I was reminded last night that Goldrush was also a popular map in ET, but the “TE” version with the Tank stopping on the bridge. SD have now modified LB to do the same, EV stops on the bridge, turns, and blows out the HQ doors.
However LB remains a very poor substitute for GR.
Where LB could learn from ET on this is opening up a route that allows the attacking team to get behind the defence and come up the street leading down to first barrier on the first stage. It’d be risky because they’d likely run into newly spawned defenders, but the payoff is they get in behind the defence. At the moment defence can hold the street corner (with a Sniper usually) and camp the EV and it doesn’t really matter which way attack goes, they always end up in the same place with defenders waiting, which = meat-grinder.
Similarly I’d make it so “something” around the 1st barrier area could be captured by defence to push attack back to EV starting point (their 2nd spawn), which attack could re-capture to regain their usual 3rd spawn. To make that work, and make blowing the barrier in the first place more interesting, there would need to be a long route attack could take to get behind the barrier (some route from 1st spawn area to the road that goes down past 3rd barrier to HQ). Currently, they attack the barrier from one side only, which = meat-grinder again.
And on the last stage the doc run should be much longer than it currently is, perhaps put the container somewhere up the hill (perhaps the building just past where 3rd barrier was), and move defender spawn somewhere up that hill also (but back in the buildings some where) so they can intercept once the data core has been taken. If there was a route that could take you back past 1st barrier, back to 1st spawn, down the hill to 3rd barrier, it’d give attack a very long, and fairly safe route to carry the docs, but at the cost of defence almost certainly waiting for them at the delivery point. You’d then get some good too and fro game play without making it yet another meat-grinder stage.
Again, compare LB with Goldrush and it becomes obvious what’s missing. No long route to get behind the other team, at any stage, no capture-able spawn to push the other team back a spawn point, no real doc run element with any chance of defence recovering the data core once it’s been taken. These kind of changes should be fairly simple (as a non-coder / non-mapper that is of course easy for me to say but I can’t believe it’s that difficult), and they’d go an awful long way to making the game much more dynamic, and much less mindless run from A to B, die and repeat.
