It is limited for the championship as far as I understand it. I think limiting that for pub play would limit the fun somewhat, and certainly add some frustration for newer players. So I kind of like it this way.

Regarding swapping sides, I think the part where you choose where to bring the ball is fun and interesting, it allows for some surprise play and sleight of hand.

Which is not to say I don't share your concerns about symmetry. I just don't have too much of an opinion on how much of a concern it is.

asymmetrical is alright too, as long as we have 2 proper bases with choke points to hold and push, and a middle area for Powerups

each team spawn in their base is easier for organizing and no random in weapon spawn locations

they should have made quakesketball

What they should have made is Catch the Chicken.

Cops and Keels

TBH it'd be harder to fix Sacrifice than to replace it as the main mode, so might as well do the latter.

It requires new maps that will make the action happen at the bases rather than at TDM choke points (what's the point of having totems if players still never shoot or go there and they never group up somewhere on the map), having team spawn locations to minimize fights that happen everywhere on the map and that aren't related to capturing the objective, having designated capturing points so that the game becomes easier to understand for spectators, reworking the hud and the spectator functions. Most likely id is only fixing the two last aspects, without realizing that's the least of their concerns.

Would have been nice to have a new gametype as the main one, but Sacrifice just didn't work. Sacrifice is the least played mode (going by server availability in-game), the most boring to play solo (like most players play) and an incomprehensible mess to watch on streams.

On the E3 stream when Sacrifice was played it had half the viewers than duel (800), making it a waste of streaming time, resources to host it (four PCs per team means renting that space and everything else needed) and money (flying in a whole team rather than one person just to get half the reward they could get with duel). It was a huge failure, to the point it easily cost more to host Sacrifice than what they gained with hosting that mode in particular, rather than only duel.

CTF is on the works, is objective-based and we know it works, both in terms of server popularity and of being enjoyable to watch. It never made any Quakecon lose viewers compared with the duel part, other than duel grand finals. I think it should be the team mode picked for the Quakecon 2018 and onwards, if they choose to pick one rather than only staying with duel. The other classic modes cannot be it because TDM is not objective based (making it not fun to play solo on the long run and it brings less viewers to streams) and CA is just horribly boring to watch. And well to play as teams all team based gametypes are fun, so that aspect is not a problem.

Sacrifice comes from an old Quake 1 mod called Q-Ball.

I played this mod on mplayer way back in the day and it was extremely fun.

The differences are that in Q-ball theres no totem shit. The team that just holds the 'soul/qball' gets a point for every 5 seconds.

However the person holding the soul cannot shoot. He has to throw the ball and then he can start attacking (he can use the axe while running with the soul)

This is why it was fun, you can win the game not by fragging, but by running away and escaping. But since the guy with the soul cant really attack, then its 4v3 in terms of fire power.

This made the mod extremely dynamic. You could have players that focused on trick jumping and movement take the ball and just run the map with it while your teammates just try to kill the other team.

Or you can all huddle in a small area of the map waiting for the points to count up.

Also the soul/qball can be seen through walls (close walls not through the whole map) so hiding forever was not really easy to do.

Q-Ball was immensely fun. I see sacrifice as a shittier version of it.

sounds much more fun than sacrifice

It was my favorite mode in any quake game. 2v2 Q-Ball was very fun, you'd run into the enemy with the q-ball, toss it straight up in the air (so they can't just steal it and run away) switch to lg/rockets and fight the dude for like 3 seconds, then rocketjump, switch to axe mid air and retrieve the q-ball then try to escape if you hadn't killed the enemy.

It was simply pure fun.

I must say I also don't like how sacrifice only occupies a very small portion of the map. After all flow and interaction with the geometry a map offers is one of the best things about quake. I don't see why that should be limited to a handful of spots always producing the same moves and the same actions in the same directions.
In my eyes it has a really high potential for getting stale.

Ctf would propably work really good with champions. It might very well be the best suited multiplayer mode considering the implementation of champs. I guess we'll never know though :(