The pushmap system will not change (though we will continually work to improve it). There are very specific and important reasons why it has become so prevalent in our work.
1) It focuses the combat. Part of building FS was the goal to get the epic battleground feel. We wanted you to be embroiled in a huge conflict of armies, not single one-or-two man skirmishes. We geared our entire gamebalance to make use of lots of people all fighting together, not for rambos to run about killing one another and backcapping flags. Creating an epic battlefield environment is not exactly easy when you only have an average of 16 players a side. As such, the "push map" system was developed so that the teams would inevitably would be forced to clash with one another head-on. at no time will any team have to defend more than two or three flags. This is compared to vanilla and various other mods where you end up with 6-7 flags to defend and you have to spread out everyone so that there is always 2 or 3 at any flag to stop it being taken. This brings us on to point 2...
2) We wanted to eliminate the need to have people sitting at the rear flags doing sod-all. In many vanilla games you'd enevitably have to have someone defend your rear flags from capture or else ninja players would just capture your back lines. While in reality that would make sense, it has to be realised that in reality a) you have a massive amount more people to do such menial things and b) this is a game. We play games to have fun and get away from reality. No one wants to sit at a rear flag and guard it whilst everyone else on his team is off having fun. It's tedious, boring, and frankly not why we play these games. If we wanted to sit in tedious boredum we could just turn our computers off and look at a blank screen.
3) One-way pushes allow us to create maps where there are clear defenders and clear attackers. Some of our maps, as you've noticed, are one-way. That means that once a flag is taken the former defenders cannot retake that flag. This allows us to create a different style of gameplay to the straight tug-o-war push-map that is standard. The key to these maps is time. The attacking team, in every case, only has so much time in which to capture enough of the enemy flags to stop the bleeding. On Endor they have to capture every flag even in order to win. This mixes up the game and provides different objectives for each map, rather than creating the same map a dozen times with just different scenery. To that end look for arrows on the maps. Arrows will indicate if a flag is one-way or not.
4) Speederbikes anyone? (thankyou Ty)
and finally...
5) All of us were sick with straight conquest. The constant flag-hopping, spend 80% of the time moving from flag to flag rather than fighting, ninja encouraging, battlefield-killing, skirmish creating tedium that was BF2 conquest is no more. Instead the maps now guide and assist in creating the epic atmosphere of the mod. Here you become part of a larger force. Quite naturally you'll find you're moving with others on your team to accomplish common goals. This mod works very hard to create a natural teamwork environment so that you aren't forced to yourself.
Occasionally you'll find someone who's turned off by the fact that they alone can't be the super one-man army that wins the game, but take into account that for every one-man-army that kicked bottom in vanilla or other games there are 15 more people on the team previously that didn't do it. This is, after all, a multiplayer game. As such, we've attempted to make sure that a lot the ability to accomplish things rests on how well your team performs, not how well one or two people can out-twitch or ninja flag-hop the enemy. We've done our best to create and shape the world so that the team naturally comes together and functions without the enormous backend of player organization (which is near impossible on pickup games); push maps are just one aspect of this goal.
Fear the Woodzilla
Closed Alpha Test & Deth..
