Another week of BF2042 Conquest. More games and more feedback. The more we are getting experience the more we get ideas how to improve. It’s still early stages and we don’t want to change the rules too much before we have a proper vote.

The rules are reaching the point where they could be put to a real test. We will soon announce a test cup. All the attending team get a vote in future council. The council members are casting their votes for the final rules.

Minor ticket tweak

Las week we lowered the ticket count 560 to 300. It was a major improvement on the gameplay and it changed the game phase substantially. Full 6 rounds of conquest was concluded in about an hour. While it was an improvement it also made one round a bit too short. One slip up in the start spawn and the whole round was done. 300 tickets was perhaps just a little too few. We have decided to tweak the ticket count to 350 to make rounds less brutal.

Targeting 350 tickets

With the new ticket count of 350 it give a team a change to come back even if there is a brief moment of full cap in early stages if the round. The new theoretical round times are

Flags controlled	1	2	3	4
Time to deplete all tickets	0:28:20	0:12:55	0:07:13	0:03:58

To be hones, the ticket count in Portal is not exact number of ticket. One can adjust the ticket count, but not in number of tickets but rather a percentage of original ticket count. By setting the ticket count to 50% it will be on standard map with 700 ticket 350. But for example Noshahr Canals have more ticket to start with so there will be more than 350 tickets in adjusted server.

How the ticket bleed works in BF2042

Ticket bleed means the automatic reduction of the tickets from the team controlling less flags. In every Battlefield the ticket bleed works a bit differently. In Battlefield 2042 the ticket bleed is not happening at all if both team control the same amount of tickets. When a team gains a flag majority the opposing team start to loose tickets every 5 seconds. The number of lost tickets depends on the number of flags the team with flag majority controls.

Example
The total number of flags on the Caspian Border is 5. In the BCL comp setting, 2 of those are “home sector flags” that are capped in the beginning of the round. When the round starts and both teams have captured their home sector they both control 1 flag and there is no ticket bleed. Once one team captures a second flag and the opposing team still have only 1 flag the team with 2 flags will start bleeding 2 tickets every 5 seconds from their opponent. Once the captures are balanced – both teams controls 2 flags the bleed stops.

The final flag, the 5th flag mastery will determine who starts bleeding. Once a team captures the 5th flag making the capture total to 3, their opponent starts to bleed 3 tickets every 5 seconds. If they manage to get a “full cap” capping all 3 open flags + their home flag the bleed would be 4 tickets every 5 seconds.

In addition to the bleed every kill reduces the opponents tickets by 1 capping capping a flag from the enemy instantly removes 10 tickets from the opponent!

Server settings guide

There has been some questions regarding the server setup and arranging teams on the server. To simplify the process and make the game start more fluent we have made a short introductory video about the server start process. Most of you probably already know the drill, but there are always newcomers who would need some guidance.

Test League

We are planning to have a test league soon™  We have not decided the specifics yet, but we are targeting a short league for teams to get familiar with the game mode and get more experience on the rules. We will announce shortly how it will be concluded.

 

Thank you community for actively testing the T8 Conquest setup. We have received lots of valuable feedback and teams really seem to like the Conquest setup!

We are trying to keep the rule changes at minimum to keep the experience consistent to all teams. We are gathering all the feedback and concerns for a community vote taking place later on. After the vote there will be the 1.0 version of the rules and we can start our first BCL leagues in BF 2042.

Changes for the T8 Conquest setup

After some testing and feedback from the teams we need to change some aspects of the rules to make the gameplay more fluent. The rules has been updated accordingly.

Tickets

As we are experimenting with the Portal we are learning how to take control of different factors in the game. Key factor in round time is the number of tickets. Several teams have indicated that the Flag capping is quite slow and the ticket count is too high – rounds are taking too long. Flag capture is something we can’t control, but the ticket count is adjustable.

Optimal setup would be if a full match of 6 rounds would be done in about an hour. We are far from that at the moment and it looks like one round takes about 20 – 25 minutes and adding to that some hassle with the teams joining or server crashing (yes that surprisingly happens too ;)) a full match can take several hours.

In the initial setup the ticket count was 560. We would need to half the time spent on one round that means that about half of the tickets would be sufficient. We are changing the ticket count to 300 for time being. I believe it makes the rounds more fast paced and those full caps so much more pailful. With this change we are aiming to reach around 10-15 minute rounds, what would be quite optimal!

WE have estimated the time to deplete all 300 tickets with different number of flags in your teams advantage (the number of flags your team has more than your opponent). 4 flag advantage would mean your opponent did’t capture even their home sector – it would be fast-track to looser town.

Flag Advantage	1	2	3	4
Time to deplete all tickets	0:24:10	0:10:50	0:05:50	0:02:55

These are just theoretical estimates and in real games these times will be something completely different, but in theory the round times are more tolerable. Of course even round can still take considerable amount of time.

Specialists

Specialists are at the same time valuable assets and headache for competitive gameplay. We have received several suggestions of how the specialist count limitations could/should be. There is no one right answer and the specialist count will be a topic in the community vote.

Many of the specialists have in addition to their gadget an ability that is always on – like the Casper’s near by enemy indicator. This tends to push players to pick a specialist with special abilities.

To avoid any one specialist type dominating the battlefield we would like to test a setup with some further limitations. Previously the rules were limiting only the specialist with a special gadget.

At the moment there are 10 specialists available. 2 of them were banned in BCL rules for their armour capabilities (Angel & Irish). It leaves 8 specialists available – that happens to be exactly the same number we have playing for a team. To even up the battlefield and simplify the rules we are testing limiting to 1 of each specialist. This means that the team is always presenting all the specialists available.

The Portal cannot limit the total number of any specialist in the team, but it can limit the number per squad and that will be limited to 1, but still it is team’s responsibility to see that no specialist is used by more than one team member.

Weapons

There is a meta already in the game. Some players has asked for banning some weapons, but at this point we are not banning any additional weapons. The weapon banning is going to be a topic in the rules vote later on. At the moment the weapons under investigation are:

• AC42
• MP9
• K30
• PKP-PB

Maps

We understand the maps are not optimal for competitive gameplay. Especially the original BF 2042 map Renewal is quite a challenge. All three maps in the current map pool are more or less unbalanced, that’s the reason it’s important to play the maps from both sides. We can always hope there would be a smaller game mode like Domination in the Portal in the future….

With the current state of the game this is the best we can achieve.  The current map pool is decided after studying the available maps and considering where we could have the most balanced experience based on a few factors

• Clearly separated areas for home sector
• Three flags for fighting relatively near to each other
• Distance from the home sector to the open flags should be tolerable

If you have an idea for a great map to be added to the pool please voice out and we’ll take a look.

Starting the match

We have tested different ways to arrange teams into server. It looks like the server is always filling new players to the side with less players in it. If both sides has the same number of payers next player (or party) will go the the opposite side of the last player joined. With this in mind we have some idea how the server starting is most effective.

At the moment the best practice to arrange both teams to right sides on the server:

1. Both teams creates two parties of four into the game.
2. The leader of a party in the team responsible creating the server creates the server with the code aan4g2, at that point the whole party is set to US side of the server. Please create an unique name i.e “BCL T8 [Your team tag] vs. [opposing team tag]”
3. The team who created the server informs their opponent that they can join with one party of four. The opponent party will go to RU side
4. The team who created the server can join with the other party of four ending up in the US side – the whole team is on the server
5. The team who created the server inform their opponent that the second party of four can join and they will fill the RU side.

This is the most effective way to fill the server.

Some important pointers:

• The team creating the server is always on US side and to make it possible to play maps from both sides both teams need to be responsible of creating the server once. Create the server, play all three maps and ask your opponent to create a new server where your team will join to play the RU side of all three maps.
• When searching the server your opponent has created
  • Ask for the exact name to search for
  • Make sure all team members has the Cross Play on
  • Remember to set the “Password ON” in the search
• When you find the server check the “Hosted By:” field under the server name. There is a bug in the search where the search sometimes shows wrong server with the searched name – make sure the “Hosted by:” is the player in opponents team who created the server” or you will end up in a wrong game!