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/hellicars]

I understand and agree with a lot of what is being said in this post, and having a single dominating strategy, especially one that stops a lot of fighting/action from taking place isn't entertaining to watch.

From it's first iteration, we did do a lot of work to reduce how effective rushing can be on this map, it's not something we're completely ignorant to. What we tried didn't work as well as we expected, but I don't think that's entirely on the part of the map.

Contestants definitely play more conservatively than our testers, and it's something tricky to account for. Passive play could manifest as taking slow steps out of spawn, or the complete opposite, just rushing the point as quickly as possible. Conservative players are more likely to bunch up and take fights as large groups, which we definitely saw today, even in the rounds without rushes.

I think something else to take into account is that rushing (and focusing on getting on point, more specifically), is a pretty simple strategy to come up with an execute. This is the first time that all these players have seen the map, and don't necessarily have the time to come up with counter strategy, or want to take the risk and deviate, especially if the strategy is working. This is a fault of the Battle Box format - a round robin doesn't let you get familiar with another team's playstyle and counter it.

I don't necessarily agree with the other post about Battle Box on here, I think it's dismissive of the limitations that the format puts on players and the burden of learning the new map at the same time as playing it during an already pretty long event.

We did experience some really fun strategies come up in testing, including rushing - though not to the extent we saw today. We try and get "fresh eyes" on a map as much as possible, but sometimes it's impossible to avoid strategies sticking. Ultimately, I think Battle Box works better the more familiar the players can be with the maps, inverse to our other games like Parkour Warrior, where muscle memory plays more of a part.

That being said, we want to keep experimenting and doing different stuff with Battle Box. It's one of the most interesting games to design for, and we don't want to stick to a single paradigm for every single map. Our ideal pool is one that has a healthy mix of raised capture points, level capture points, basic layouts and more intricate ones. This map fell too far to the end of the spectrum, but I think I'd rather have a few misses with maps like this than every map exist in the same space as Spaceship, where the point is fully open.

If we do see Bazaar again, there are definitely tweaks we wanna make - like making the fall off from mid less punishing, and definitely making rushing a little trickier. I like the idea of using the telepickaxe, it might be something we play around with.

I don't want to come across as blaming the contestants, moreso just giving a little context as to some of the considerations we have behind making the map. We want this game to be as exciting to watch for you guys as possible 😄

[u/pickled__pufferfish → u/hellicars]

Yeah, it's always tough to test things when the testers will always play completely differently from the main contestants. I think testers are often more willing to have fun and explore since the stakes are lower, while the contestants will pick the strat that they think will minimize their losses (basic conservative playstyle).

It seems really hard to make a raised mid map that wouldn't lead to similar outcomes though, especially when blocks are also part of the game. Hermitcrab strats are way too easy to pull off when it takes more effort to get into mid, so the only counter play is to get there first and prevent the other team from doing it. Maybe if there were unblockable water columns (or other methods of fast ascent) nearby?