Originally Posted by Turbo

Some of these maps are not designed for 45 straight minutes. When you take another point and the warehouse the defense cant take it back. If you make the maps to long then the assault team will always win. Something to think about.

Also as OB1one said you spawn in waves so if you die and their is only one sec till the other wave you spawn right away.

Dead people can talk to everyone.

I think Turbo has hit the nail directly on the head here - Stalingrad is definitely NOT designed for a 45-minute round. The maps just aren't BF2 sized, the gameplay is totally different with captures being THE key, and not merely a means to getting ticket bleed like in BF2. I just don't see the game design OR the map designs lending themselves to long rounds. On this map, for instance, it gets very intense when the Germans have lost all the objectives and are down to defending their last one. When the game gets to this point, they CANNOT recapture any of the other objectives as they can (mostly) for prior in the round. This is fun trying to hold out for the last 4-5 minutes of a round - it would NOT be fun for 30 minutes. I doubt it'd go that long, but it'd turn into a campfest I'm guessing.

Arad, the tank map, is more like a BF2 map in a way - all the points are captureable at any time by either side. The game is over when a side caps all 4 points. This sounds like it has the potential for a long back-and-forth slugfest that could last 60 minutes, but I doubt it'd last that long. If neither side caps all 4, it's a draw - there is no incentive to hold points for a longer period of time, or for holding 3 of 4 at the end of a round. Having played it, I don't think that having longer rounds would make it more fun, or would add to the strategy potential much if at all.

Konigsplatz is combined arms, and is pretty large. However, just like Stalingrad, I think that given too much time the assault team WILL win too much of the time. You'd end up with the same situation - holding the last objective with 5 minutes to go is intense, 30 minutes is impossible and not fun.

Something else to consider - when replacements are depleted, when you die you cannot respawn for the remainder of the round. With no more than a few minutes left this isn't bad, but it'll REALLY turn people off if they end up waiting for a long time. I think it would be quite rare to be out of reinforcements with 20 minutes to go and for the game to go the distance, but it's still a potential problem.

Now, one thing to remember is that the way RO is set up, you play 20-minute rounds, which really seems to fit the maps well. However, on the Beta servers you play best 2 out of 3, so a "match" that goes the time limit on each round will be 60 minutes on that map. I've actually liked this - as with one bad round, you still have a chance to come back and win the next one. Arad can be over VERY quickly if one team gets on a roll.

In BF2 it's possible to pull one out when you're way behind on tickets, and quite fun to do. However, I think most will agree that those games on Karkand where the MEC gets pinned down to holding just the warehouse flag and is getting slaughtered for 30 minutes are NOT very fun for the MEC side, and quite impossible to recover from without huge mistakes by the USMC. I think really long rounds on RO would be very similar to this for the defenders more often than not - but without the possibility of taking any other objectives to try to turn it around.

My vote is to retain the stock settings at least for awhile until we get a handle on how the game plays here, and how well we like the default system - and then we can tweak later.