u/lostpasts

It's not that it's competitively and mechanically broken - being a virtually guaranteed kill, while seemingly having the ability to pull you around corners, and through time and space. As awful as that is.

It's the fact that it can also trivially pull Cashout stations into massively hard to steal places. Which is not just absurdly overpowered in combination with its combat abilities. But worst of all, it makes the game boring. By completely nullifying a lot of the game's interesting design choices.

Against any decent team, for every defence they will pull the station into a wide open area, and secure high points all around it. Forget all the cool and interesting locations Embark put in the game. Suspended Structures? Moving Platforms? On top of an elevator? Deep inside an office complex? On the roof of a church?

Nah. Forget that. EVERY defence is the exact same now. Every defence is essentially the ruined Cathedral in Monaco. You know - the one everyone hates. And as a result, every battle is a poke fest.

Forget melee. Forget shotguns. Forget the flamethrower. Half the game's weapon variety is rendered as pointless as tactical variety becomes. And if some miracle you do get a steal chance, they can just drag the station away from you too. It has S-tier stall power as well!

Other stuff has been (deservedly) vaulted for far, far less than this. The Stun Gun was nowhere near as horrible. But the biggest sin is how utterly stagnant it makes the game. How one ability strips away so much of the game's dynamism.

Embark know this, of course. It almost single-handedly ruined Point Break until they had to literally program in invisible barriers around vaults to stop it. Yet in Cashout - the supposedly premier mode - this exact same game-wrecking mechanic is basically the hard meta now. And has been for multiple seasons. And they just don't care.

Please, please, please take a goddamn axe to this garbage in S11. It's the most anti-fun thing in the entire game.

I know it's contentious in Point Break, but many people like it there too. However, everyone I know loathes it in TDM. My team simply quits now whenever it comes up. We're done with it.

It's not in rotation in Cashout or Power Shift, because most people recognise it would be awful in those modes. And I believe putting it into TDM hasn't worked any better. Peace Centre is tailored to and exclusive to a single mode already. I really don't see it as a tragedy for Starlight Hollow to follow that model, and stay exclusive to the mode it was made for.

So after 10 weeks of play, how are people finding it in Team Deathmatch? Would you support it being restricted to Point Break only?

It's every single match. I report every time, and nothing is done. Nobody cares. There's zero consequences.

This game used to have such impeccable vibes. Now it's just CoD 2.0.

I refuse to believe there's nothing Embark can do about racist and douchebag tags. Account bans would shore this up very quickly.

Here's the values for this week's new Risk & Reward event for TDM:

$150

• M26 Matter
• Riot Shield
• Cerberus
• Pike
• Spear
• MGL32
• SA1216

$130

• LH1
• 93R
• Dagger
• Dual Blades
• BFR Titan
• KS-23
• Sledgehammer

$115

• SH1900
• Model 1887
• Famas
• Chimera-XB
• CB-01 Repeater
• CL-40
• Flamethrower
• .50 Akimbo

$100

• V95
• Recurve Bow
• Sword
• R.357
• M60
• Lewis Gun
• Shak-50
• M134 Minigun

$75

• XP-54
• SR-84
• M11
• ARN-220
• Throwing Knives
• AKM
• FCAR
• P90

(Gadget, specialisation, quick melee, and environment kills still just award the regular $100)

How about once you get to Diamond and Ruby, you are no longer queued in Cashout, but Ranked puts you in Head 2 Head instead?

Queue times will be much faster, as you're only matching two teams, not eight, so you can get closer RS matchmaking at that narrow summit, and you'll also remove the sharks from the general population. Which hopefully helps that recover and thrive, and gives both groups faster and fairer matches.

And benefit 2 - it also gives the top players access again to a premium, legacy mode that they were upset was removed, without diluting the playerbase with an another queue. Which, in addition, should carry extra clout for streamers and pros to compete in due to its exclusivity. Maybe giving the arenas a cool makeover too? And of course, they can always still play unranked Cashout when they want the full tournament experience anyway.

But if you get to Diamond or Ruby, you've proved you can "Reach The Finals", so why not just have nothing but the final round? The first two rounds are usually pretty much just a formality for you at that point anyway (unless you get griefed out, which everyone hates, and this avoids too).

There's a small precedent as well, as in S3 Emeralds had their own exclusive matchmaking pool. And the arenas had a makeover too for them (yellow to red). So it's just following this concept, but reducing lobby sizes to match the smaller population too. Which has also kinda been done before, with the drop from 16 teams to 8.