Captain’s Mode in it’s description just makes sense, why oh why not have this?
It appears to me that Captain’s Mode is perfect for Team Leagues, professional play, and any arranged Team vs arranged Team match. In fact if two teams every face each other, this should be the only mode they should be allowed to face each other with. I’m that confident in this mode’s ability and purpose… not confident in how it is presented.
Captain’s Mode by it’s description allows each team to have a captain who will pick the heroes for the team. This sounds great, except it’s not.
First problem is captain selection. The captain is randomly selected for both teams at the beginning of the game. Random selection is by far the worst way to choose something.
Imagine if you will there was a bag full of job titles. There is a perfectly qualified doctor out there but he can only become a doctor if he pulls the doctor job title out of the hat. Unfortunately he pulls out the clown.
This is basically how leadership is chosen in this mode, completely random.
This means that someone who is completely new to the game mode will have no idea what to do.
The second major problem with this mode is that it’s not obvious who the captains are. The captains are the first players on each team on the loading screen and are the closest to the middle on the team screen. There is no special indicator to show who is captain. Very often minutes will pass before the team realizes the captain isn’t aware that he has to do something.
A fix to this would be to have a voting system setup at the beginning in which people can vote for who they choose to be captain.
The third major problem is the time limits…. they’re too long. The Captain’s Mode picking can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 10 minutes. It is actually faster to leave Captain’s Mode (with no penalty) and queue for another match than it is to actually go through the voting process.
To fix the rampant Captain’s Mode leavers the process needs to be sped up, this means lower timers. On top of this it means the process will be more involved and it gives a real advantage to one team for picking people fast. In it’s current form it just drags out and seemingly people can waste all of your time without hitting the slow punishment.
A good time is differing in DOTA2. But for sure there are a set number of carries, possibly a jungler, so many nukers, an initiator or two, a lane support, and a support. You combine these into appropriate team models.
This means that in this world of Captain’s Mode not everyone will get to be the hero they want to be.
This mode gets treated as a glorified All Pick in which the team mates say what hero they want to play. But after there are so many carries or tanks on a team the Captain is forced to make the decision to pick up a pure support, jungler, or nuker. Of course no one wants to play these heroes.
This causes fights. People will take heroes they didn’t call because they feel more comfortable playing it leaving the last person to select a hero to choose that they don’t want to play.
Team synergy is ruined as now the black doubt has been placed on the team and two people hate each other over this situation.