[2022] Zoos, walls and T2 trench spam. The Border Base mechanic need a serious review.

There is some important context to communicate about Border Bases.

In the first few years of Foxhole and World Conquest, a problem that became known as "border lockdown" emerged. It would cause region borders to be closed off by players and heavily defended. This became a desired strategy (understandably) from players but it had some negative effects.

First, it would cause major issues with player queues. During peak hours, "border lockdown" would essentially subtract regions from the frontline conflict (e.g. bringing the frontline from 7 to 5 or even 4 regions). This problem wasn't easily visible by players and would manifest itself in sudden complaints during peak hours when there would be several hundred players in queue.

Second, it would cause very unpleasant border fighting scenarios. Players that were in the world would have to spawn in a friendly region, border travel over the locked down border, die, and then travel back. That was how front line battles in these locked down areas would look. The fighting came down to who could camp the border and kill players travelling in the best. This among many other issues caused us to try various other solutions (for those who remember): Forts, Frontier Bases, etc. However, none of them were consistently reliable and came with their own set of problems.

The Border Bases now more or less guarantee a minimum supported frontline population where players can spawn in and fight. They also minimize (but not eliminate) the awful border fighting scenario I mentioned about by intentionally pushing the fighting away from the border and further into the region so the gameplay can behave more like a conventional frontline (instead the "magical" border wall being used as an exploitable strategy).

So any discourse/criticism on this subject is welcome, but please keep that context in mind. Border Bases are far from an ideal solution, but they have minimized the issues above for quite some time. We may be running into new edge cases now that need to be looked at but can't be understated much of a negative impact those historical issues had on the project and care needs to be taken to not reintroduce them into the game. An enormous amount of development energy has been spent fighting this problem over the years.

That's a good point. The timer is intentionally absent and the random locations are meant to discourage trying to "game" the system. Clearly (and again understandably) efforts are still being made to do that.