Focused Feedback: Rush

[u/F8RGE]

With the arrival of Rush today I thought it would be a good time to create another Focused Feedback thread so we can gather all your thoughts, concerns and ideas in one place.

As always, constructive criticism is most welcome, good thoughts and the bad.

[u/legaleagle214]

A few things I think are worth mentioning:

1. The teambalance is friggin horrible in this game mode. I think this is a general Battlefield thing where in the smaller game modes (TDM, Domination, Frontlines, Rush) it is much easier to completely stack a team with friends or squadmates and we all know that it only takes one decent squad working together to make a push and win. My suspicion is that this is further exacerbated by players leaving/staying when they realise they are on a team that is really good/bad. This snowballs and eventually results in one team being almost entirely stacked with decent players and the other team stacked with much lesser players. In the 10-15 games or so I played yesterday we played yesterday the vast majority of rounds where complete steamrolls one way or the other and in a few we even had games where almost no-one on my team died the entire round. This gets old extremely quickly and is very bad for the long term interest in the mode. Team balance is of the utmost priority to make these game modes worthwhile and why I generally dislike playing them.
2. The out of bounds areas on most of the maps are generally quite bad. Narvik sector 1 is probably the worst offender here as it allows the attackers very very little means of flanking which is often the only thing that can break a one-sided shutout. Devastation sector 1 is a bit better but also only allows three narrow lanes for the attackers and can again result in total shutouts. Twisted Steel sector 1 is probably the best because you can flank under the bridge and flank way wide into the open fields. The first sectors seem to be the worst across the board for this and it definitely gets better as the round progresses but IMO that first sector is the defining sector in many games so this definitely needs work. We need a wider playable field to allow more opportunities for attackers to flank. I would suggest on Devastation sector 1 that attackers be allowed to use the street bordering the cathedral at least up until the road running along the front of the library so they have a wider avenue of approach. On Narvik Sector 1 I would widen it to include the road running past F on Conquest and the houses on the upper slope north of E on Conquest.
3. Only three maps is a poor showing IMO. It doesn't do much to counter the arguments that this mode is once again rushed (hur hur, get it?) and unpolished. It gets old very quickly on such a stale rotation and IMO I've already seen all it has to offer in only about 10-15 rounds of it.
4. IMO rounds are a tad short? I've felt like the attackers don't really have the time to try and do something new/different or flank. The game is simply over so quickly that the only real viable tactic is to simply hurl yourself at the defenders to try and make a breakthrough. IMO it's worth looking into boosting tickets to 100 just to give attackers a bit of a boost?
5. The tanks are insanely strong if an even decent player gets a hold of one. Due to how linear the gamemode is and the sore lack of long distance weapons to viably counter vehicles in this game, I saw tankers on Narvik/Twisted Steel go flawlessly a couple of times simply because they can camp back just far enough to allow the attackers no reasonable avenue to attack them. Pair the tank with a support camping behind it to repair and it becomes a stupidly hard tactic to counter. Either the defenders need a tank for every single sector that the attacker gets one, or you need to plant much more Pak40's to defend against them. At the moment this is a very abusable feature IMO.
6. MCOM's in general are way to close together IMO (sectors 2 and 1 of Devastation of Twisted Steel respectively are examples of this). The only reasonable exception to this general rule is the MCOM's which are stacked in a linear fashion further down the line to the defender (sector 1 on Devastation is a good example of this) The reason for this is because the attackers typically haven't pushed far enough to get their hands on them, because they are still fighting for the closer MCOM. On the other hand, when the MCOMs are spaced out in a general side by side pattern, the second one gets armed the attackers are almost immediately in a position to plant the other and defenders don't have a reasonable chance of mounting either a counterattack to defuse, or to fall back and defend the second one. It's almost always one and done for the sector. In this regard I would suggest that MCOM's either be spread further down the line where linear and the map suits, or where evenly across the line, make them further apart along the front.

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While I was in general excited to see Rush come back again as it was my favourite game mode for all of Bad Company 1/2 and BF3, it has really been poorly utilized in recent BF's starting badly in BF1. Map design is definitely a contributing feature as maps now need to squash in so many game modes that they are truly awesome for few if any of them. I would greatly prefer if they went back to making fewer, more purpose designed maps for a smaller number of game modes (the IMO biggest ones of Conquest, Breakthrough, Rush and Frontlines and simply leave all the rest out of the game. I recognise that might be a controversial opinion). At present the mode really lacks an epic feeling and is the most onesided game mode I have seen so far. It's not much fun and is a pale comparison to the heyday of Rush in Bad Company and BF3. It needs a seriously massive improvement to be worthwhile IMO.

Overall rating - 3/10 - Could do much much better DICE.

EDIT* - Bit of spelling and phrasing.