The equivalent of notching in one of the greatest eSports game of all time (CS) is aligning your grenade throws to visual in-game clues like this:
I personally think that BnG itself would never become a competitive scheme with wide appeal just because there are so many ways to exploit the game engine, it is easily abused. It doesn't really matter if you use a physical visual cue or an in-game cue. Both ways are intended to remove skill and have higher hit chance. It would just not be interesting to watch a game where there are so many systems in place that let the players abuse the spirit of the scheme. BnG is a game of memory, which means the skill ceiling is lower compared to other facets of worms, it's extremely static and predictable (hence notching exists in the first place). In a static environment it's intuitive to just memorize the possible outcomes especially when they are limited by physics itself, it's a 360° circle of which you only need to use roughly 90° (of which 45° are mirrored so it's just a copy to memorize). You can shoot below your worm but it really is just a fancy way to use LG. Besides that, again, you can still apply the 90° you learned from "up there" and divide that by 2 because it's a mirror. The enemy is 99,9% placed in a position that is easily reachable within these 90°.
Notches are set ° angles, I forgot what it was but I think a notch is roughly 3-4° per "tic". These tics then get visual clues (worm animation) at 5, 9, 13, 16 (roughly 45°), 19 etc. So if we removed these static tics we would just up the possible angles by a measly factor of 3x. Now that might sound like a lot to you, but really it isn't because of the way we play BnG and how the physics in-game work and our rather small maps, we usually operate in a narrow angle. We would extend the range of shots to 45 possible shot angles instead of 16 (remember the mirror, and tics). I don't believe the engine can simulate endless amounts of ° aka 3,7° or even 3,52124°. Even if it did, it would also make the game extremely random because good luck trying to hit exactly 40° with a key press when the game allows decimals.
To conclude, I think a possible solution would be to try to implement wider range of angles, why not re-design the maps entirely and have full (or close to) 360° of viable angles. In a way worms2 BnG with these cups was way more skillful than our narrow W:A BnG we have established. We should look at W2 BnG and learn from ancient ways of artillery. More angles, more targets all make notching harder and enhance the strategy layer. If both teams have 4 worms and you can place 1 worm on top of the map he would be the most valuable worm because he has the easiest shots (notching), then you would have lower levels where you can't really do full power shots and have obstacles in your way etc. I tried googling some old maps but found none but I hope some of you remember these old w2 maps and know what I am referring to. xD
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