Forum Discussion

Jerjus's avatar
Jerjus
New Novice
1 year ago

Business idea: Conquest without ticket bleed

...until one team controls all of the flags, which should trigger either a massive ticket bleed or a short timer to the round's end. This would obviously make everything better. If it's not obvious then you are welcome to read what follows.

Disclaimer: I already posted this rant to a certain subspace of the internet with upvotes and downvotes. It got downvoted without a comment. I wonder if anyone even read it. I am so done with that place that I took the post down from there. Someone though, bewilderingly, seems to have shared it before I had pulled it down, which I didn't exactly realize was the case at the time. All things considered I will post it here, because I don't know of a better place to share rather passionate, but not quite easy-to-digest due to their text form, concepts and visions on Battlefield such as this.

Core

Recently I had a bit of time on my hands and played Battlefield. And I realized that the Conquest gamemode, while addictive (I have spent a ton time in it in the past), is not very fun at all, especially on larger maps. Not very suspenseful, not very satisfying to win and very frustrating to lose. Maybe I got tired of it over the course of the years, but if so then probably I am not the only one who did. Hence I propose this sacrilege: suspend the ticket bleed until all flags are captured by one of the teams, and make it massively cascading once that occurs, like a knockout blow likely to end the round.

    "Why?", you may ask. How is it that keeping on average three flags, out of five, for instance, captured in a match means that you "conquered" the enemy and therefore win? It's quite ridiculous that this decides the victor. The range of tactics you may use in standard Conquest is rather shallow, it's either pushing with the whole team at a chokepoint or capturing a back flag in a small group on linear maps, otherwise running around in a circle of flags enclosing the map on the larger and less linear maps while praying that your team doesn't all go to the few central flags. Especially this second scenario is quite abhorrent and not that uncommon.

    So I want to turn Conquest into Team Deathmatch? No! Firstly, there would be an incentive to lock out the map and capture all the flags, achieving "conquest" in the full sense of the word and winning the round promptly. Conversely, an incentive to hold a defense line far higher than the last flag not to risk losing it.

Details

To further incentivize taking control of the flags, it should be easier to fight the more flags your team has captured. So only on flags (and the uncap) you should be able to build resupply stations for ammunition and health or vehicles, as well as build and/or gain control over stationary weapons. Some (powerful, not only transport) vehicles should spawn into the map on certain flags, such as tanks, or something like the UAV from BC2. It should be possible to steal them, but repairing stolen vehicles should be impossible (unless maybe you used a similarly stolen repair tool of the enemy forces, which would be very tricky). Some flags should enable the team controlling them to call in support like artillery or smoke barrages, this should not be too powerful though. Spawning on squadmates could be toned down to increase the importance of flags as spawn points.

    In case of Conquest Assault (underrated gamemode) the attacking team would have a set timer going down before they capture the first flag, and lose if it goes down to zero.

Additionally, flag capturing rules could be tweaked. It should not speed up much with the amount of players on the flag increasing, however spawning on flags being contested should quickly become unavailable as the contest progresses (this is relative to what is the apparent average in recent Battlefields, apart from 2042 because I don't play that).

    A soft-core version of this idea is to make the ticket bleed rate a very non-linear function of the fraction of captured flags, shaped like a logit function for instance. I don't really know what it has looked like in the games to date to be honest though, I believe it was quite linear.

Discussion

I don't know how this would play out exactly, but I am almost certain that such set of rules would make this mode more suspenseful and dynamic, something that it lacks terribly compared to many: Rush, Breakthrough, even Frontlines, apart from only Team Deathmatch and Domination. The standard ticket bleed forces you to carry out every move at full speed, if you care about the result that is. Eventually you get used to that speed and it becomes boring at best, frustrating at worst, which is when you are losing, which is about half the time after all. Unless you are playing 2042 that is, because then it's frustrating 100% of the time, so I don't have high hopes for this ever being addressed. I know Conquest is a classic, a staple of the series but I feel it needs a change. This would make the rules very clear cut, the numbers resulting at the end of the round a simpler function of the state that the battlefield was in. Share your thoughts please.

discussion

2 Replies

  • Bone-dadii's avatar
    Bone-dadii
    Seasoned Newcomer
    1 year ago

    Im assuming your talking about battlefield 4? firstly, what your suggesting is essentially COD domination. however, I think that would work on a small scale conquest when there's only 3 or 4 points to capture, because even on standard conquest on the large scale, the matches usually only take about 45 min to an hour to complete, which gives people with different playstyles(recon, engineer, etc) ample time to rack up kills and XP or complete challenges. plus you have to consider, depending on the map, battlefield 4 matches are infamous for ending up with one side getting pushed back into they're spawn and camped/farmed, and shortening the games like you say would give the camped side no chance to get out again. so it would have to be an entirely separate game mode, with specific maps on the small scale. to summarize so while your suggestion isnt a bad one, it would end up being a copy paste from COD, as well as pretty restricted from what battlefield is and is known for.

  • Jerjus's avatar
    Jerjus
    New Novice
    1 year ago

          Thanks for the reply. I believe either I don't understand modes in CoD, or you misunderstood my words somewhat, and I believe I skipped over defining some concepts. By ticket bleed I mean when the team holding less flags has their scoring altered systematically in the worsening direction relative to the other team. So in other words not the balance of kills, but the other thing decinding the score. As far as I know, and I just re-checked, in CoD domination the scoring is decided only by ticket bleed and it does engage smoothly, as in not all flags need to be captured for it to start ticking.

          So what I propose is almost the polar opposite, to decide the scoring mostly by the balance of kills. Flags would provide spawn points, unlike in domination modes, and battle aids such as vehicles. You are right that it would either need to be a separate mode or be tested out in a environment like CTE, conquest is too established to fiddle with it otherwise. I didn't specifically mean BF4, that is actually one game that I didn't play for a while. Generally though I find the conquest experience not to differ too much between games, the rules are almost the same and between various Battlefields on most maps I feel like I have had enough of the mode. The spawn traps occuring quite frequently is actually good, if chances for those were too slim the mode would play out as an extremely large Team Deathmatch -- which seems to be how many players approach Conquest anyways, which makes the mode frustrating for parts of the team caring about the outcome. Trying to get out of a spawn trap while the score is ticking against you, knowing that you have next to no chances to even that score out later on is another frustration that I am trying to iron out with this concept. Somehow I find losing a round of Rush acceptable, whereas losing a round of Conquest either closely or bigly I find far harder to accept. Conversely winning a round of Rush is extatic, whereas winning a round of Conquest is a bit "meh". I got into Battlefield through the excellent Bad Company 2 and think very highly of the Rush experience that had been offered there. I think that bringing such knife's edge dynamics as I described to the Conquest mode would make it play a bit more like Rush or Operations/Breakthrough and help with the frustrating parts. The playerbase would need to relearn playing Conquest somewhat though.

          I do not however believe that this experience would be restricted to working well on small maps or be like CoD, rather I see it as being as Battlefield as Battlefield has ever been Battlefield.

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