[2020] The Crown Showdown is fine the way it is... but randomized objectives can help prevent a singular "meta" experience.

I know this is a hot topic, and many think that the Crown Showdown needs to be either outright removed, or nerfed such as no hacks, reduced movement, etc.

The issue with removing the crown is it goes against one of the core philosophies of the game of keeping the action moving. It prevents games from dragging on. In the same vein, nerfing someone who has the crown would essentially prevent the crown from having any value, which in my mind does the same as removing it. If you nerf the crown holder, nobody will want to pick-up the crown, and those who do will likely die. It goes against everything the game is to say your abilities and movement are worthless at the very end if you want to play the objective.

However despite how you say you may dislike the crown, I'm going to take a guess and say you don't truly dislike the premise of the crown at its core, but just dislike the resulting meta of using hacks to escape and evade. That "you like the idea but it doesn't work in practice".

This is fair: because a singular meta is never really a great thing. So my suggestion would be to have the Showdown at the end randomly select an objective from a pool of Showdown objectives.

For example, one of the following modes gets announced when the Showdown countdown timer is introduced:

• Crown Control - As it is now, classic showdown rules. Grab the crown, hold on to it to win.
• King of the Crown (Static) - King of the Hill rules, a zone appears and as squads/players stay in the zone, they accumulate time/points. First squad/player to reach the target value wins.
• King of the Crown (Dynamic) - Same as above, but the zone moves, either continually, or jumps around in cycles.
• Crown Race - A crown spawns in the map with no pre-spawn location indicator. After it is picked up by a squad/player, it disappears and a new crown appears on the map. This repeats until a squad/player reaches a target value of crowns collected.
• Crown Hunt- Each player drops a crown when they die. Whoever picks up that crown earns a point, regardless of who killed them. First squad/player to reach a target value of crowns captured wins.
• Crown Collect - Several small crown pieces spawn throughout the map. Simply running over one picks it up. If you die, you drop all of your held crown pieces. At the end of X time (1-2 min) the player/squad with the most amount of crowns wins. If there is a tie, lowest place teams die and drop their crowns and the process repeats with a shorter round.

Now players can't play the whole game banking on a specific "meta". Evasive abilities may be great for Crown Control, but terrible for King of the Crown. Defensive abilities may be great for King of the Crown, but poor for Crown Collect.

This is done while maintaining objective gameplay, and not nerfing the power of players who directly play the objective.