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Hello everybody!

With Operation Ares and our upcoming Conquest tournament around the corner, it's time to make an announcement on some changes coming to Conquest gamemodes. These changes will only be implemented in tournament and competitive settings (e.g. private servers, tournament matches); they are not destined for the public realm (e.g. Mixed) currently. However you may see some of these features in the future on our public servers.

We're renaming 5CP to Domination as it's our way of re-branding the gamemode. This has the most changes done out of all Conquest gamemodes so we highly recommend reading everything as we explain the reasoning for these changes.

Domination Timer

• Controlling the enemy’s 2nd point (having 4/5 points) increases the “Domination Timer" in your favor.
  
• If the enemy owns your 2nd point when you had the timer in your favor, that timer will decrease back to 0 and flip in the opposite color going back upwards.
  

A major issue with 5CP was when one team would destroy the enemy by being on their 2nd point the whole game but in the final minute, they get snowballed and lose both 2nd and mid in the final seconds which resulted in a loss. We don't want matches to be determined in the final 2 minutes, we want every decision to matter in the 12 minutes of play time.

The Domination Timer is one centralized timer on the scoreboard and will act as a win condition at the end of time limit (more information below). We didn't want middle to have any say in the domination timer because we feel as if teams would only care about mid for the whole game and it'd act as a 1 hill KotH.

Hills

• All hills will no longer have a neutral state when capturing an already owned point.
  

Neutral hills generally led to confusion from both a spectator and player perspective. The middle hill will be neutral at the start of the match, however, once it is capped, it can only flip states between blue or red owning it. This change will make it harder for back caps to be efficient as you need to fully capture the point to make sure they can't capture the next hill instead of only bringing it to a neutral state which requires half of the time.

Last Point

• Teams can no longer repair their last point. That means if red has took 50% of my point, it will stay like that for the rest of the match and can only get worse.
  

One of the issues with 5CP was how difficult it is to capture the last point. Now obviously this can be solved with map changes but we'd like to start rewarding teams for pushing even if they can't fully capture the point. The idea with this change is that each push makes it easier to end the match as it will eventually lead to a short capture time and you no longer need to worry about spawnkilling with only 2 people alive.

Win Conditions

• Capture all 5 points
  
• Own the Domination Timer at the end of time limit and you own the majority of hills. If you own the timer but have lost mid, overtime kicks in...
  

Overtime

• Overtime can only be triggered if the team who doesn't have the domination timer in their favor owns the majority of hills (3/5) when time expires.
  
• Overtime ends in these conditions:
  
  • The team controlling the majority of hills (3/5) controls the domination timer long enough to flip the timer in their favor. That team wins.
    
  • The team controlling the majority of hills (3/5) captures the last point resulting in an instant victory.
    
  • The team controlling the majority of hills (3/5) loses mid and now loses the match.
    

We think these overtime conditions would make the end-game better and allow for comebacks to occur. If we allowed overtime to start from owning mid instead of the enemy 2nd, we feel like matches would go on forever as the timer doesn't go up by owning mid and it'd be a constant battle there.

KotH is in a pretty good state but we'd like to make changes to how the end game works and have less confusion in the scoreboard.

Hills

• All hills will no longer have a neutral state when capturing an already owned point.
  

Again, this is to prevent confusion and we'd like to have scores keep on going up. This will also help prevent confusion with overtime below. We will likely speed up capture times for hills to make it quicker to flip points as every second counts in KotH.

Win Condition and Majority Overtime

• When a team reaches the score limit, they must also have control of the majority of hills in order to win.
  
• If they do not have majority control, Majority Overtime starts, where the team must regain the majority of hills to win before the other team's score catches up to their score. The win condition is: one team must have control over a majority of hills AND have the most points in Majority Overtime. This means the score can keep on increasing beyond the map's limit as long as the team with most points does not have hill majority (e.g. over 2000 points on a map such as Limbo II)."
  
• Overtime can be toggle-able in XML (maps with 2 hills won't really work with this).
  

This change prevents teams from throwing all of their players on one hill at the end of a match because they're really close to winning. That was generally annoying and required the team losing to basically triple cap which is very difficult especially when the enemy team is all on one point. We have made sure close matches that trigger an overtime aren't ruined by forcing the team who passed the score limit second end up winning instantly and instead need to continue holding the majority of hills until they pass the enemy in overall points to secure the win.

KotF has had a bit of problems with RNG resulting in some teams being able to take possession of flags easier so these changes will hopefully fix that.

Flag Posts

• Flags will no longer respawn at the same post.
  
• Particles will indicate the location of the next post spawn while the flag is currently being possessed.
  

These changes will prevent a flag from respawning 5 times in a row on the same post. That led to some really boring matches as only one area of the map was being focused on. Knowing where the next post location should allow for teams to strategically run to certain places with the flag and to be able to know where they should leave spawn. Strategic deaths with the flag will be a thing.

TDM has no core gameplay changes except for how we handle ties now.

Blitz Overtime

• In the event of a tie at the end of the time limit, a match will go to Blitz Overtime where the team that survives wins.
  
• All players will respawn as soon as time expires and 1 life blitz will be enabled.
  
• Playable area should begin to decrease with a world border that forces everyone to mid.
  
• Certain region restrictions will be disabled (ex. scoreboxes and their portals will be disabled).
  

We don't like ties. We believe this is the most fair way of forcing teams to fight each other after time expires instead of letting the match go on and letting it be the next team to get a kill wins.

We're going to be experimenting with how these changes to CTF will work in the competitive setting but for the most part we're excited to see how matches end because of this.

Mercy Rule

• Similar to Badlion's CTF, if a team is up by x flags (defined in XML), that team wins regardless of time remaining.
  

This should allow for matches that are one sided to end quickly instead of watching a 20-0 match with 5 minutes left.

Proximity and Touches

• GONE
  

I think we can all agree we'd rather have matches not be decided by a few blocks or a half completed objective.

Sudden Death Overtime

• In the event of a tie at the end of the time limit, match should go to Sudden Death Overtime where the next successful capture results in a win.
  
• During this time, when the flag is dropped, it remains at its location and does not respawn to its post
  

Overtime was implemented in Badlion's CTF and went pretty well. Our take of this will make it a bit easier to take flags out as they won't respawn to their post. The only bad thing that could happen is if you somehow get knocked close to their spawn with the flag cause then things will go REALLY bad.

These changes may still be switched up in the future depending on how well these play in a competitive setting and if we find any problems or other issues we'd like to solve. We hope you enjoy our next tournament.

Credits to Strangey  for compiling this thread

Noting that these changes were agreed on not all that long ago & have been evolving lately: huge thanks to our wonderful dev team for working reay hard on implementing all of this in a short time. Not everyone can see the good work they put in, though we do every day and it's stunning. :pray:

I can't wait to see some exciting Overtime scenarios in the coming tourney :100: