Team Deathmatch Suggestions (TDM)
First of all, I love the direction you're going with TDM, I think it's bringing the game in the right direction. Additionally, I appreciate the quick feedback and changes to the mode, the whole round concept just seemed silly to me, with the main upside being more choices for loadouts per match. Here's just some suggestions I'd appreciate you considering.
Firstly, the match timer. I know Team Deathmatch already has a hidden timer of 30 minutes. I think this should be lowered, as no regular match comes anywhere close to taking this long, and the only reason I knew it existed was because of the 5 minute warning that I got from playing a 2v3 a majority of the match. Also, I noticed about halfway? through the match, the final countdown sound effects from Titanfall 2 began playing, in which after it stopped nothing happened. Along with lowering the match timer, I believe it makes perfect sense for it to be visible on the UI, even if it's small.
Secondly, along with this match timer, there should be a Mercy win of some sort. If one team has, say a 20-30 point lead in kills, it's practically impossible for the enemy team to win at that point, so consider having it end early or start a countdown to end early if the gap isn't closed fast enough. If not for large point gaps, it should be done if there's a large gap in players on one team compared to the other, and it hasn't been filled in by in-progress joins in enough time. With that...
Thirdly, fix in-progress joins so that they actually function. It seems clear at least concerning TDM's UI that players are supposed to be able to join matches already in-progress, but I've yet to see it happen once.
Fourthly, leave penalty. I don't mind you adding a leave penalty similar to Control. I just have a few worries about it. I don't know exactly how you made it function in that mode, but PLEASE do not punish players for leaving matches with imbalanced teams. If you have a match that's become a 2v6, and a player from either team decides to leave because obviously at this point it's not fun for anyone anymore, they absolutely should not be punished. This applies to a lesser extent with stomp matches where one team has massive lead in score, but I think if other features are implemented this issue will become much less common.
Lastly, all players on each team should be grouped up into the same squad. I remember playing Shadowfall way back so I'm certain you have the UI/colors to account for 6 players. The main reason this needs to happen is not only so you can easily see the state of all of your teammates instead of just 2 of them, but because kills from players who are not on your squad do not give assists. This can easily become frustrating when kill stealing occurs and you aren't even credited an assist for doing most of the work. I'm sure it happens several times a match to basically everyone. So, if you don't group both team's squads into one, at the very least fix the assist credit.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I'm interested to see the future of this game, now more than the last year or two.
(Also, please have more than 3 maps in TDM rotation, it gets boring incredibly quickly and you have tons of Arenas maps you can easily reuse.)
