Recently I have been working on a small map for 4v4. Small only because there are a limited number of prime blocks for Erosion and I need to keep the budget down to prevent frame rate issues. The concern was that since every Respawn Point for a team in CTF could be covered by the enemy proximity influencer simultaneously that spawning could occur within just a few feet of an enemy. But in the process I discovered that the structure in the center of the map helped make this a non issue. This concept can be applied to maps that are less than 800 square units in size where the enemy can saturate the entire map with their proximity influencer. I wrote an article on my blog that shared the concept as a design pattern that a forger can follow.
It all makes sense. The only issue I have with it is that I really can't think of any map I've ever built where it would be better for gameplay to have players spawning in the center of the map instead of around the perimeter of the map. This is especially true with CTF gametypes. When playing CTF on a small map, I would always prefer to have players spawn in or near their base rather than in the center of the map. I'd rather have them get spawn killed than spawn that close to the enemy flag. Even in a gametype like slayer, I'd rather not have players spawn in the middle of the map with any amount of regularity. It's quite common to place a power weapon or powerup in the middle of a map, and again, I'd rather have a player spawn into a spawn trap than spawn near a power weapon or powerup just as it spawns. If anything, I prefer to add negative weighting to the middle of my maps to decrease the likelihood that players will spawn there. Have you actually implemented this on a map and played on it yet? I'm honestly curious, because if it works well then I may need to completely rethink how I setup my maps.
Throw it in your fileshare and tell me what it's called and I'll see if I can get it into TCOJ tomorrow.
I am happy to say that the design pattern worked perfectly as it was intended to do. My map is about 1200 square units, but when playing flag it provides under 800 square units of team assigned Respawn Points for each team. The spawning experience during game play seemed surprising to me, so I played the film back 8 times, once from the perspective of each player. At each respawn I checked to see where the enemy players were at. In every case, the spawning was exactly as I intended. Roughly half the spawning was along the corners, the other half were in the center structure. While it seemed at times we were spawning too close to an enemy, the issue to keep in mind is that on small maps it will feel that way from time to time. But in every case we spawned AS FAR AS POSSIBLE from the enemy team. That was the goal of this pattern and it worked perfectly. the map is on my fileshare now, LostGround.1k (as in version 1a, 1b, 1c, ... 1j, 1k)...