Quote Originally Posted by aeoncs View Post
The primary objective of any battleground in any MMO should be to kill enemy players and if you can potentially win without killing a single player, that's bad game design right there; that's really all there is to it. Seal Rock has its fair share of problems too, but you at least get some real PvP out of it.
I have never seen someone win a Shatter without actually...PVPing. (I mean "someone" in terms of a GC as a whole, not an individual player, which of course is quite possible to have happen.) I think a lot of people are overblowing this issue simply because treating the map as a whole beat-'em-up in mid is a surefire way to lose, and people hate having to disengage when they feel like they're "winning" simply because they're not actually winning, the third GC is collecting all the ice and raking in points while you're duking it out with the second GC in mid.

...wait, wasn't Seize exactly like that? LOL. "GUYS, NODES"

Seriously, Seize was an awful map with random and INSANELY defensible spawns and I don't understand how people could enjoy it. The map was far too spread out to really encourage any sort of far-reaching strategy, because you could easily get caught with your pants down at some node or another with only 3 DPS and on top of that, the whole DRK spamming Unleash/SCH SMN spamming Miasma II/WAR spamming Overpower BS to prevent node caps was utterly asinine. DRK alone with Living Dead trolling could prevent a full party from capping for like a solid 30 seconds straight if nobody CC'd them (most people didn't, because hurr durr my ez kill), and by then a good portion of the points would already be drained from the tomelith.

Could Shatter use some improvements to make kills a bit more noteworthy in the overall flow of the game? Sure, but I kind of like that Maelstrom tried rolling a premade two days ago on Primal in the evening with a butt ton of casters dropping LBs on everyone and went chasing kills like a bunch of idiots, only to still lose the match...twice in a row before I stopped queuing for the evening. I like that I can see the enemy GCs on the map to strategize our own team's placement, and I like that nodes aren't random spawns, don't repeat, and aren't arbitrarily of an extremely high ranking sometimes because "lol screw you, your marginal lead is now gone a minute before the match ends because the second-place team got an S in their base".

/shrug Seize is easily my least favorite of all the PVP maps we have out now. I don't understand why the community likes it so much.