I don’t think endgame is THAT bad, but let’s discuss how to improve it

There seems to be a lot of talk around endgame scoring, and Zapdos in particular, being too swingy for a healthy game. I’m not really on board with that feeling but hear me out, and I do have a pretty simple change that I believe would make things seem a bit more fair and sensible.

Why do you feel qualified to talk about this? My background in MOBAs is 10,000+ hours on LoL (and many more watching streams/competitive scene), a couple thousand hours on heroes of the storm, and ~1,000 hours each for DotA 2 and Smite, and probably a few hundred hours scattered around several others that have popped up over the years.

What’s the big idea? What I first want to point out for why the ability for end game comeback is very important in Pokémon Unite is that the game end condition is a strict time limit. In most MOBAs the end condition is simply that one team destroys the other’s main building and nothing else technically matters in the game for any reason more than how it led to that point.

In LoL it’s entirely possible for your team to be dominated for 30+ minutes just for you to suddenly win a big team fight and march into their base for the win. This comeback feels great and generally hasn’t been viewed as unfair, and can happen basically at any time after “endgame” has been reached…which is a nebulous time period that starts around 30 minutes into the match that CAN last literal hours. Basically, in the end it doesn’t matter who was winning by how much until someone actually does win.

Now let’s look at how this compares to Pokémon Unite. In Pokémon Unite the game end condition is simply a time limit. After 10 minutes the game ends. It doesn’t care how many points anyone scored or how many goals were destroyed, it ends then regardless of game state. This means nobody triggered any kind of winning condition so while in some cases it might be obvious who the victor is, you don’t necessarily know the winner until post-game scoring is shown.

Why does the game ending condition matter? Well, let me tell you. Traditional MOBAs can really be simplified to be a race with a finish line. Once one team crosses that line they win, end of contest, end of discussion. They might have dominated or they might have made a comeback but they reached the end goal first. Unite is more like an endurance trial to see who can go further in a given time period . It’s similar to a race, but in this case there exists a scenario that a comeback is physically impossible. If your opponent sprints 5x as fast as you can for 5 minutes and then just lays down to sleep you already lost the 10 minute trial and it’s literally pointless to go on. For this reason, if Pokémon Unite keeps the time limit as its only ending condition then it absolutely NEEDS a pretty big comeback mechanic otherwise stomp games will just feel horrible when maybe you just got unlucky early or turned your game around and started dominating later on. Pokémon that start weak in the early game also become VERY devalued if there isn’t a strong catch-up mechanic.

Oh…go on Now that we’ve established that being able to come back is important to keep players engaged even while on a losing team, let’s look at what Unite does to address the situation. First up is the double point scoring in the final 2 minutes of the game. This is what truly allows teams to make up lost ground as it theoretically cuts the deficit in half and almost always makes a comeback look realistic if your team can control the rest of the match. Secondly, and importantly very complimentary to the double points mechanic, is the Zapdos instant dunk buff. This buff basically ensures that anyone on your team that can make it to a goal will score their double value payload if your team was able to secure the kill on Zapdos.

Does double point scoring fulfill the comeback fantasy in a healthy way? I believe it does, mostly. An important thing to note is that this buff applies to both teams. If your team is behind and goes fully on the offensive to catch up then you risk letting the enemy team just going past you and maintaining their lead by scoring 2x points of their own. The area that this can become a little too silly is when outer goals that are left up with very few points remaining get 100-point dunks on them, making the safer goals much more valuable in the endgame.

And how about Zapdos? Honestly, I’m not sure what the big deal is around this objective right now. It is a strong effect that takes a massive commitment to procure, and then requires follow through to score with it over a somewhat small time frame.

Yeah, but double points+Zapdos buff together is broken. I was ahead by 500 points then lost in the last 45 seconds I mean, sorry bud but your team threw. You must have gotten teamwiped at Zapdos without killing a single one of them to allow that comeback, do you really think you should have won after that epic collapse? Maybe next time use that huge lead to pressure their base, because if you got one more decent goal the score difference would be insurmountable. They shouldn’t be able to defend against your threat to score AND do Zapdos at the same time.

So you really think everything is fine as-is? Not quite, I do think there can be adjustments to make things more fair. First, I think what NEEDS to be done is to limit scoring on the destroyable goals. No more +99 overkills on the outer goal that the enemy team foolishly took out with an exact amount 6 minutes prior. I think limiting scoring to the exact amount of “hp” the goal has is a pretty easy change to make, with the scorer keeping the balance of any excess points he had when dunking. And obviously the game end timer needs to be more accurate with allowed scoring, if your goal is in before the buzzer it should very well count.

I don’t like that, got anything else? Another idea I like is to offer some bonus for destroying goals early. Possibly award bonus XP or something when destroying a goal, but at the same time they would have to limit the snowball effect because like I’ve been trying to say it is important to be able to come back in the match.

I could also see an alternative win condition that foregoes the swingy comeback potential. Instead of the double point mechanic, maybe just allow the game to automatically end if a team reaches some kind of critical threshold such as 500 points scored, or +X amount of points ahead of the enemy team. They could also just make a different game type without a time limit, first team to 1000 wins or something, but I personally don’t think I’d like that as I dig the fast, structured pace of the time limit.

But honestly, there shouldn’t have to be a comeback, the enemy team should just surrender if they’re that far behind. I’m not really a fan of this mindset, though you’re entitled to the opinion. I love a good comeback. That said if the enemy team is clearly well coordinated with a good team composition I’ll gladly open the surrender vote to get on to the next game.

Anyway, just rambling at this point bored at work lol. I’d love to have conversation on the topic and just felt like making a post because I feel people aren’t giving enough thought to why these mechanics should or shouldn’t exist while they focus on how ridiculous it can seem sometimes.