I am starting to like the new shatter, anyone else ?

[FROSTEDFLAKE]

This is an appreciation thread for the new shatter map redesign and hoping for more positive changes to frontline as I think a lot of player love to play it.

[Mecia]

So they decided to pull Secure for a rework which is still pending and in the meantime reworked the one FL map that had no glaring issues into a worse version. I think i dislike it less than Seize and Danshig but it was an unnecessary choice when the aforementioned maps have actual issues.

[Archeron]

It's a tough map for me. I miss the old Shatter, and the experiences from Shatter being repeatedly given garbage reworks soiled my initial thoughts on it.

After the updates, especially the changes to spawning and adjustments to points gained/lost through players kills/deaths it is a fairly solid map. It has its moments when I'm not playing against multiple Dark Premades. I don't really blame the map for it being populated with premades however.

I'm hoping they make Borderland ruins a map worth playing on again. Perhaps knock the spire down and introduce a King of the Hill, or capture the flag element in. And naturally perhaps rebalancing to the North Spawn of seal rock, their nodes have always been less defensible though not in a significant enough way to influence the outcomes of matches in a significant way from my personal experience. Allegedly more changes are to come in 7.2, so we'll see.

[Mawlzy]

Can't stand it. Slow and dull.

[Aravell]

They changed shatter from a map with interesting tactical decisions with all the chokepoints into a pure farming map where the daily roulette players farm ice while the premades farm the roulette players.

Not a big fan, really.

[Mistress_Irika]

Take away the elixers, and I might actually give the mode a chance. Right now the map only serves to keep people busy with breaking the ice as much as possible. If you're fighting it's always to defend the big ice. There's hardly any skirmishes elsewhere.

[Valence]

Removing all the rng and the downtime was the worst thing they could have done to this already contentious map, making it extremely scripted and running on rails (like old secure but worst, because this one also favors 24 man blobs). Big ices cycle without interruption and you constantly have to tell your team not to go for the unsafe ices, which is a surefire way to lose the game if you do it even once (killing half your members and making you miss on your own ice coming just after). The design literally pushes novices into a gigantic meat grinder and I do not understand how something like this even could get validated by QA.

[Miki_L]

I stopped playing on it entirely. They just double downed on the big ice problem, the problem being that roulette queue NPCs will just hit the big ice over and over again even if they can never catch up to other teams' points just by doing so. It's boring and pointless as you have little influence to whether your team will just afk grind the big ice to a loss or not. It needs to be removed in 7.1/7.2

It's better having less map variety in the pool than to even have this at all.

[Sinstrel]

Removing all the rng and the downtime was the worst thing they could have done to this already contentious map, making it extremely scripted and running on rails (like old secure but worst, because this one also favors 24 man blobs).....

I agree that this map is extremely bland strategically. There are really only a handful (if even) of strategies to even think about while playing Shatter. I don't think removing the rng was the issue though. PvP maps can be infinitely more strategically engaging without RNG mechanics if the developers decide to be more creative. A couple of examples that come to mind are League of Legends' 5v5 tournament map, World of Warcraft's Arathi Basin battlegrounds.

That's not to say that there shouldn't be more things going on in a typical game. For instance the concept of timed map hazards in Crystal Conflict should also see an implementation into Frontlines. What if there was a blizzard storm that occurred at set intervals of the map where you are taking frost bitten damage until you hide away in the only available cave on the map. I think that would be quite interesting and bet that you can probably start to think of a dozen strategies with just that alone.

There is a place for RNG elements however. To lessen the effectiveness skilled players have per match vs more casual ones.

Overall it seems Yoshi and SE are trying to figure out ways all aspects of the game can be streamlined. I don't the issue of bland/boring applies only to this Frontline map...

[Valence]

I do remember Secure, which was a lot more interesting strategically than this, and even if we can argue that it probably had its own flaws, it was always, always the same script. Go to nodes mid, then run to side outposts, then run to the other, then to the first one, then back to mid with nodes. For instance it's not a problem in Palaistra due to the scale and the objective is fundamentally different and moves back and forth depending on what happens, unlike fixed points on the map that never change and therefore always bring the same moves with the exact same games unfolding, which feels very mechanical and soulless.