Sledgehammer Games has done a fantastic job at giving players what they want out of the Call of Duty: WWII title, including usually implementing the fan feedback that comes in overwhelming droves. This time, however, they seemed to have dropped the ball a bit because despite the overall odds in one favor, Sledgehammer decided to go a different way regardless.
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Previously the developers put out a poll on their social media asking players what they wanted from the Domination Mode. The question posed was whether or not fans wanted 75 or 100 being the maxed earned points in each individual match. The numbers were overwhelmingly to the side of 100, but the team decided that they were going to score it down to 75 as the maximum number anyway.
It’s not a huge deal, but does make you wonder why they even bothered with the poll to begin with unless it was simply a marketing ploy to prompt player involvement on their social media channel. Though, according to the recent Developer Update blog from Sledgehammer, the reasoning behind the decision had a little more depth:
“Domination is intended to be an objective-focused mode. Playing the mode optimally requires finding a balance between map control and slaying enemies. The XP awards associated with these actions also need to strike this balance,” began their reasoning.
“Dom 50 puts too much emphasis on trying to attain complete map control (3-Caps). 3-Caps typically cause spawns to flip and often result in a loss of map control, because it is difficult to locate the enemy team. On the other end of the spectrum, Dom 100 puts too much emphasis on killing enemies (typically in the quest for streaks).”
They then went into discussing the importance of control, stating that the 75 max made sense for this reason, “Slaying enemies to keep them away from the Dom flags is certainly an important aspect of the mode, but having control of the Dom flags needs to come first for a team to succeed. Dom 75 properly rewards both of these motivations and finds the intended balance regarding how frequently Scorestreaks are earned. Dom 75 encourages players to take control of 2 objectives and then maintain map control by killing attackers (which we consider to be the winning strategy of Domination).”
It does make sense, and the key is balance. We’re happy that Sledgehammer addressed the confusion surrounding player input, letting fans know that they weren’t ignored and that there was sound reasoning behind the flip.
