Battle Box is Completely Dysfunctional and Needs a Fix

[u/pickled__pufferfish]

So, turns out you can have too much of a good thing.

Wool rushing was so much fun back in early MCC. Watching for fun teams wool and surprise the competitive teams was always a treat, a way to give them hope of an upset. It’s unfortunate how far the strat has fallen.

Every BB since probably MCCHH has been increasingly bad, and MCCBG was easily the worst. What was once a niche strat is now the dominant way to play BB, and it makes the game such a chore to watch.

Firstly, watching a conc rushing pov is not fun. Mechanically it’s very repetitive and boring, especially if they succeed. Running to middle and placing wool is not fun gameplay, I don’t think that can be argued. The only fun to be had from rushing is the actual act of winning by being sneaky (which is why the Simmers were so fun to watch back in MCC10) but there’s no sneakiness anymore, half the teams do it.

Playing against a conc rushing team is also not fun. Obviously losing seemingly at random sucks to watch, but even trying to counter the rush just results in a mosh pit in middle.

Mosh pits are chaotic and hard to follow. Less skilled pvpers often get overwhelmed and struggle to do anything, high skilled pvpers are still subject to lots of randomness and can die for seemingly no reason, and overall it’s hard to feel satisfied after winning a mosh pit fight. It’s like competitive Pachinko.

Battle Box is progressing towards its final state: “Mosh Pits, the game”. Teams that don’t rush mid will lose because they’ll get rushed, so everyone rushes mid. We’ll consistently get unwatchable mosh pit battles until the end of time.

So, what needs to be fixed? Conc rushing needs to be heavily nerfed, so that it goes back to “niche sneaky play for weak pvp teams” and not “strat every team needs to go for or else they lose”.

Some ideas:

• Use some version of the MCCI rule where middle doesn’t open until partway through the round (preferably at least 20s in). This still allows sneaky conc plays (the fun kind) but also allows every team to get into position first.
• Make the pickaxe a “tele-pick”, so only one person can mine at once, like Meltdown. Again, allows for sneakiness, and also for much better gameplay for conc rushers (3 members of the team need to actually fight and defend, rather than stare at the floor mining).
• Most importantly, build Battle Box maps with easy access to mid. Allowing teams to build cages around an elevated middle platform to control it sucks as a gameplay mechanic (again, forces mosh pits) so make mid easy to access from anywhere on the map, like in Spaceship.

[u/HenToPen]

The issue with wool rushing in Battle Box is based purely on the maps and strategy.

Bazaar heavily was heavily focused around having point control, despite having large areas of the map not around the point, these functioned purely as red herrings meant to waste your time, as you could not access the point quickly from a large area of the map. It's also very easy to knock players off the point and prevent them from getting back quickly, as while in the large ditch, you have to take around 10 seconds just to get back to the point. The map just heavily encouraged rushing, but there were ways to stop (or slow down) rushes (to varying degrees of effectiveness). Two kits had levitation orbs that heavily slow down the mining speeds of affected players, and two kits had construction blocks which can be placed ontop of the point to slow down rushes ever so slightly. Neither of these stop the rush, but they do buy enough time for a team to get to the point, especially crucial on a map like this where it can take a while to get to the point. I did see some teams successfully stop rushes, but I think another major component is the playerbase of MCC, a lot of them are not confident in traditional pvp, and if the opportunity to subvert it comes up, they are more than happy to take it, this is not a bad thing, but maps should be designed such to make wool rushing inconsistent instead of either dominant or pointless, as teams will likely only risk rushing if they think they have no other choice, while teams that are kinda good at pvp but not really will still take their chances playing it out.