As an opening statement, I have about 3 years of competitive 6's experience and played ESEA-IM last season, as well as several seasons of highlander experience, and I am very seriously interested in mapping and spend a few hours a week looking over new maps with a competitive mindset.
The issue of finding the right gamemode for competitive is incredibly complicated and i think, unfortunately, none of the standard game modes in the game are functional for competitive player's needs.
5CP comes the closest, but still has the very fundamental problem that a winning team is incentivized to stalemate whenever they are ahead. Holding a point will always have a higher success rate than attempting to push a point in even-resource situations, and will generally still have a higher success rate even when in positive-resource situations (player advantage, positional advantage, uber advantage, etc). This means that if a team has a round advantage on their opponents and holds mid, they have absolutely no incentive to push, and will generally send in 1 suicide or pick class at a time until they gain a significant enough advantage to push, leading to minutes long stalemate situations. Changing round timers or resetting to mid doesn't solve this problem, because these solutions always further incentivize a team to stalemate. The only viable solution would be to give teams on the back of the map more options to break stalemates after a period of time, which would cause the attacking team to want to make push attempts quickly before the defensive team gains enough of an advantage to break the stalemate and gain a point. this could theoretically be accomplished through map design (timed one way flank routes, slowly changing geometry to make last harder to attack or 2nd easier to attack, etc) but would still have the fundamental problems of tf2 offense vs defense (that is to say offense is always more difficult than defense).
KOTH is the only real gamemode that is perfectly functional in competitive tf2, because it meets a number of important requirements. Each round functions independently of the others, i.e. your strategy doesn't significantly change based on whether you are behind in rounds or ahead in rounds. This functionality is important for a gamemode like koth, where each team begins each round in a perfectly even state. The team on the back foot (aka the team that doesn't currently hold the point) is given a significant advantage to attacking in the form of improved respawn timer. Finally, teams are in no way incentivized to give up advantages while they are ahead. The team that holds the point can establish progressively more forward holds until the hold is nearly unbreakable, and the the team that doesn't hold the point is always on the clock and is forced to make a move.
The major problem with KOTH is the fact that there is very, very little room for strategy, and it would be very difficult to create a map that solves this problem. The maps are inherently small and because of this have relatively little strategic depth to holding or breaking holds. They also naturally funnel you to a specific area and create DM fights within that area, the one point on the map. 5CP has the competitive advantage here. Because of the larger number of transitional areas and holding points, along with the bi-directionality of each area, every map comes with a significantly larger number of strategies that can be employed. Another issue with KOTH is that it lacks "momentum" which is to say that a team in 5CP can maintain a push and roll from one side of the map to the other, and it's one of the most spectacular things that can happen in competitive tf2.
The solution, of course, is a custom gamemode which combines the elements of both of these gamemodes. There are a number of potential solutions, some of which I'm sure I haven't considered yet. Here are some of the solutions that I've considered (and in some cases, failed in an attempt to implement) over my time spent both mapping and playing competitively.
- The Overwatch Solution: A multi stage KOTH map which rotates after every round. This is a natural improvement to the lack of strategy in KOTH maps in a number of ways. First, simply having a larger number of employable strategies on a given map makes the map more difficult to master for a competitive player, and improves the skill ceiling of the map. Second, the constant variation in the level's layout prevents rounds from feeling the same as they progress. Teams will generally settle into a rhythm or become predictable over a number of rounds on existing KOTH maps, and higher level teams tend to be completely aware of their opponents specific strategies before the map even starts. Multi stage KOTH would make it much more difficult to predict and react to your opponents play, which further deepens the strategic element of the map. The most obvious downside to this solution is fairly simple, it's several times as much work for the person creating the map to create and balance. Another downside of this gamemode is that it still doesn't have the "momentum" aspect.
- The Mashup Solution: Create a 5CP map with a constant KOTH timer that ticks progressively faster the further forward into the map a team is. For example, the timer starts at 7 minutes (or 7 minutes worth of abstracted points which indicate how close a team is to winning). Upon capturing a middle point, the owning team's timer ticks down once per second. If that team captures the 2nd point, their timer now ticks down twice per second. If that team captures the last point, that timer now ticks down 5 times per second. This gamemode would have to be designed to significantly favor the defenders, but maintains a lot of the most interesting aspects of 5CP while solving its major issue.
- A Formula Twist: A 3/5CP map which has extra control points which need to be held to maintain a benefit. This solution is the most outlandish, but also among the most interesting possibilities. Create a 3CP map with 2 extra control points that are somehow accessible from both the last and the middle point. When a stalemate occurs for any significant amount of time, this point opens up as a KOTH map, forcing both teams to leave their stalemate positions to fight over a neutral bonus.The bonus could be something map related, like additional routes to the point or a lengthening of your opponents spawn timer, but it could also be a physical buff that players receive, like marking opponents for death or a backpack-style effect for the winning team. A map like this would be incredibly difficult to balance for competitive, and is probably not worth pursuing unless a massive shift occurs in competitive players demands for alternative gamemodes.
All of these ideas suffer from being non-standard, both in general adoption by the comp community and in difficulty of creation and balance, but they would likely all be improvements on our two existing potential competitive gamemodes.
If anyone has questions about why the other gamemodes aren't functional for competitive gameplay, feel free to ask and I'll explain as best I can
