Balanced? Somewhat.
Map dependent? Yes. Especially for tactics. How do you counter a barrel heading towards you? Make a base at a one-way area, place a few potato mines, and if they're heading your direction, drop a wall to make them park over the minefield. Boom!
Enjoyable? From my experience, no. Too long of a match, typical repetitive experience of 3 against 7, and players almost always went to the same exact spots in certain maps.
Frankly, I should have split the mystery portal discussion in the Rux thread into its own topic.
This portal was a lot more fun on Thursday. I find it good to get into these portal events early before players have begun to work out how to exploit the mode and characters to their advantage.
The portal wasn't so bad this week. I will say tactics make a very big difference in team performance. (Standard run and gun is almost useless in this portal.) As usual the SBMM created a lot of near empty lobbies. Some games were as low as 3 v. 2. Obviously that lead to very, very long games which got annoying very quick. Basically it was fun as long as there was a decent size lobby.
Also, for some reason I kept being put with very low level players even though I am 5455. Some lobbies I cut through like butter, those weren't really fun because it felt like I was making a lot of players unhappy. (Nobody likes just dieing over and over.) Something is wrong when I am getting 28 vanquish streaks in a 50 point game and nobody else in the lobby comes close. Makes me wonder what exactly they are basing my skill on. (if it didn't help with bosses I would say drop it entirely.)
It's a decent one. Pirates won slightly more often in my time in the portal but not by a large amount. The drone swarms at the beginning of the matches were amusing, there were potato mines EVERYWHERE, and I enjoyed it greatly.
My favorite is still Rando's Revenge in the portal but this was a good one.
A lot of drone and bird fly early in the game and they're racing for 1st strike, so they fly high to middle of the map and target the first player they see.
But I fly mine to the corner of the map and fly it very low to avoid radar, sniper and ground to air missile, and find out who still on their remote control and deliver the bomb with high success rate. If somehow didn't deliver the kill, finish it off while they still in shock and confused.
The game fun when the lobby is full and a lot of newbie players but when players start leaving and only left good players, it starts become intense since we become a real (sneaky) sniper and don't want to reveal their position. It becomes tick tack toe game and can go on for very long time.
Overall it's a good sniper match.
After playing this event throughout the weekend, I'm left questioning whether or not SBMM was in play. It seemed to me not. I was quite often put into lobbies with only low level players, and not once put into a crappy lobby with only a few other high rank players.
One thing I consistently noticed with the portal events is that the least experienced players are the ones I see most frequently on Thursday and part of Fri, but by Saturday and Sunday nights, all of the high level players have jumped in to collect their rainbow stars. Thursday is easy pickings and Sunday is a rough ride.
Play in the morning is easy since a lot of newbies so they tend to expose themselves in the open field (easy target).
but playing at night is hard since those newbies are sleeping and left few adult players with high experience/high-rank player who playing seriously and won't give an easy kill. They really play hide and seek, just like a real sniper does.
I almost pull one trick: I sneak to pirates spawning site where they mostly fly their bird, then surround them with mines, then shoot them so they step on it, but unfortunately they didn't step on it...dang, otherwise I will share the confetti video here.
I was going to get a pretty funny screenshot last night when I spawned in as a pirate and found around six pirates standing around examining their maps. But while I was lining up the shot, two of them came out of their drones and the scene didn't have the same humor.
I had the same idea as you, but I didn't have much success trying to sneak around maps to find all the droning enemies.
Perhaps SBMM wasn't in effect. That would explain how I got into so many lobbies that I clearly outranked.(Still feels mean to stay in a lobby I can dominate like that.)
Pretty early on I started targeting droning enemies by sneaking around. Worked out pretty good for me unless there was an enemy campground which was a whole different challenge. In particular Time Park seemed to be the most frequent map to have enemy bases. Once a team got strong control over one of the areas or the center it was quite hard to wrestle it away. However, this lead to some of my favorite plays of the weekend. A handful times I would sneak around back and slip into their base then start wiping the enemy out. In a few cases I managed to wipe out the entire camp leaving the area open for my team to occupy. Made me feel like Hawkeye or Iron Man. (Bet you can't guess where I'll be this weekend 🙂) Again, the portal was very fun as long as the lobby had more than 2-3 people on a team. If SBMM wasn't in effect I wonder why teams were so small? (Once or twice I would just assume its a small lobby, but it happened a lot for me and they took forever to get more players.)
