Appreciate that we're rolling back some of the initiator changes, but it feels like there's still an underlying misunderstanding of what util cycles exist in the most tactically deep games of VAL, and how the impact of untradeability and shotguns demand a minimum viable level of utility to keep rounds from devolving into shotgun/op roulette. Defensive Util Cycles look something like: >1:40/1:35 - Start of round info >1:15/1:05 - First cycle reclear for the fog of war generated by your opponent's open. Timing varies by map's attack side rotation times: you're trying to cut between when they'll leave their insert, and when they've gotten far enough toward the other extremity/corridor that your rotates will still arrive pre-exec if the Opp tries to accelerate in response to the reclear. >0:50/0:45 - Second cycle reclear to confirm opponent's commitment to a specific extremity/corridor and greenlight your team for encirclements/map collapse. >Post - Retake Naturally, these timings are very frequently non-linear, e.g. ~1:38 Open >1:05 1st cycle >0:50 2nd cycle. What we generally need from initiator cooldowns to keep these "3-step macro" rounds viable is for our cooldown to be usable for Open + 2nd cycle, or 1st Cycle + Retake. Given the example windows above, a 50s cooldown still consistently makes us late for 2nd cycle unless we immediately use the CD on open, and/or it makes it so that we're opting to play at the mercy of poorly played attack - if they see cooldown util on 2nd step they should typically always be trying to accelerate because then they can create a scenario where you're dramatically less likely to get your 2nd CD back in time for it to be useful for retake. All that to say: 50s cooldowns still aren't enough. It gives more util sure, but in a way where to play out deep, multi-step rounds you're on hard guard rails of when you're allowed to use that util, down to not-even-5-second windows. That level of predictability means those round approaches should be easy to counter > shouldn't be widely played again > the change doesn't actually repair the depth of gameplay we've lost. This feels like we're acknowledging we overshot util volume reductions, but we still haven't acknowledged that the timing of that util availability is just as important as having it in general. It really doesn't have to be this hard: 1. Look at util cycle timings across all maps 2. Identify how big of a window you want teams to have to vary when they play those cycles (+/- # seconds) 3. Simple arithmetic of the CD being available for alternating cycles + buffer time. 4. Review that the buffer size doesn't create accidental 3rd cycle availability. 5. GG