I think Swol and Izuna are coming at this from pretty different perspectives and this causes the never ending debate.
Thinking about spectatorship, which is Izuna's perspective, it's often more interesting to watch an experience that's compatible with your own. So being able to watch a game at an esport level that matches the experience you can have in ranked play, it's easier to relate to what's happening, why people are using certain weapons, the dynamics of the game type. For spectatorship it's often better to have the features of the regular modes. Locking off things like boots, which might be a big part of some players playstyles, can cause the gameplay to look alien when compared to their own.
Of course games like Halo use modified rulesets for those tournaments, but the developers of those games have streamlined that competitive support with MLG playlists, which are competitively balanced for the esport scene and allow everyone to jump in and test their skill within a competitively regulated mode, Titanfall doesn't do that, so aside getting some friends together into private games with custom rulesets, there's few ways in which casual Titanfall players will relate to Titanfall as an esport.
The solution then, would be to add something like a 3 vs 3 ranked playlist with a competitive ruleset. With that said however, I do not think single pick items are the solution, instead, Respawn should work towards balancing the game in a way that validates and encourages the use of a wide variety of Titan's and equipment.
Swol's perspective comes from that as a player, so he's thinking about competitive validty, which is an equally valid perspective. He wants everything removed from the game that would make the matches stale or unfair towards a certain side, so that then the deciding factor becomes more weighted towards a teams skill rather than their loadout decisions. This is especially significant if certain loadout options are very powerful, and would cause the majority of players to gravitate towards certain picks, as it would also make the game quite repetitive to watch.
The unfortunate problem with both of these perspectives however is that Respawn haven't shown any indication that they care about Titanfall's competitive scene. What does that mean then? It means that the competitive scene is for the players, not the spectators. It's for the people that want to play at a high level because they enjoy that, not to attract massive numbers of spectators and build a competitive scene. If it were the latter, Respawn would need to support it. In this regard it means that to some degree, Swol's points are more valid than Izuna's, because Titanfall wasn't built as a competitive game, it doesn't have the support from its developer / publisher to allow it to flourish as a competitive platform, that would make people want to watch. So the primary concerns are not what affects the spectators but instaed the players, and in which case, they should balance the ruleset around what they feel is competitively valid and enjoyable. However, at the same time they will need to be aware that they can't expect other casual players to watch or care about the competitive scene. The level of play in the competitive scene will also remain relatively low, compared to other games where a heightened level of competitive play is encouraged through monetary incentive (causing many many more players to effectively, take the game a little more seriously) and support from the games deveoper.
If the game were supported by its developers in a competitive capacity and a larger portion of the community cared about its competitive scene, then Izuna's perspective would have more validity, but as it stands until we see any real competitive support facilitated by Respawn, both with competitive modes and balance tweaks, then the competitive element of TF2 is for the players, and not the spectators. In this case, Swol's views are more paramount because they reflect the views of someone more significantly affected by the adjustments. Izuna suggests changes for the sake of spectatorship, what spectators? The average player does not watch competitive Titanfall 2, they do not care, and the developers seemingly do not care.
The other issue is that Izuna would argue with a wall on a topic as simple as the colour of the sky, provided it would argue back. I myself ended up in a several reply debate with him about something as trivial as response latency on monitors and USB devices, only a few pages ago. An argument that I wasn't at all vested in, but one that he would not let drop, even after I stated that I wasn't interested in the conversation.
That's an aaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwful bunch of generalizing you have there. CTF and attrition have completely different focuses and skill requirements to win. In CTF, you never have to shoot an enemy, much less manipulate enemy spawns and keep track of what's spawning where.
CTF is all about keeping track of the enemy team's position, knowing that they will always spawn in the same place, and running a route that you can use to get the flag and get back safely. It's extremely easy to do compared to Attrition and bounty hunt because I always know where they enemy will respawn, which is one of the things that can catch people off guard in attrition. Plus, on average I can say that the average CTF player I encounter, even which playing against groups, is not better than the average player in attrition. I can load into a game, note where the enemies are, and just choose my approach and get out with the flag pretty easily. Of course, just like every other mode, there are people who know what they're doing, and they'll be able to anticipate players coming in and have their own routes, but those are the players that can do well in any mode.
Players are not automatically better because they play one game mode over another. Hell, some CTF players would get stomped in attrition because they don't know how to shoot, because they rarely have to if they're quick and good at movement in CTF. Quit trying to convince yourself that you're MLG pro just because you only play a certain mode. Oh, this one group got beaten by another tryhard group? Must mean that nobody in that playlist is good!
If you're so convinced that AI makes attrition too easy, there's another mode (domination I think?) which is only pilots and titans in a deathmatch. Try that out, it can get really sweaty and fun if two teams are evenly matched, and the lack of cemented spawns means that teams can retreat, regroup, flank, and manipulate the enemy to gain an advantage. Campers get absolutely destroyed by any kind of mobile player since there's no AI to farm or flag to camp beside, which makes it feel more mobile to me that even CTF.
The general rule is that competitive play focuses on placing the emphasis on a players skill, removing confounding factors that may mask it. The reason Attrition would never be a competitive mode is because the AI add variance beyond the players, skillful control. The AI in Attrition, or Bounty Hunt are far less predictable than say, the AI in a typical MOBA and that presents an issue when it obscures competitive play. Perhaps the most egregious example would be in Bounty Hunt, let's say two Titan's of opposing team's control attack a bounty Titan at the same time. That bounty Titan cannot attack both players, therefore once the neutral Titan is dead only one of the other players has taken significant damage, allowing the opposing player to kill his Titan. Here the AI's decision is difficult to anticipate and yet influences the game in a significant way. The same could be said of the habbits of the reapers in Attrition.
felt bad ass
