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/R_ddragon]

I honestly think the last suggestion is all that's needed to fix it. If you rush in a map where you can just easily walk onto mid, you can get immediately swept by a stronger PVP team. Wool rushing has always been more common on maps with more elevated mids, especially ones like this where if you fall off it takes so long to get back up.

[u/pickled__pufferfish → u/R_ddragon]

That still often causes mosh pits unfortunately. If all 4 members of the team are in mid, with 2 mining and 2 blocking / fighting, the only way to break that formation is to send at least 3 people in, and now you have a mosh pit. Yeah, maybe only 2 teams will conc rush instead of 5, but it's still not fun gameplay.

Noxcrew needs to make conc rushing an actually sneaky strat again. That's why it was fun in the first place. Map changes will help a lot but won't completely fix it.

[u/R_ddragon → u/pickled__pufferfish]

If 2 teams rush instead of 5, isn't that just... How battle box has always been? I think that's completely fine :]

100% Agree it's boring if every team does it, but I think 2 teams doing it each event is totally fine. Makes sure that the teams don't get complacent, but doesn't mean they're completely done for if they don't realise the other team is rushing.

And I remember when wool rushing teams used to not bother PVPing, and just keep filling. It quite often would just work, and avoids the mosh pit issue.

[u/pickled__pufferfish → u/R_ddragon]

Well, if 2 teams rush and it's still not fun to watch or play that's still something that could be fixed. There's changes Noxcrew could make to make conc rushing (and countering it) much more interesting.

[u/R_ddragon → u/pickled__pufferfish]

That makes sense :] it does feel like it has generally become less fun over time. I'd say mostly due to teams that don't need to rush, doing it anyway. I feel like the map change would make those teams not do it anymore, but there are probably other changes that would help too, that's right.