What happened to TTH?

I think the short answer to the OP is that they poked around with it to get it somewhere fun, never quite finished, then gave up. It has been neglected ever since.

It was still pretty fun despite that, so people played it for a while, until its shortcomings became too much, and they all left.

 

Why are all the opinions coming from people who don't play? you too @hierbo

 

because TTH is a boring shit mode where the only winning side is to spam more explosives or water.

no reason to git gud when you can spawn with a keg every life.

 

Totally all good points. CTF is definitely much better put together than TTH. But I think just saying TTH is a crappy mode is not entirely fair; its just broken.

Is a Lotus with a blown transmission a crappy car? Of course not, its just broken.

I think that if TTH got its fair share of TLC, it would be as good or better than CTF.

CTF is a more simple game principle, so it is naturally more easy to balance, as there are very few unique mechanics or behaviors to worry about, compared to more complex (I do not mean better) game modes like TTH. It takes a sound plan that is thought through from the outset in order to make a game mode like TTH work, not incremental changes.

The method that seems to have historically been used to "fix" TTH has been a scattershot approach:
"Lets try this semi-random idea. Hmm, that didn't help. Oh, well, lets leave that change there and try some other unrelated tweak at some point in the future, maybe."

I'm not meaning to imply that there is laziness in the development here. I mean to say that TTH has long been the red-headed stepchild mode, and so has never gotten "front and center" attention by the devs and testers, as far as I can tell.

I've got plenty of ideas of things that could be done, but piecemeal ideas wont do the trick here, as I said above. It needs a whole suite of ideas, thought of together and intended to work as a unit; a rule set and system for TTH. I don't know what the code looks like underneath, so I have no idea what size undertaking it is. I have seen community members make entire game modes themselves, though, just sayin'! :D

EDIT: Oh, and regarding the comment about people that don't play commenting on gameplay (I actually DO play, but not daily), consider that the active forum members that don't play a ton or at all often have bazillions of hours of play under their belts, but are just burnt out on it at this point, or are no longer enamored with the direction the game has taken. Still, though, most of us oldies are at least as well qualified to comment on KAG gameplay and mechanics as newer, more active players (at least in my opinion).

 

but the point is you haven't played regularly in a long time and the balancing changed the game(not exactly in a good way or bad)also ive never seen an admin in a tth game(ive seen a lot of guards though). I think its a lesser gamemode because it doesn't give skill an incentive more spam. Then there is the fact that there aren't any aussie tth hosted servers so I cannot help but think you laggy little bastard terrorized the us server >:(