New Frontlines

[Februs]

I'm really sad that there only seems to be three flags though.

They probably made it three because they were thinking ahead. As cool as it would be to have more capture/shatter points, I can think of a few glaring problems that would come about from having it set up that way.

The first is spreading people out too thinly and deter actual combat. The more objectives there are on the map, the less likely people would fight. Have you ever played a Seize match where only two GC's are fighting, while the third is gallivanting around the empty side of the map? How about a Secure match where one GC sweeps around all the Capture point's without fighting for them while the other two were throwing themselves into the meat grinder at the top of the tower? The same thing could happen here if there are too many capture points. One of the 3 teams could just cruise their way to victory by having uncontested areas while the other two get into a massive death match over the rest. Tunnel vision is real in Frontlines, after all.

The second reason is the size of the map. Adding more objective points would likely increase the map size, because they'd have to avoid clutter and overlapping objective zones (especially on the actual map, to avoid confusion). A bigger map size creates problems. One of the biggest complaints about the map for Seize (besides the fact that it was unbalanced) was that it was simply too big. It took players a long time, even when mounted, to cross the entire map, and if RNGsus was feeling particularly troll-ish that day, you could spend half of an active node timer just trying to get to it. Everyone had matches where RNG gave them the shaft, and all the nodes spawned in one area; so, it's not that hard to envision why it would be a problem. It's even more of a problem in a 24-man match, where the teams are much smaller ... Which brings us to problem number three: 24-man matches.

SE has to plan ahead for 24-man matches, because they do happen and will inevitably become the norm. Even when the game mode is new, less populated Worlds, or any players who play at abnormal hours for their Data Centre, will end up in a 24-man match. 24-mans just don't have the players to support a wider spread of objectives. Even if they coded the game to adjust for this (which they likely won't do, for the sake of system memory), the map would be needlessly big and have a lot of unused space. We probably wouldn't notice it right away, but late in this game-modes life cycle it would become pretty apparent. It happened with all the previous game modes of FL. The original Secure greatly downsized the number of capture zones for this exact reason; so, I can't imagine Shatter working out any differently. Three flags (assuming that there are only three) is likely a product of them learning from what happened in the original Secure.