Rhade said:
Multiple lives a round is simply unacceptable.
This and the objectives are the dealbreakers for me with Skirmish being the main focus of competitive matchmaking. Oh, and 6v6. Why 6v6? Competitive Warband has been rolling 8v8 in big tournaments for years. It's only been dropping recently because of decreasing interest.
I get that objective-based game modes are the focus of other games, but players just lack the necessary mobility in Mount & Blade to make multiple objective game modes viable IMO. Take a standard MOBA map as an example, with its near mirror-image balance, three lanes, and connecting pathways. If you took such an innately balanced map concept as that and plopped an objective into each of the three midpoints of the lanes, then sure, it's still totally balanced. The thing about MOBAs is that players will almost always have some item or ability that provides additional mobility, to let them get into advantageous positions or escape traps or just traverse the map quicker. Some even have abilities that can be used globally, at any point on the map. The key concept here is that competitive MOBA players know how important it is to maintain a presence on the map (even if they aren't there all the time), and the game gives them the tools to do that.
Mount & Blade is fundamentally different. The only mobility enhancers are horses, of courses, and the only way to maintain a presence in part of the map is to physically be there unless you're an archer. You can't project force without major commitment in Mount & Blade because the heavy lifters are slow infantry. What I see happening is teams picking one objective to strongly contest, a second objective for a one- or two-man take, and if applicable a third objective to scout with cav. Any further division of the team leads to insufficient bodies in any one place to repel a focused attack, and any less division means the team is too concentrated and will face whatever penalties are incurred by surrendering objectives. If everyone can respawn then this gets even worse, because a team that contests an objective and loses because they're outnumbered at that objective will take fast-moving classes on their second spawn and play the other objectives, devolving the fight into a rolling skirmish & kite fest.
You might say the obvious solution, then, is to take an attacker/defender approach to the objectives, where some teams start with control of objectives and it's the other team's job to capture or destroy them as appropriate. That forces conflict, right? Scenarios like these are prone to ties or marginal victories, and these are more difficult to validate in a competitive setting because there are multiple ways to achieve a partial victory. In Warband's F&D, for instance, teams scored 1 point at the end of each round for the objectives their team either destroyed or defended, or 2 points regardless if they killed the entire enemy team. What happened was defenders would surrender one objective immediately, and then just fight over the last one to try to kill the entire attacking team. If the defenders won, they got 2 points even though they lost an objective. If the round timer ran out then both teams got 1 point (attackers for destroying the freebie objective and defenders for having one surviving objective). Naturally, it's in the attacking team's interest to score their freebie kill and then skirmish for the last objective or attempt hit & run attacks to destroy it with minimal risk. At worst, if they're careful then they get a tie. Defenders don't have a viable option to split their forces for defense of both objectives because the attacking team can and historically did fully commit to one objective at a time. In a tournament setting, how do you look at reported match stats and determine what was an actual, legitimate, fought-til-the-end tie and what was one team sniping an objective and kiting for the rest of the match? How do you deal with the fact that one team must go all-or-nothing on an objective and their scoring potential is entirely dependent on the enemy team's willingness to fight?
