Over the past few months Blizzard has been tweaking competitive Overwatch to try and make sure ties don't happen as often, and because of issues like only needing 1% capture in the second round if the opposing team doesn't capture at all in the first, principal designer Scott Mercer has outlined some more changes that are going to happen.
"Last week as part of the release of patch 1.10, we made a change to how a competitive match victory was determined on Assault and Assault/Escort maps. We had received a tremendous amount of feedback that ties on these maps felt unsatisfying, particularly on maps such as Hanamura. We then decided to change the general rule that required a team to fully capture one more objective than your opponent to win. You now only need to gain more progress than your opponent."
"While this new rule makes ties exceedingly rare, there are now some gameplay situations that ended up feeling more awkward with the new rule," Mercer acknowledged. "If Team A is on Hanamura defense and prevents Team B from ever gaining any capture progress, then when Team A is on offense they only need to reach 1% capture progress to win the game. This means Team B needs to always have someone contesting on the capture point, or they risk losing."
Mercer also goes on to explain that these situations produced a lot of confusion since they happened so fast, and the lack of clarity here isn't something they want to happen. Instead of needing simply 1% more progresss, then, a team now needs to achieve a minimum of 33% progress, and Mercer gave some examples of this.
"Team A attacks the first objective on Hanamura, but only gains 10% progress after a really rough offensive round. Team B then attacks, but they can only gain 20%. This is a TIE. Neither team achieved the minimum of 33%."
Another example was also given: "Team A attacks the second objective on Hanamura, and fully captures it with 3:00 left. Team B attacks the second objective on Hanamura, and captures it in overtime with 0:00 left. Team A now is back on the attack, trying to take the first objective. They can only reach 20% progress after their time bank of 3:00 elapses. This is a TIE. They did not meet the minimum target of 33% progress. If Team A had reached 33%, then they would have won the match."
Mercer does acknowledge that this slightly increases the likelihood of ties (what all these changes were trying to stomp out), but that this would be far less than the 6% rate they were seeing before, and the changes would be worth it for clarity's sake. Do you think this change is for the best?