I've given the new Shatter a fair shot now, 15 games or so, and I think I can confidently say now that it's inferior to the previous iteration.

The smaller map, reduced points from ice, and no bases, has made the mode EXTREMELY kills-focused. While in other modes, you sometimes see comebacks and close games because of how teams play around the objectives, in the new Shatter, typically the most aggressive team gets a runaway lead and wins easily. Premades are already pretty dominant but the new Shatter takes it to another level, with teams facing a premade having virtually no hope of victory. The snowballing effect of Battle High and the incredible point potential of kills causes aggressive teams to dominate this mode in every single aspect.

Due to the low value of objectives compared to kills, teams which prioritize objectives almost always end up losing. Usually objectives give teams an idea of where to focus their efforts, but in the new Shatter the optimal approach is to outright ignore objectives to instead focus on kills. The typical Frontlines player is easily distracted by objectives, particularly in this mode as it allows them to avoid fighting other players (something which they are deathly scared of), yet counterintuitively this works to their team's detriment. By splitting off from their team's main force to attack ice, they diminish their killing ability and leave their team open to attacks from larger forces. All those points they think they're earning by diligently smashing ice are quickly siphoned away by aggressive teams killing their teammates and hastening their defeat.

I initially thought the mode was more fair with the more frequent ice spawns, but the spawns are not distributed evenly. Each large ice gives an advantage to one team, the one which has a slope from the ice leading to their base. The other teams must risk being pinched by entering from the cliffside or the center, leaving them only one viable exit. This wouldn't be a problem if the ice spawned evenly, but frequently it spawns in the same spot repeatedly, advantaging the same team over and over. So the map is arguably less fair than the previous iteration where each ice could only spawn once.


The fix for this isn't simple or obvious. The value of objectives vs killing needs to be balanced, and the way nodes work needs to be adjusted so that players cannot simply hide away and peck at ice all game without ever needing to PvP. Fewer ice active at once, less frequent spawns, higher point value of nodes. Hmm, this is starting to sound familiar. Kinda sounds like how the old map used to work.

Yeah, just go back to the old map. The new one isn't worth the work it would require to salvage when they could just bring back the original and solve basically every problem immediately. I'm not even sure why they changed it.