First of all, as you can probably tell from my signature, I'm a big Ambush player. Just wanna add my take on the whole thing.
@tedeski said in I didn't play Ambush much in Ins2, but...:
I saw a thread about it recently and thought I should give it another go, since my first time trying it I was a complete idiot and brand new to Insurgency (bought it on a sale like a year or two ago). Holy crap... why isn't it the competitive game mode?
At one point back in the days Mikee actually talked about adding a Comp Ambush mode into Ins2014. I think it would be beast, personally.
It's so much more inviting for tactical play than Firefight. It allows for tactical play on par with CS:GO, where clever use of utility and extensive map knowledge can make or break every round. If you learn set-nades (smokes for key choke points, frags for strong defensible locations, pop-flashes etc.), you can dominate a map against people who don't have as much knowledge. There are times when rushing can catch your opponents off-guard, and other times taking it slow and using your utility pays off. It makes sense to set up crossfires. It's just a tactically rounded and tactically balanced game mode (might need some minor tweaks for a true competitive mode, obviously).
Yeah, this is why I pretty much only played Ambush PvP-wise. It's fucking metal.
Firefight, in contrast, feels like a CoD or Battlefield game mode. You sprint around trying to flick-shot everyone, or you camp in a corner and wait for the push. In the Ins2 competitive scene, it basically became team deathmatch. Everyone ignored the objectives, except to nade it if someone touched it or if a couple teammates died. Then, and ONLY then, would you complete a cap. That's literally the depth of the strategy. There's no reason for tactical setups or pushes; it's just a fragfest and teamwork is almost non-existent most of the time. There's some nuance with pre-nades and flashes etc., but that's only useful on a few maps. Almost nobody used set nades for pushing a site, because doing so was a waste of utility when a round might last through 5 or 6 captures.
I don't think Firefight is a bad mode, per se. I just don't think it should be a Competitve gamemode.
But every time I watch or play Firefight, it feels like TDM for almost every round and I feel like Sandstorm could be so much more than that.
Firefight is TDM with objective respawns, so in theory if you just wipe the enemy team the objectives are useless.
P.S. Don't crucify me, please.
Nah, you good lol.
@eyeofhorus said in I didn't play Ambush much in Ins2, but...:
Not going to crucify you, but I am going to bring up some counter-arguments because I am of the opposite opinion.
First off, I feel that Ambush is just as much of a team deathmatch as Firefight is. Let’s look at the objective of the players. The objective of the non-vip attackers is to guard the vip. The best way to do that is to kill the enemy, therefore their objective is to kill the enemy. The objective of the defenders is to kill the vip, but he has guards so you have to kill the guards, and therefore their objective is to kill the enemy. The only player whose objective isn’t inherently “kill the enemy” is the vip. In Firefight, every player has the objective kill the enemy AND capture an objective. This leads to Firefight being a little more complex in my opinion. The first objective in competitive Firefight is to gain map control, there’s no reason to capture a point if no one on your team is dead because you’ll just waste a potential respawn.
Ambush can be somewhat TDM-y, I'll have to admit. Once you've got teams full of pros, the meta becomes:
- Both teams rush for positions and tries to out-flank the enemy.
- VIP ideally just hides somewhere.
- If after 2-3 minutes both teams still have players left, the remaining players actually escort the VIP.
In many rounds, the "Escort The VIP" never actually winds up happening.
That being said, Ambush could definitely be incorporated into Sandstorm in a way where the term "Ambush" actually applies. With something like random spawning areas (possible with the VIP's defending team spawning together while the attacking team spawns spread out around the map and have to hunt the enemy team) and maybe random extraction points so every round is different (and the game ultimately isn't predictable) I think it would be a lot better.
That being said, I would argue that there's a lot more tactical decisions you can make in Ambush compared to Firefight. You could end up with the VIP as the last guy alive and he can pull a massive clutch and reach the extraction point, which still gives your team a point. Or, on the opposite end, the VIP can get gunned ten seconds in by running directly into live fire straight out of spawn. Even with map knowledge and only a few routes, matches can end up becoming really tense and unpredictable.
5v5 ambush wouldn’t be enjoyable I think. All the attackers would attack one objective probably defended by 2 of 3 defenders. Then the attackers kill the defenders and the vip touches the objective before the other defenders even have time to rotate. It would be like CSGO if all you had to do was touch the bombsite with the bomb to win. Of course, sometimes the defenders will win the 2/3v5 but probably not often. So then what? Make it 8v8? The defenders will just camp, only dying to nades or prefires, there wouldn’t be any real firefights.
I think it could work. It would just have to be set up differently than what you're suggesting.
For example, there's only one open extraction point in Ins2014 until the total player count gets to above 12 or 16 people in the server (I can't remember). With random spawns and extractions, I think it's doable, but 5v5 probably isn't enough players, honestly.
I’m not saying Firefight is a great competitive mode. It was just the mode that worked the best in Ins: source. I’m pretty sure both ambush and elimination were play tested as competitive modes and just didn’t work. The victory for attackers in those modes is just too instantaneous I think. Firefight is more balanced just because both teams have the same objectives. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see a competitive attack/defend mode in Sandstorm, I just don’t think Ambush (at least the way it currently works in source) is the right mode.
I can definitely agree that Ins2014 Ambush wouldn't work at all for competitive play lmao. I think it might work better than Firefight though, at least for now. Maybe atm it's because AKs are pretty inferior to M4s, though. I have no clue. Firefight objectives just don't seem to have a purpose in Competitve play.
This all does come from a guy who really doesn't like Firefight, though. The respawns I think are actually counter-intuitive.