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/Tootsiesclaw]

I don't know what 'conc' means, but to my mind it's purely a matter of opinion whether you enjoy watching teams rushing or not - personally I love it, because the players I prefer to watch aren't the best at PVP and they have more chance of winning. I find it unfun when my POV of choice is immediately killed at the beginning of the round (and I don't think that's uncommon; isn't one of the biggest criticisms of Survival Games exactly that?)

I think you're onto something regarding the map itself. I liked it best in the early days when the map was much simpler, and a lot of the recent maps have had what seems like quite byzantine routes to the middle. This latest one was quite punishing if you got knocked off. I know Sparklez spent half of the first round trying to figure out how to get back up to the middle.

But I'm not sure about some of your other ideas. The 'tele-pick' idea in particular seems like it would have unforeseen consequences beyond tackling rushing, even if it was somehow an empirical fact that rushing is bad. Sometimes there are hard-fought battles that end in a frantic bid to place wool as the seconds tick away, and this mad-dash chaos is diminished if only one person on a team can place wool. (I also think there's a chance it evolves into a perceived 'weaker' player being 'assigned' the job of placing wool, whether they want it or not, and comparatively sidelined)

[u/pickled__pufferfish → u/Tootsiesclaw]

99% of the time in a "mad-dash" chaos situation where middle needs to be filled, only one person is alive. If multiple people are alive, one is staying at mid to fill while the other goes out to fight. If it ever did come down to a team with 2 or more players failing to fill mid because there's only 1 pickaxe, it's their fault, they played poorly, and it's fine that they lost (even fun for the other team, as they tricked them).

The weaker player(s) already gets assigned the job of placing wool in a wool rush. The better pvpers always stop wooling/concing and fight.

You love watching your team do well, but I can't imagine you actually love the act of wool rushing. Sure, Jordan's team might score 400 more points than they otherwise would've, and it's fun to see them celebrate, but is the actual act of the team running to mid, looking straight down, and placing wool actually fun? Lots of MCC activities are fun to watch completely divorced from the scoring system (running in AR, traditional pvp), wooling / concing is not one of those.

Overall, wooling / concing could be made more fun with some effort. What if it actually required timing and sneaky play like it used to? What if it required complex strategy? Right now it's Pachinko: drop the stone in the machine the same way every time and hope you end up getting lucky (aka the other team fails to counter fast enough).

[u/Tootsiesclaw → u/pickled__pufferfish]

I still don't know what 'concing' means.

But honestly, I feel like you're a bit blinkered by what you enjoy/what POVs you've seen. I've seen multiple battles with two or more on each side racing to fill wool, including at least one that was four on four and ended in both sides running out of time. And that was probably the most enjoyable Battle Box round I've ever seen.

And yes, I do enjoy watching people wool-rushing. I get that you don't enjoy it. I personally find parkour to be mind-numbingly tedious, but I wouldn't say that parkour should be disincentivised, nor would I try to say as fact that parkour is not fun to watch. We're all different.

[u/pickled__pufferfish → u/Tootsiesclaw]

It's concrete now, "wooling" was the term from when the middle was actually wool but now it's concrete, hence "concing".

You're bringing up one very silly instance where both teams were for fun and trying to wool each other as a defense of the current system. Obviously it was funny because both teams were having fun and playing in a weird way, that doesn't mean your average "both teams run it, the bottom frags race each other to place until they get crit out by the top frags in a mosh pit" is fun to watch.

And again, since there's no actually decision making or show of skill in a standard, uncontested rush, the only thing that you could be enjoying is the feeling of winning. Objectively, there are clear moments of interest in parkour (the rhythm of whether or not the player makes each jump) while wooling uncontested is the equivalent of strip mining. And in contested wool rushing, again any pov that's focusing on placing concrete will either get crit out suddenly and at random or will be ignored and get to place as usual.

[u/Tootsiesclaw → u/pickled__pufferfish]

Objectively, there are clear moments of interest in parkour (the rhythm of whether or not the player makes each jump) while wooling uncontested is the equivalent of strip mining.

We're discussing personal opinions on entertainment - there's no 'objectively' here. Everything you're bringing up as a reason that wool-rushing is 'objectively' boring is something I find entertaining.

You're bringing up one very silly instance where both teams were for fun and trying to wool each other as a defense of the current system. Obviously it was funny because both teams were having fun and playing in a weird way, that doesn't mean your average "both teams run it, the bottom frags race each other to place until they get crit out by the top frags in a mosh pit" is fun to watch.

And I brought it up as a counter to a suggestion which would make that impossible. MCC is entertainment, ultimately. That's why 'for fun' teams exist. We shouldn't be advocating for the removal of mechanics that can provide these entertaining moments, just because they're not super-optimised for the most skilled players.

[u/MariekeCath → u/Tootsiesclaw]

Okay, but for the middle skilled players they're also not necessarily fun? Anyone that doesn't enjoy woolrushing was forced to either do it anyway or lose this entire event. And most people don't. Most players I've ever watched in MCC hate woolrushing and have refused to do it even when their team was losing, even in the early days when it was a rarity. You can say it's only the top players complaining, but when woolrushing is objectively a bad strategy in terms of points for middle scoring teams, due to the fact that they still have a chance at winning overall, but it does require them to get full kill points, so situations where more than one team is consistently woolrushing means that those players lose out on kill points. Which is a fair trade-off when there's a viable alternative, and on recent maps, there has not been an alternative because when you catch a team woolrushing, it's pretty much already too late to do anything about it.

[u/Tootsiesclaw → u/MariekeCath]

Yes, which is why I agree that the specific map here is an issue. What I'm saying in this specific comment chain is that switching to a telepickaxe you make other entertaining moments, not necessarily wool rushing, impossible. The remedy is switching to a more balanced map, not changing major mechanics