To begin, I am going to talk about my main problem with power collection and then give you my idea for a re-work and then finish with why that would work.
Power Collection has some major problems at it's core and the first one for me being the pace of the gameplay. Bleeding Edge by design should be a more fast paced game with a strong sense of team-play to guide you to victory, combat is one of the main draws to playing the game with the 'brawler' tag being heavily advertised and pushed in the gameplay but in PC (POWER COLLECTION) team-fights are sparse and a lot of the game is just walking around beating up power cells. Obviously you do meet but that's only at delivery points and that stage is short meaning that after you win a fight and deliver it's back to beating up power cannisters and the slow loop continues. Zone Control works so well because your team is constantly kept on their toes, forced to make game changing decisions like "shall we defend" or "do we push A and risk losing B", It makes the fights fun and makes things so much more intense and unfortunately that level of decision making just isn't there with PC. I've already explained the loop that it sets so how does that get fixed?
Lets put Aquaducts (the map) in our minds, imagine it with points ABC and I'm going to use that map to say how PC should be re-worked.
- Four big cannisters should spawn where objective B currently is and they should drop Five power cells on destruction,
- Point C is renamed Point B
- Only one Point can be active at a time. If one team is severely losing then both Points open for ONE round,
- Collection lasts 3:00 Minutes, when all Cells have been picked up it ends,
- Delivery lasts 3:00 Minutes, when all Cells which are being held are delivered the phase ends,
- After delivery phase, both teams have 20 seconds to rush back to the spawn point of the cannisters,
- If anyone dies right after delivery phase ends then they have a 5 second respawn,
- If anyone dies after collection then it's a 5 second respawn
Why would this work?
It would work because team fights are encouraged at every stage of the match and it brings in that important decision making I mentioned earlier, you would decide whether to give up the cells and wait at the delivery point or whether to challenge them at the cells but risk losing and giving them the upper hand; You could come up with some yourself, the possibilities are endless. Fights would happen all the time at every phase and it would bring that same level of intensity to PC that there is in Zone Control, and I believe it would become more fun to play, delivering power cells is already nail-biting so these changes would make things a whole new level of competitive.
Thanks for Reading!