Boss Turf Takeover; A Little Bit Broken

Not sure if my more extensive thoughts on this weekly challenge merit a separate thread of not since there's one already discussing the topic but I'll leave them here anyway since my focus is a little different.

I'll lead off by stating that I like the idea of Boss Turf Takeover (BTT) and I can see what they were going for and I think they were a little off their target the first time they brought this out but on this second outing it's even more off target and I'd like to talk a bit about why I think this to be the case.

I can see their intentions; spawn a Boss Chest in the middle of the battle for three out of every four Turf Takeover objectives and give each side a chance to spawn a Boss to assist their team. Obviously they wanted the idea of having a Boss enter the battle to be something to motivate players and add a bit of challenge. They tied the spawning of the chest to the capture state of each objective; at 1/3 completion the chest would spawn some distance from the main objective area and either team could then attempt to open it. Any spawned Boss would be tied to that portion of the map only and couldn't proceed past an invisible boundary.

One the first outing Turf Takeover was 12v12 and we hadn't yet seen the TTK changes so battles for each objective were fierce and it was not uncommon for the process of capturing an objective to go into overtime as each team battled it out in a chaotic frenzy of activity. Introducing the Boss Chest changed this dynamic a bit once players figured out that the spawn location never changed so it wasn't unusual for either team to lose 3 or 4 players to either camping at the chest spawn or trying to open, or prevent the other team from opening, a spawned chest.

Considering that TT was 12v12 the loss of these other players from the main objective battle seldom resulted in anything more than a mild handicap. The mechanic sort of missed the intended goal in that the Boss tended to be spawned late in the capture but since overtime was a frequent occurrence this wasn't necessarily as bad as it could be but a worse problem was that the Boss itself was pretty easily vanquished by the opposing team so the threat of the Boss itself wasn't all that you would initially expect but this could have been fixed in the future by making the Boss a bit tankier or by allowing them to migrate successfully to the next objective area instead of despawning them at the boundary.

The important takeaway here is that most of the frustration involved in this weekly challenge was just getting that first chest opened. Otherwise you were just playing Turf Takeover as normal.

Now, between that first BTT challenge and this one we had several changes occur to Turf Takeover; overall TTK was adjusted, stationary objectives were made easier to capture and team sizes were reduced to 8v8. These changes, to put it mildly, disappointed many dedicated TT players, promoted an environment which made it easy for one team to completely dominate the other, removed a lot of the fun and caused some to stop playing the mode regularly altogether.

You would think that BTT, having been designed for the previous iteration of Turf Takeover, would have had the mechanics play tested again before rolling it out this second time.

That pretty clearly didn't happen.

Turf Takeover has issues since the balancing changes and the presence of the Boss Chest aggravates these issues in many games where the objective is a stationary point; objectives where you push a payload are largely unaffected.

Teams can still see an average of 3 or 4 players go off to camp at the chest spawn location. In a 12v12 match this could cause a handicap for one team if only the one team lost players. In an 8v8 match the damage is much more severe.

If the defending team loses up to half of it's players to the chest spawn during a stationary objective and the attackers ignore it we wind with a situation where the remaining, actively defending, players can be quickly crushed and while this is something which can regularly occur in the 8v8 version of Turf Takeover it has an unforeseen effect on the Boss Chest itself. The Boss Chest will spawn at the 1/3 captured marker as always, but with the objectives made easier to capture we now have a situation where the objective can be completely captured in less time than it takes for the newly spawned Boss Chest to be opened. This means that it is highly unlikely to see a Defending Boss spawned on a stationary objective and any Attacking Boss which is spawned will spawn at a time when it's essentially useless.

If the attacking team loses players to camping at the chest spawn while the defenders do not we wind up with a situation where the attackers may be completely unable to reach the 1/3 capture completion point necessary for the Boss Chest to spawn in the first place, meaning that those camping at the spawn site are doing so in vain as the timer counts down to game over.

This situation adds new difficulties for people trying to completely their second Challenge to vanquish a Boss since this is only realistically possible on maps with objectives which involve pushing a payload since these objectives are the only ones which would allow a Boss to spawn at a point during the battle where it would be possible to fight it for the amount of time necessary to vanquish it.

This means that in addition to the frustration involved with completing the weekly challenges we also have the frustrations brought to Turf Takeover by the changes to team size, capture time and TTK as well as the fact that these also seem to negatively impact the Boss Chest mechanic which effect the ability to complete first two weekly challenges.

The only positive I can see is that with 8v8 spawning the Boss now presents more of the threat that I believe the developers originally wanted it to present.

Am I the only one to observe the way these mechanics clashed? Is there any way to fix this weekly challenge so that the mechanics don't clash or do you think we'll just be stuck with a somewhat broken mode in the rotation?