Earlier this month, Respawn ditched Titanfall's dedicated Capture the Flag and Pilot Hunter game modes . You could still stumble upon them in the game's Variety mode, but you couldn't choose to play just either of them if you wanted. At the time, Respawn explained that it removed the modes because not enough people were playing them, which led to poor user experiences. Today, it posted a much more detailed explanation, and also how it's going to bring the modes back into the game.
“The reality is that less than 1% of the player base was even trying to play CTF, let alone actually able to get into a game,” Respawn said in a post to Titanfall's official site . “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.”
Less than 1 percent really puts things into perspective, and I can confirm that the wait times to get into a CTF game were prohibitively long. I actually haven't been able to get into a CTF game since the first couple of weeks after Titanfall launched.
However, as Respawn's post explains, those players who did like CTF “have expressed their disappointment with our decision,” and now the mode is coming back.
The mode itself has been changed so that Titans can no longer carry the flag, and more importantly, matchmaking has been modified in a way that will hopefully reduce wait times. The short version is that Titanfall matchmaking won't be as picky about which games you join, even widening the search to include neighboring continents. This will have an impact on latency, but at least it will get you into a game eventually.
Respawn's post goes into it greater detail. It's actually a really enlightening read if you're interested in how matchmaking works, and why it doesn't so often.
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