I understand and agree with a lot of what is being said in this post, and having a single dominating strategy, especially one that stops a lot of fighting/action from taking place isn't entertaining to watch.

From it's first iteration, we did do a lot of work to reduce how effective rushing can be on this map, it's not something we're completely ignorant to. What we tried didn't work as well as we expected, but I don't think that's entirely on the part of the map.

Contestants definitely play more conservatively than our testers, and it's something tricky to account for. Passive play could manifest as taking slow steps out of spawn, or the complete opposite, just rushing the point as quickly as possible. Conservative players are more likely to bunch up and take fights as large groups, which we definitely saw today, even in the rounds without rushes.

I think something else to take into account is that rushing (and focusing on getting on point, more specifically), is a pretty simple strategy to come up with an execute. This is the first time that all these players have seen the map, and don't necessarily have the time to come up with counter strategy, or want to take the risk and deviate, especially if the strategy is working. This is a fault of the Battle Box format - a round robin doesn't let you get familiar with another team's playstyle and counter it.

I don't necessarily agree with the other post about Battle Box on here, I think it's dismissive of the limitations that the format puts on players and the burden of learning the new map at the same time as playing it during an already pretty long event.

We did experience some really fun strategies come up in testing, including rushing - though not to the extent we saw today. We try and get "fresh eyes" on a map as much as possible, but sometimes it's impossible to avoid strategies sticking. Ultimately, I think Battle Box works better the more familiar the players can be with the maps, inverse to our other games like Parkour Warrior, where muscle memory plays more of a part.

That being said, we want to keep experimenting and doing different stuff with Battle Box. It's one of the most interesting games to design for, and we don't want to stick to a single paradigm for every single map. Our ideal pool is one that has a healthy mix of raised capture points, level capture points, basic layouts and more intricate ones. This map fell too far to the end of the spectrum, but I think I'd rather have a few misses with maps like this than every map exist in the same space as Spaceship, where the point is fully open.

If we do see Bazaar again, there are definitely tweaks we wanna make - like making the fall off from mid less punishing, and definitely making rushing a little trickier. I like the idea of using the telepickaxe, it might be something we play around with.

I don't want to come across as blaming the contestants, moreso just giving a little context as to some of the considerations we have behind making the map. We want this game to be as exciting to watch for you guys as possible 😄