I’ve been playing Overwatch for a long time and it still bugs me that getting more time on payload maps means you defend first. To me it’s clear that attacking first is better, because the team who attacks first will push it a certain distance and then they know exactly where they need to hold it to on defense.
More concretely, if both teams win the exact same number of fights (and thus theoretically push the cart the same distance), the team who attacked first will win because they’ll stop the payload 1 meter short of where they got it to when they were attacking.
In case it helps to give an example, say it’s Route 66 and both teams have capped all 3 points. If we attack first on round 3 and win exactly 1 fight, we will (most likely) push it to the edge of the first point but not cap it. Then on defense in round 4, if the other team also wins exactly 1 fight they’ll get it to the same spot, but because we already know where we stopped it we come out to defend a second earlier than they did and stop them, thus winning the game with the same number of actual fights won. All that was different is that our attack was slightly quicker because we knew where we had to hold it. That information ends up giving us a better chance of winning.
This advantage is very obvious to me in my diamond/master games but I don’t hear about it too often and I’m curious if others feel there is some defense-first advantage I’m not accounting for, or if this is something that should be changed about the game (switching to more time = attacking first).