This is the players choice. If they want to beat their heads against a brick wall, I personally would let them. I don't understand why that merits a change.
Pugs don't use strategy, but that's why they have 2 other SCs to more directly fight each other.
If the scenario is designed such that the majority of players feel it's better to take a beeline across the most simplified area of the map, and the endpoint results in hard spawncamping, it's flawed. That's what merits a change, to increase the distance travelled to go to the spawn, push the battle towards the other flags and the more complex area of the map, and allow multiple safer routes out the spawnpoint.
Reikland Factory is a poor design, I'll make that clear. Spawns should never be adjacent on the same side of the map, because that will naturally cause players to take the closest route to the enemy spawn if they don't actually care about the objectives. I anticipate that any real attempt to make players care about objectives would be dismissed as taking away the fun of scenarios, and am beginning to seriously wonder if many scenarios should not simply be converted into TDM, as that's what people seem to want most.
Those routes were always open, they just weren't utilized. In my experience, they still aren't really utilized. And it doesn't help with spawn camping. The landing and guards don't help with spawn camping. In both T1 and T2, it's still pretty easy to push people back to their spawn (the side entrance/path to back flags.) and keep them there.
1) I made it quite clear that PUGs will still beeline, because they have no concept of strategy. This isn't about trying to bash strategy into PUGs, it's about giving other players an option to use different areas of the map and different routes while still being able to fight more than 3 people, instead of having to wade directly into the force like when it groups up at the Landing flag.
2) It seems that everyone else, including myself, feels differently about the effect on spawncamping. It's quite easy to assert that something happens when it really doesn't, so unless I suddenly see more people coming here to assert that spawncamping is just as easy (and those people are not the type who will just flow into the lower Factory door and then cry that there was nothing they could do about their deaths), I can't take this assertion seriously.
I meant no offense. It's not my server, my money paying for it, or my hard work developing it. It was an opinion, not to be taken as a personal jab. It's just that this decision worries me about the future of the server, so I'm voicing my opinion.
If we screw up somewhere, there will be floods of people coming to tell us so. At the moment, I don't see that.