As the author of h.mut, I feel qualified to say its time has come. We use chat for too many things: using chat to keep track of the health of your team's flagholder doesn't make much sense, nor does relying on a mutator for a feature so important to such a popular gamemode. I'd prefer that information to live in the HUD somewhere. What should that look like?

I think this can be underneath your health, maybe translucent health bar with a teamcoloured name. I also thought of the flag sprite, but I think it's more valuable to have it show the name just like F9. If it were the flag sprite it may be confusing, Because... what colour do you show? Your team colour or the enemy captured flag? A flag can't have health, so it wouldn't instantly communicate that it's the health of a teammate.

I like the idea of integrating this information in the HUD in general, but I think one issue that may arise is that it becomes hard to track sudden changes to their flagholder's health. People are used to observe teamchat for these kind of sudden changes, but I'm not sure how that would work in the HUD. We would have to make sure that a change to the flagholder's health is easily noticeable even when you're in the middle of action. At least chat is easily trackable since it stays for some seconds unless there is heavy spam.

If you mute the flagholder, you can't see their health updates in teamchat.

I'd like to change my previous statement. I agree with SJ that players would like to get all information from the places on the screen. Adding a health bar as a replacement for the H? mutator I suggested earlier would do the opposite and would not work out great. Players really only look at two places for information about what is happening during CTF:

1. Chat
2. BigEchoes in the middle of the screen

Imo a small step in the right direction would be to just say ||Player health is 1/2/3" the moment it changes, similar to ||Red team has scored and ||Player captured the flag.

Sidenote: I think Ideally the BigEcho/Text for ||Player has scored and text ||Red team has scored should be combined too. So you are not looking at two different places to figure out two things at the same time. That the Red team scored should be obvious by the red text, but knowing who scored is important for organising and recapturing., especially around 3v3/4v4 games.