would be difficult if not impossible to implement in a CTF layout, and the time a team needs a boost the most is before their player has even touched the intel. Asteroid briefly experimented with shorting respawn times for teams who have at least one player inside the enemy base. I'd still love to see how that works and test it out with a conventional CTF map, because it sounds clever on paper, though it would be dependent on the map actually having decent-sized bases (sorry, Sawmill... no wait you suck I'm not sorry at all).