Well, this seems like a notably better solution than tearing it out of the lists even if most people weren't using it.
Respawn said:What Happened to CTF?
Last week we made some changes to the Titanfall playlists on PC and since then many members of the community have expressed their disappointment with our decision. Capture the Flag has been a specific point of contention considering we had just made a significant change to how the mode worked (Titans cannot carry flags after the last patch). If youre just catching up, we made the decision to remove these modes because hardly anyone was playing them and matches were nearly impossible to find.
The reality is that less than 1% of the player base was even trying to play CTF, let alone actually able to get in to a game. With that few players attempting to connect, our matchmaking would just sit there, spinning forever, waiting to find a game to play. This is a bad experience for the user, and so we had to look at how we fix it. Our first step was removing playlists that were effectively broken. The second step is to continue refinement of our matchmaking. After that first step, though, its obvious that lots of people were upset far more than the player counts on the removed modes led us to believe. So, what happened? Lets talk about it.
Source: http://www.titanfall.com/news/ctf-matchmaking-update-pc-and-xbox-oneRespawn said:So, what are we doing about it? Well, first, were bringing the CTF playlist back on PC. Furthermore, were introducing a test of even wider region searches. If youre searching for 5 minutes without starting a game, Stryder will eventually widen your search to include neighboring continents. This means you might end up in a game with a much higher ping than youre used to, but as players pointed out; playing is preferred to not playing at all! The 5 minutes is a rough estimation as Stryder may very well use a much shorter time if it can determine from its real-time view of the globe that waiting 1 or 5 minutes will have no tangible difference. Like with many attributes of matchmaking, were tweaking and tracking or slicing data differently almost daily. Our engineers spend A LOT of time staring at graphs and analytics.