Throughout forums and Youtube and comment sections, I’ve heard time and time again how most players really don’t prefer BTB. Face it, 80% of your play time is devoted to 4v4, there’s very few players who identify otherwise. BTB is a chaotic cluster-duck where tactics and skills are far less important. The utter chaos of the RNG gods reign supreme here and not in a good way. In my opinion the reason BTB feels so bad and how to fix it is actually quite simple.
Two factors: starting weapons and team size.
It should be pretty obvious that starting off with an AR on open and exposed maps is not ideal, particularly when there’s only a limited amount of precision weapons. Every match in BTB is dominated by the lucky few who are able to get their hands on a BR or precision weapon. BR starts or even the inferior Commando would be a nice change in BTB.
What’s actually a far more significant factor is the team sizes and their relationship with the map size and design. I really enjoy the fact that they increased BTB from 8v8 to 12v12, but if you’re going to have that many players, the map has to accomodate that accordingly. Current BTB map designs feature a combination of open spaces and choke points, where even the choke points are very often exposed to various angles and distances. The maps are too small to accomodate 24 players and sometimes too crowded. At the same time, large traffic areas are so awfully exposed that maneuvering anywhere is often a death sentence. This is the biggest reason most players dont prefer BTB because no matter what you do, how well you play, how well you maneuver, there’s always a handful of enemies that can always get a bead on you no matter where you are on the map.
Unpopular opinion, but this game needs some serious map rework and revision due to how poorly balanced they are. It would be nice if maps had a few more concealed travel options, multiple routes to the same destination. I think with the current 3 BTB maps, the best course to take would be to reduce team sizes to 8. At least until they release larger scale maps that can actually support a larger player count.
Any thoughts? Please share them, and please don’t be a pedantic -Yoink!-.
This is the first time I’ve seen anyone claim people hate BTB.
People love BTB way more than Quick Play. If anything, I see people wanting less reasons to play Quickplay, citing that they hate Oddball, CTF and Strongholds.
I can’t say that I recognise this. I was quite surprised how although the team size has increased a small effective group can still steamroll CTF/Stockpile matches into a quick win.
Due to the tea sizes also the impact of power weapons and vehicles has decreased and thereby negating some impact of the RNG.
I do agree that some of the randomness of vehicle spawns is frustrating (f.e. One side gets a scorpion and the other a gun goose) but they are added so late into the game that it’s usually not impactful. (Which of course is something the game does suffer from: Even in BTB a big part of the sandbox is not accessible].
The bigger impact on some maps for me is the not mirrored weapon spawns for bases. Commando + Ravager =/ Battle Rifle + Hydra in a BTB setting where both sets have very different roles (supposed to arena where the average combat setting makes both of them useable).
A BR start would although take a lot of the freedom of movement away because it’s so damn accurate compared to earlier iterations but I won’t object to a commando secondary.
All in all I’m having a lot of fun in BTB and especially the switch to Total Control from Strongholds makes those games much more interactive. I do hope we’ll see some improvement in vehicle drops and weapon racks.
Big team CTF can be extremely frustrating and boring. The number of times one had a tie match 0-0 tells you something is wrong. Stock pile is usually a blowout for one team. I think total control is pretty good, but that one seems to be hard to find. Then there is slayer with infinite AR spam.
Definitely have something to do with too many anti vehicles in the game.
You ride out in a Hog and you are gonna get Shock Rifled, Dynamo’d or Skewered the moment you enter enemy territory.
Hogs are made of paper, and too many anti vehicle options just lying around.
Back in H3, most BTB maps only had :
x1 Power Drain
x2 Plasma Grenade Spawns, one for each base
1x Splaser
2x Brute Shots, one for each base.
In Infinite we have at least 3 - 4 spawns of Spikes/Plasmas, Dynamos for each team, a Shock rifle, a Skewer/Sniper for each team, and randomly spawning Hammers and Rockets. Wayyyy too much anti vehicle.
As someone who rarely plays BTB my biggest gripes were that Fragmentation is just an awful map that for some reason gets picked in like 80% of my games and there is a distinct lack of vehicle spawns. I don’t like the assymetrical, random spawns in the first place but there are so few vehicle pads that it makes BTB lose its sense of scale.
Fragmentation doesn’t help matters either, with vehicles being utterly useless as they can’t access the side paths where everyone logically funnels to as hanging around the middle of the map has you dealing with wide open spaces and vehicles at the same time. Deadlock’s big drawback is just how insanely open the map is. I definitely like it far more than Fragmentation but again it lacks vehicles, feels way too small and is just way too open for its own good. I’ve yet to play on Highpower but from what I’ve seen it looks like the perfect BTB map.
Ultimately though you really hit the nail on the head. The maps just feel way too crowded
Luckily the basic vehicles respawn very fast so for hogs I never feel that overwhelmed. Also because most players rather slay with them then damage a vehicle.
I do always feels really awful when later in the match a wasp finally spawns for the enemy and you skewer it immediately when one of the many waiting opponents steps in… no objection to the power level of anti vehicle weapons, but with such rare spawns it really feels bad to ruin those opportunities in favour of a win.
I mention Hogs because these babies are the basic bread and butter CTF vehicles for every single Halo since the beginning.
The ultimate triad of Gunner, Driver and Passanger/Flag Carrier.
They simply die too quick, making the CTF matches extend to hideous lengths if both teams aren’t just poopoo bad.
I noticed this as well. Not just BTB, but with Arena also.
Most of the maps are too small for their playlists, and I really don’t enjoy playing on crowded maps.
I feel BTB has way too many power weapons too. Each team spawns with a load of stuff, and new weapons continue to spawn throughout the match. Ravagers, snipers, skewers, shock rifles, rockets. It’s too much, and impossible to keep track of.
The problem is the maps. 343 in general has struggled to make good btb maps imo. In the case of H:I, The maps are actually too small (narrow). Look at maps like Sandtrap or Blood Gulch. Those maps offer plenty of long sight lines but the vehicles have plenty of space to maneuver. Fragmentation feels like New York traffic with how congested it is.
Basically, vehicles need to have circuit they can roam, and infantry need sections where vehicles can enter. Think of the buildings on Headlong.
I like BTB in general, has been my go to mode for ever.
I don’t really like those “random” vehicle spawns.
You dominated 14 minutes of the game? Here’s a warthog, enemy gets 5 wasps and 28 scorpions. All right.
And I miss blood gulch and other “non 343” maps, lol.
I do not think BTB is a disliked mode. In fact it is my favorite mode by a long shot. That being said it definitly needs some tweaks in my opinion.
Specifically I think the biggest problems right now are vehicles and weapons’ spawns.
The Pelican Drop system looks cool but is actively detrimental to the supposed design goal of “having the epicness escalate as the matches progress”. Scorpions and Wraiths are almost impossibile to come by and even if they spawn they tipically do that out in the open and got instantly destroyed. The spawns are also asymmetrical for some reason so that when the game decides it one team gets an instant win. I have lost more than a match because the enemy team got a Wraith or a Scorpion and my team got a Gungoose or a Warthog.
An easy fix (hopefully the engine is flexible enough to allow it) would be spawning the vehicles at the beginning of a match and having them resupplied via the Pelican Drop at their original spawn point after a fixed amount of thime since their destruction (kinda like what is already in place for the weapon racks).
As for the weapons the situation is a bit less bad but I see no reason for asymmetrical spawns. Whats the point of having a Stalker Rifle when the other team got a Shock Rifle in High Power? The team who gets the Shock Rifle can disable evry vehicle of the enemy team; the team that doesn’t can just accept its fate.
I also do not like the random orbital drops for the power weapons. And I cannot understand why 343 tried that again after it nearly killed Halo 4 so hard that they where forced to add Legendary BR Slayer which removed the system.
Again an esy fix: just mirror the weapon spawns and if you really want the orbital drops have consistent weapon drops.
Lastly I do not like the Mk50/AR spawns. I get why they are doing it but, probably out of luck, I have never had a match where I could not find a BR more than five seconds after spawning thereby rendering the Mk50 spawn completely pointless besides adding a bit of busy work after each time I spawned.
As a side note I am not too sure about 100 kills to win being the right amount of kills with 12 players per team. I’d probably like 150 kills to win a bit more but this is nowhere near the other issues I currently have with this iteration of BTB.
