General Discussion - Page 155

One of the major reasons we decided to go with the sudden death tie break format instead of game length (aka "Stopwatch") was that to keep the objective for a map simple and clear: win the map. Use of a game length tie break and the various proposed variants on it add a second objective on top of that to break ties: win the map fast. Especially in the early days of Overwatch's competitive metagame, I'd rather not encourage players to change their team comps and playstyles around that second objective. To make a point, we could also use a different secondary criteria to break ties that would be just as technically fair as game length: total player deaths. That would be horrible, though. We don't want to incentivize players to NOT make aggressive plays because they're worrying about dying, nor do we want players chasing kills and ignoring the objective. Game length isn't as bad as THAT, but it could make some heroes more preferred than others, or in a worst case lead to "stall" comps used by defenders who know that they don't need to stop the attackers, just simply delay them. All that being said, we're actively looking to see if we can make improvements to our current format to address the feedback we've been getting. The dialogue has been great.