Alright, proper grammar, here we go.
I'm going to play devil's advocate for a minute. The same argument could be flipped on Splat Zones as well if the game goes into OT. Especially in higher ranked rooms I often find that a lot of games go into OT and at that point a team could be dominating you the whole game and you could come back just because you were able to fend them off for however many seconds you were behind do to that lucky inkstrike/inkzooka. In TC we stopped them at 2 secs, had 94 secs on our clock and rode the tower all the way back to their camp base in OT. In Splat Zones, if matches are close, it all comes down to who can make the final push at the end of the game clock. I even had a 100/100 game once that we ran the timer out on and in that scenario the team with the most ink on the map won.
I mean I agree with that assessment that game clock is a bigger factor in TW because the clock always runs its course so the chance for variables is greater but I don't think its the strongest argument for why TW shouldn't be competitive especially since in higher ranked rooms OT is common.
While this line of thought is fine (and, as you say, this is devil's advocate), the problem is not
that a triple kill wins the match, it's that a triple kill
with about 25 seconds remaining wins the match. Since that triple kill has no dependence on the rest of the game--all you need to do is stay alive for long enough to get a zooka, or land a lucky splat bomb, or something like that--this turns the rest of the match into a formality. The fact that the end result of a triple kill at 0:25 is identical no matter if you had been spawn camped until that point or if you had been holding at 70-25
is a crippling problem.
Similarly, Zones has two things to prevent "fluke" victories: the timer itself, and the penalty time. For the first point, the winning team needs to run through 100 points (or have the fewest remaining points at the end) in order to win, but if neither of these conditions are met, then the actual score
does not matter; 100-0 and 1-0 are both victories by knockout, and 100-99, 100-1, and 50-40 are all victories by time (just like how 44.1 vs 44.0 is an identical result to 95 vs 2 in turf). The key difference is that the eventual winners could
choose to run the time down so that they can all build special and have an unbeatable quad special combination that takes the mid point, thus securing penalty time (to the tune of three quarters of whatever score the opponents just got) that allows them to have a second attempt if the other team has a "fluke" of their own and retakes the point, but in Turf, you're
forced to make a move at the 25-30 second mark in order to have enough time to push out and take over the map or choke the map out and make such a comeback impossible (depending on which side of the spawn camp you're on).
Furthermore, consider that defending on some maps is so much easier than pushing (see Arowana, Saltspray, Mackerel once you get set up) that being able to secure a point for an extended period of time is not necessarily indicative of superiority, only a "fluke" on the first engagement (maybe they have a 96 user, for example, whose gun decided to shoot straight for fifteen seconds). If the losing team is the superior team, they will get about four good pushes in before the game ends. That's four opportunities for them to outplay the other team; maybe they luck out and it takes one, or maybe it takes all four and it gets down to single-digit points for the other team, but
they then get the same advantages that the inferior team had, and can almost certainly win the game.
In this sense, "flukes" have a chance to balance out. There are five whole minutes for one team to emerge victorious, and if neither of them do, then they're evidently matched closely enough that a deciding factor needs to break the tie. A single "fluke" at the end of a Turf match wins. No counterplay, no preparation, nothing to do except hope to hell the other team all decides to ink their feet while they have complete map control.
@flc it's your teams fault they lost, not the Game Mode. An Inkstrike at the last 20 seconds that gets a triple can determine a win at all Game Modes. Heck, all game modes can determine a win at the last seconds if you think about it. It's mostly a psychological thing. The last seconds will make you get more aggressive for that victory.
@Ryuji your opinion doesn't determine what something should or shouldn't.
@Power it's typically considered that TW has less strategies, but is there a way to prove this? We still don't have Private Lobbies yet, and you can make independent Tactics and group Formations. I even created some in one of my threads.
I don't mean to be rude by what I said and for what i'm about to say to all three of you, but I am detecting some Splat Zone bias. And don't think I have TW bias. I love all the Game Modes. I play them all.
Of course I'm biased toward Zones. It's so much better than Turf for competitive play that to not be biased toward Zones would be unreasonably optimistic.
"It's your team's fault" is a cop-out answer that has no place in this kind of discussion. It's my team's fault that they died to, say, an inkzooka? Inkzookas are not dodgeable. You cannot avoid an inkzooka on reaction; by the time you see it, it's either hit you on the user's screen or it hasn't, and then you cower in a corner if it's the latter. A single shot is unreactable, and if the other guy just happened to get a clowny shot that took out half my team behind a crate, that's not my team's fault, that's
a fluke shot. And that's the whole point of the Inkzooka. It's
supposed to get fluke shots. And when it gets a fluke shot at 0:25 on Turf,
it literally wins the game. It's also not my team's fault that the 96 on the other team decided that now would be an appropriate time to start landing shots (referring to the weapon, not the person using it), or that a splat bomb bouncing off five walls and not making a sound, or that a roller's internet had a heart attack and he just casually walked through four people while they were all moonwalking on the spot. These are all things that can and do happen in all game types. These are all things that
directly determine the outcome of the game in Turf, while only
influencing the outcome of Zones or even Tower.
Now consider two teams who are
trying to take advantage of this.
The Imperious Lounge (basically a whole bunch of A+ players) frequently takes over Turf lobbies and runs everything from clown setups to proper team comps, and
invariably, the team that wins that 0:25 fight wins the game. People routinely hold specials for the entire match when they're spawncamping, just so that they can have one available for that fight (since they won't be able to build special if the map's already inked). People--and this includes me--will sandbag just to see how much they can come back from with a quad kill inkzooka at the end, gambling on the chance that the inkzooka on the other team isn't looking their way when they pop it. The best four players in the game could all get slapped on the same team, spawncamp the whole match on 70% territory, and
lose, just because of the other team guessing right (or them guessing wrong) at the end of the game. I personally have had games where I've gone 3-12 and won because those 3 kills happened at the very end.
This is what Turf War turns into at a high level. Two teams who don't give a **** what happens (only that they ink the map a little) in the first two and a half minutes, culminating in one last fight that goes the way of whoever happened to guess right with their inkzooka or have a functioning 96 gal.
Turf is NOT a competitive gametype.