arena

[kestrel]

can someone please explain to me why this gamemode remains so consistently popular when it directly violates several core principles of team fortress' design
i genuinely don't understand why people keep voting for and playing it

not being able to respawn goes against the concept of being able to change your class or loadout between lives to adapt to enemy strategies and it heavily favors instant kill setups like flare pyros, demomen and snipers. these things are fine in the main game, but in arena you get heavily punished for dying to these
with no way to respawn there's also nothing you can do if the enemy team just completely mogs your team composition. do you have multiple light classes when the enemy has stacked heavies and engineers? guess you just have to eat shit

a mode like this works in something like counter strike because everyone is basically the same guy, just with moderate differences in weapon performance. classes in team fortress are wildly different in order to give the player multiple counters to any solution which presents yourself, but that just doesn't work if you aren't allowed to respawn
i can only assume people keep voting arena because they just want a DM-fest without having to care about objectives, but if that's the case why not play something like CTF or KOTH? the enduring popularity of 2fort is proof that you can just ignore objectives and still have fun

 

[MoiraPrime]

It gets voted so often for the 4team maps because it doesn't matter if you can switch classes or not when the rounds are so short and quick. When you have 2 teams of 12 players you just have annoyingly long rounds, but 4 teams of 6 instead has parallel teamfights which effectively cut rounds in half.

 

[VintagePC]

The way I've always viewed it is to incur a bit more of a penalty for just running into the meatgrinder again because you will respawn relatively quickly. But I am bad enough at the game that I suck at Arena regardless so my 2 cents is probably worth less than that

 

[kestrel]

It gets voted so often for the 4team maps because it doesn't matter if you can switch classes or not when the rounds are so short and quick. When you have 2 teams of 12 players you just have annoyingly long rounds, but 4 teams of 6 instead has parallel teamfights which effectively cut rounds in half.

i find the amount of teams doesn't really make a difference. i frankly don't care how long it takes, i don't want to sit out for 30-60 seconds waiting for the match to end. i can literally just connect to another server in the time it takes to do that