Remove Shatter and Secure from the rotation.

[Cidel]

Secure and Shatter are in this weird situation where the former was temporarily removed to add a few new things to become slightly more interesting and thus bearable, while the latter was given the opposite treatment and actually removed capturable bases and has become worse with focus constantly being taken away from actual PvP with respawning large ices that now are almost never contested by more than one team save for the mid.

Secure still suffers from the tendency for teams to "see-saw" around the map in a murderball, and is the most punishing map to get double-teamed on now that there are more bases for enemy teams to hold while they both converge on either side of your spawn, preventing you from leaving or holding more than 1 flag. I've said before, but I have never seen wilder swings in scores on any other Frontline mode because of this ability to safely double-team the leading team without accidently engaging the other pincering team. I'd go so far to say early leads in Secure are meaningless if not downright suicidal. It often seems like the last 300 points are the only ones that matter.

I'll take new Secure over new Shatter, however. The devs are hell-bent on keeping Shatter a near-endless training dummy simulator with constant respawning ice. They removed small ice's original behavior of respawning like every half-minute to always having 2 large ices active; worse being if you're the only team that doesn't have an active large ice, because in all likelyhood your large ice is now stuck spawning alongside the middle ice which handicaps your point accumulation. That and the first team stupid enough to push into another team's large ice bottleneck is wide open to getting pinched by the 3rd team barring rare, desperate circumstances where they actually circle all the way around to pinch a team at their own large ice.

I wonder if the mode could be made even slightly more interesting if it tried copying new Secure's mechanic of awarding some Battle High for destroying NPCs (ice) so the people stuck slapping ice dummies all match aren't totally useless in fights from focusing on the literal one objective of the map that exists to constantly dissuade people from actually PvP'ing. Large ice gives the team that contributed the most damage to it 10 Battle High (provided you actually hit it), with smalls giving maybe 5.

They won't outright remove both modes though (even though I'm largely indifferent to Secure and outright dislike Shatter). What with achievements tied to them, and how bad it would look for them to pull their two "reworked" modes. Just don't play on the days with the maps you don't like. At least the rotation is so they aren't back-to-back days.

[CidHeiral]

Shatter sucks but the new Secure is great. I disliked the original version but now it feels so active, there's always an objective and action happening. The terrain is much more interesting as well. Groups still do the rotating back and forth thing though with the capture points but it's not nearly as bad as it was and more often results in actual fights.

[Teno]

New secure is good, there's pvp.

Shatter can be gone forever everyone knows that.

I wouldn't mind not seeing seal again, you spend more time roaming than fighting.

[Atreus]

Secure is great. It's the RNG garbage that is Seize that needs to disappear if anything.

[MisterNublet]

Shatter sucks but the new Secure is great. I disliked the original version but now it feels so active, there's always an objective and action happening. The terrain is much more interesting as well. Groups still do the rotating back and forth thing though the capture points but it's not nearly as bad as it was and more often results in actual fights.

I must get completely different games then, because Secure is way worse than it was previously. The only time I see fights happening in this "rework" is when two teams begin to freak out near the end of the match when one team is a few hundred points away from winning.

The other 90% of the time is spent with teams running away from each other when capping the side nodes. The biggest mistake they added to the map was the jump/warp pads. Before, there use to be small skirmishes while middle was active, now there is zero risk of committing an entire team to taking side nodes when everyone can jump straight to the middle platform after scaring away the other team. If someone takes a modicum of damage, time to flee into the jump pad.

Even with the rework, Players still treat middle as a PvE event with the occasional Comet being thrown around.

A bunch of pointless additions that only made the mode worse to play.

[OliviaLugria]

Shatter got the new map and it was perfect, then they kept modifying the rules to the point where pvp’ing in the mode actively hurts your chances of winning.

The new additional actions only make it worse

[CidHeiral]

I must get completely different games then, because Secure is way worse than it was previously. The only time I see fights happening in this "rework" is when two teams begin to freak out near the end of the match when one team is a few hundred points away from winning.

The other 90% of the time is spent with teams running away from each other when capping the side nodes. The biggest mistake they added to the map was the jump/warp pads. Before, there use to be small skirmishes while middle was active, now there is zero risk of committing an entire team to taking side nodes when everyone can jump straight to the middle platform after scaring away the other team. If someone takes a modicum of damage, time to flee into the jump pad.

Even with the rework, Players still treat middle as a PvE event with the occasional Comet being thrown around.

A bunch of pointless additions that only made the mode worse to play.

Well all I can say is that hasn't been my experience. In the matches I've been in the teams absolutely collide in the middle and at the side capture points. There's still some "cap and run" happening but it's less often than the original where that was all everyone did for the entire game. If they could find a way to reduce that further though that would certainly be welcome.

[ThreeBeastSmile]

I actually like the new Shatter map, just not how it plays out now. There's now very little outlet for someone who prefers to roam relatively alone to see just how many people they can drag into a king of the hill over small ice. That could happen on the old map, and also when the newer rehash first debuted. On the old map there was also the bases. Now I'm at the point I don't want to queue on Shatter, and that's not what I'd prefer to do. It's lame sitting out a day over a map when there's an itch to scratch, but the apprehension is just that strong when I picture what kind of team I could be dropped into (and honestly, that's where I usually end up nowadays... in that worst case scenario.)

New Secure is... okay. Old Secure was my favourite map. I'd spend 99.9% of the time at ground level, again, picking fights mostly alone and getting some entertainment. The terrain was great there for LoS plays, and also for hiding and moving into place to make the hit. The whole alliance base-tagging shimmy thing didn't occur to me when that was little more than a passing weather front from my PoV, since I spent almost all my time on the ground whether allies were around or not.

Now? While middle is a lot more accessible (be it either by ramp or pad) and I will visit it more regularly, I do hate that it can be used to leave the scene way too easily (though getting that KO mere inches away from one is pretty satisfying). What I hate more is how while there's opposition to fight a stone throw away, most will opt to just ignore them and use the jump pad instead. That's definitely the ice beelining tact manifesting there... which tends to only continue once up at mid.

With introducing more bases, the terrain got broken up a bit as well, and while there are walls... I just don't find the cover to be as good as it was before, there's less opportunity to sneak unseen. The gimmicks at mid are quite irksome unless you have something like a bind to screw people over. Not sure exactly where I stand on NuSecure but so far I'm still enjoying it ahead of most other maps, especially more than NuShatter. Just don't think it's as good as before for someone with my playstyle in solo queue (as the "make your own fun guy").

Either way, there shouldn't be any map that makes someone want to outright sit out. The least this game needs is even less variety in PvP.

[Mawlzy]

Secure is great. It's the RNG garbage that is Seize that needs to disappear if anything.

Can someone please explain precisely what this "RNG garbage" on Seize is?

[Mawlzy]

Shatter got the new map and it was perfect, then they kept modifying the rules to the point where pvp’ing in the mode actively hurts your chances of winning.

The new additional actions only make it worse

It was certainly perfect for the strategy you employ. That also tends to make it unenjoyable for people outside your premade.

I wonder if a dev watched your stream, noticed the Shatter map you like created one-sided matches, and this prompted the subsequent changes?