KOTH or “King of the hill” is proving to be rather popular on TF2 servers these days. It’s a strange mixture of the previous TF2 Arena and the current TF2 point capture style of play. It is neither an all out death match nor a fully fledged regular TF2 experience. The key concept is as follows:
• Either team can capture the centralised control point on the map
• Once a team captures the point, they must hold it for 3 minutes to win. Each team has their own 3 minute timer that must count down for a victory to occur
• Control of the capture point can flip between red and blue team. The 3 minute timer stops when your own team loses control of the point.
• You have to be on the point to win – sitting back and losing control also loses you the game.
This sounds interesting in paper, but I find the mode of play leads to excessive spamming and little chance at team co-ordination. This may be in part to the starting maps being quite compact and the central capture point focusing both teams onto one small area. Maybe I’m just being simplistic here, but because I’m talking public play (not matches) the teams tend to be quite large (12 instead of 6 per team). These larger teams make the maps feel more like a huge meat grinder.
The capture time is set to 3 minutes – lending some urgency to the attack to regain the capture point. This is a good thing as it helps focus the team and reduce some negative aspects of camping and not completing the set objective. I like this feature as you genuinely do feel some anxiety towards getting control back from the enemy.
The same 3 minute counter reduces the ability for some people to plan and execute even simple tactics (again, I mention that I’m talking about public play - not matches). People rush headlong to block the enemy from capturing without consideration for enemy numbers or defence. This is I feel, a bad thing.
So, the 3 minute counter is both a good and a bad thing. I wonder if we should be able to change the capture time as we can do with other TF2 server settings. Would a longer capture time help or would it reduce the focus on re-taking the control point? Pity we can’t test it - by all means let me know if I have missed a server setting or if there is an admin plug-in that can change this.
Spawn waves – I wonder if this mode of play might suffer on servers with “fast re-spawn” enabled. This mode of operation reduces the time that a player will wait before being spawned into the game after death. Faster re-spawns can lead to more bodies flying around the map and the increased bottleneck seen on some KOTH maps (Viaduct comes to mind).
Map distances – the KOTH maps seem quite compact to me. This is probably due to the 3 minute timer. Maybe some alternative maps will be larger (not too large I hope), but in any event a bigger map would need a longer timer to make things fair. If the 3 minute timer were kept then we’d see the control point get taken and no follow up challenge from the losing side due to lack of time. I can’t help but feel that a bigger map could relax the spam nature of the KOTH mode – but I would probably be proven very wrong.
Vertical challenges – I would like to see KOTH maps use the “Badlands spire” kind of layout. I don’t think that these new maps have much of a hill after all (despite what the game name says).
KOTH no doubt exists off the back of Arena mode. Arena was definitely a stab at appealing to the Counter Strike Source (CSS) audience. CSS attracted the kind of players who liked to prove how elite they are, with the noobs spend more time sitting out than fragging people. I’ve played CSS, and I think that some of the more negative aspects of the game come from the fact that people have to sit out and watch others play. The CSS “forced spectator” death camera mode was taken well by some players (“I deserved to die and the other guy did well”) and badly by others (“Cheat, luckor” or some other abuse). TF2 didn’t really see this because if you died you had a short wait and could re-join the action. The TF2 round re-spawn also meant that players could afford to be more selfless in their actions, knowing that sometimes a suicide could help the team achieve a goal. I think KOTH was a modification to Arena mode because arena isn’t as successful as Valve wanted it to be. KOTH allows re-spawns and matches more in keeping with the original aspects of TF2. Its more team oriented than Arena mode will ever be.
So what can Valve do to make KOTH more appealing to me? Well, I’d like to see an adjustable capture time to support a slightly bigger map. I’d also like to see maps with bigger hills in – and this also means some neater map designs with fewer choke points. Ultimately, KOTH doesn’t support fewer choke points as the players don’t have the option to hold back and there is only one real objective. Maybe the final answer would be to enforce a smaller team size on this kind of map – but then we’re into the Arena mode team allocation territory and I’m sure that many players hate being rotated out of the action in order to support 3 teams (like arena mode does natively).
To bring this article to a close (because all ramblings must have an end), I conclude that KOTH is a nice distraction when the team sizes aren’t too huge. It’s a nice stab at a new style of play, and a slight improvement over what I consider to be a heavily flawed arena death-match mode of play. Of all the things Valve could have added, I myself never saw KOTH coming. It’s a good job I don’t work for Valve really... the creativity would have been stunted some time ago!
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