Randomness: I'll address the two examples that I thought most problematic. "Ink-strikes at the end win the game." Unless the teams are dead even throughout the game a last-3-second ink-strike doesn't win you the game. And if the teams are that dead even, ink-striking at the end becomes part of the tactics, not just random happenstance. Someone on the team has to charge their special, keep it, not get splatted, and use it at the right time. That, like it or not, takes some skill. Especially if we are talking about high level competition here, where people are gunning for you and in order to charge your special you have to be in the thick of it.
"A lucky party-wipe at the end means you lose." That can happen. It also can happen in Rainmaker though, so it seems that point out things that can happen isn't the greatest argument. Then the frequency of this occurrence comes into question: "it is more likely to happen in Turf Wars." Honestly, I'm not really sure this is true, or relevant. Often you are more spread out in Turf Wars and if you've bunched up and gotten TPK'd by an Inkzooka that is a tactical error, not a luck problem. If you've spread out and all gotten killed 1v1 (or some combination), well, they were the better team. Not getting splatted and the wrong time is part of the strategy and is way less luck based than people are letting on.
I assume you meant Turf war and not Splat zones in the first paragraph of
the other thread. I'll just respond here because I feel as if it fits better in this thread.
I'm not saying Turf war is less competitive. It's hard to define what's 'competitive' and 'more competitive', what I meant was it was less suited for competitive play. I'm basing my view on two arguments:
1. There is a higher degree of randomness involved in determining who wins than in ranked modes - you can secure a win in the last 30 seconds almost regardless of how well you were doing the first 2 minutes. Meanwhile, other modes are more heavily based on player skill.
Basically, if you wipe out all 4 of them, or heck, even just 2 or 3 in the last 30 seconds, you're more or less guaranteed a win. This means that the first 2 minutes are significantly less important than the last few moments of the game - unlike e.g. Splat Zones, where the timer goes down, and Tower Control and Rainmaker, where the tower/rainmaker is in a different spot and your score is retained.
Yes, a quad kill can happen in Rainmaker and it does help a lot, but the enemy team has to destroy the Rainmaker's shield, the Rainmaker is (depending on your tactic) positioned closer to their base than yours and is also heavy, slowing down the holder. This gives the team killed enough time to respawn and get to the Rainmaker holder before he gets to the cone thing (placed close to the spawn). In Turf war, if one team dies the other team can simply ink away while the first team tries to respawn and get to the front lines asap, probably taking them at least about 10-20 seconds depending on the map. Overtime merely lets a team finish an attempt at getting the lead. Does this make how matches turn out less based on skill and more on luck? Maybe, but that's not what I'm talking about right now.
Ink strikes have nothing to do with randomness, setting it off right before the game ends is a fair tactic.
2. Game scores are usually very close, sometimes so much that merely one more flick of the inkbrush would've taken the win from the other team.
What competitive play comes down to is determining which team is 'better', in a way.
45.8% vs 47.2% wins/losses feel cheap for both teams in my opinion and are not an accurate representation of which team is better. While the ranked modes (excluding overtime wins) sometimes end with close scores, that happens very rarely. Each team gets several chances at a comeback, giving them several opportunities to show their skill, leaving fewer of the turnouts to close wins.
I don't have any data to back this up, but I think most can agree that close wins/losses happen a lot more commonly in Turf wars than in ranked modes. While teams are allowed to win through overtime by getting just enough points at the end, the other team had 5 minutes to hold the splat zone/get the tower/rainmaker to the enemy team's base and show that they're the better team.
Well this turned out to be longer than I thought, sorry for the rambling!