mattttboth our upper page playoffs and grand finals this season were pretty much decided by the winning team stalemating on gullywash 4th
Yeah that one's on me, I only watch Europe and sometimes NA my bad. I don't know if you're arguing for anything particular, but im in a typing mood again and so I figured I'd use this post to talk a bit about the dreaded "Se7en stalemate".
5CP in TF2 does have this problem : there's just no real incentive for a team in the lead to push since they're already winning. I don't even think that changing the round timer solves that issue seeing how nothing stops a team from letting the clock run all the way down and go stalemate on their second again instead of going to mid apart from the unspoken agreement that people will usually show up to mid. WInlimit 5 also doesn't fix this directly, it simply assumes that a winning team will want to close out the map before the timer runs out.
So, how do we fix this ? From a mid player POV, my answer would be to say : we don't do anything apart from lowering the round timer to like 7:30 (5 is probably fine for most if it, it's about the few edge cases in the original post lik Granary yard and failed push outs) because I think breaking a stalemate is something interesting that can really test your team synergy and mechanics, and because I think it's more of a crutch than a really optimal way to play the game.
But you're here and you're a prem player telling me that people are still having issues breaking them in the top level in current year, so clearly it's not as simple as it seems and the few stalemates I encountered were of a lower quality.
I'm willing to admit that I don't really know then, but I will say that I still think lowering the round timer to anything below 5 is not a good solution for me, as it effectively forces everyone to adopt a fast paced playstyle to solve a problem that (unless Australia is massively different) doesn't exactly pop up every day. There is nothing stopping you from playing fast with the current system, b4nny has been going balls to the walls for as long as I can recall and it worked, but I think forcing everyone to emulate that no matter their div or will is too drastic of a measure.