[ Announcement ] Temporary changes to the PvP missions format on PC 2026

Discussion
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Temporary changes to the PvP missions format on PC

Hello, survivors!

Sometimes you can face a number of issues during battles in the Wasteland. We’re not even talking about the skills or superior firepower of opponents, after all, you can overcome these challenges by progressing in the game. Rather, we mean more nuanced problems that we would like to help solve, including:

  • The feeling of insufficient personal contribution to each battle (unless, of course, you’re the one player who single-handedly defeated the whole enemy team). Some players might feel that they could be a more effective and valuable participant of a battle and have their actions bear more significant results;
  • Poor teamwork in standard battles, lack of coordination, teammates driving away alone or in pairs in different directions;
  • the feeling of chaos: players dogpiling each other, receiving random damage only because of accidentally driving into the center of the action, and not because of someone was actually targeting you;
  • Bumping into each other in smaller locations and narrow paths, having difficulty navigating the points of interest because of bumping into others;
  • And finally, you must admit to the wish to sometimes kick the AI players off the team, since it’s impossible to communicate with them even if you try.

Taking all of the above into account, we have an important announcement for the PC players: today, on February 2, at about 08:00 GMT, we will make some experimental changes to the format of mission battles (in standard PvP and “Patrol”) from “8x8” to “6x6”. The new format of the battles will be active until February 9.

We hope that the change will help reduce the issues we mentioned and place more importance on each player in a battle.

It’s very important to note that the change in format does not affect the minimum required number of players in a team. As before, each team will have at least 4 players, while the maximum possible number of AI players will be reduced from 4 to 2.

During the week, as well as right after the experimental change ends, we will be waiting for your feedback in this special thread. We would like to ask you to only use this thread for giving your constructive feedback or suggestions so that we can get all of your messages without missing anything.

Thank you all in advance for participating, and see you in battles!

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This is probably by far the worst thing they could do, playing this 6v6 for multiple hours today has been the least fun I have had in this game since I was in an active clan doing CC battles every week. It just brings a whole lot of new downsides, and I for one did not spot any of the supposed upsides of 6v6 at all (specifics instead of general opinion down below):

I haven’t seen any of the supposed upsides 6v6 brings that people always seem to mention when trying to sell it (less waiting for matches, less bots, possible crossplay, more balanced team PS distribution) and all I noticed were negatives, lots and lots of negatives, while the same problems still persisted (bots in every 2-3 match, wait time not any faster, PS per team still all over the place) but on top of the usual problems, there were lots that the 6v6 format brought.

The biggest one of these is how even if the matches are done with faster, they feel much more boring and empty now. I did not have any normal fun I usually can have. Support builds (and not just straight-up support like 10 trombones etc nonsense) are completely dead in this 6v6 format, and build/weapon diversity is completely thrown out of the window. Sure it’s not the greatest to begin with but this was on a whole new level. No longer can 2-3 random-builds hope to do anything against a singular let alone 2 metabuilds. Artillery and area denial weapons are completely dead. And so are many other weapons, honestly switching into 6v6 means they have to start the weapons balancing progress from scratch one again for everything except the usual meta options everyone plays

IF you hate how matches are usually all players moving as a big singular cluster, usually driving in a circle around the edges o the map, well now it’s worse in 6v6 format, where back in 8v8 you and possibly 2 other players could break the status quo and rush the enemy and take out a few, now that kind of gameplay is completely gone, you go solo into any direction it’s automatic death, the group of 4-6 players breaks up at all, it gets steamrolled by the enemy team staying in group. So the gameplay loop just got more repetitive and streamlined with no room for any creativity.

Did you think group play vs non-groups was unfair? Well it just got even worse, creating an even larger balance gap between grouped up players and full randos, or smaller groups vs bigger groups.

Fusion builds and even complimenting builds (imagine full cryo team of three, or one player with photon cab+big damage weapon and no heating playing together with someone else providing the heating effect) are also completely dead, in 6v format they take away too much from the overall team, kinda like how a support or artillery build, while having 1-2 in an 8v8 was somewhat helpful, now costs way too much in the 6v6 format and kinda instantly guarantees a loss in most cases.

Did you hate drone builds / builds that seem like a waste of a player? Do people not running the cookie cut effective meta and daring to experiment a little cause you to get booty bothered? Well hold on to your nutt sacks because now they are going to instantly doom your entire match even more frequently than in 8v8.

Honestly all of these things why they’re trying the 6v6 format (that list up there) feel even more noticeable and constant with less players. Teamwork is even more poorer, insufficient personal contribution feels even less and it’s now leaning even more towards one player getting all the points with metatrash, chaos and bumping now feels even worse because players have to stay in an even more tight knit group to even stand a chance, battles are sometimes decided on which team breaks the cluster formation first, and you still have lots of ai players, and even when you have none, it still feel worse than having 6v6 + 2 ai players on each team. They reduce nothing and just bring a whole lot more of issues.

Honestly by initial feels this is a might just quit the game tier change if they go through with it, only time will tell if the feelings stay the same but playing 6v6 this entire morning has been the least fun I have had in this game for years.

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We’ve had 6v6 on console for quite a while now, and I have mixed feelings about it.

Personally, I also prefer the chaos of 8v8, and if I were in charge of Crossout, I would rather 20v20 on much bigger maps (but we all know that is unlikely to happen).
But while the vibe of bigger teams is more fun for me, I did not like how bot-heavy 8v8 matches were, and I’ve come to appreciate that many matches now have no bots at all now. It makes matches more challenging, but I’m someone who enjoys that.

It’s honestly hard for me to say what’s more important to me: less bots/shorter queue times, or bigger teams/more chaos.

At the end of the day, the thing that will most likely lead me to quitting the game will be when queue times get too long. I am just not willing to spend more time waiting than playing.
Yes, it would be great if that could be dealt with by having a larger playerbase, but I also don’t think that’s realistic at this point in the lifecycle of Crossout. The format of the game has a big appeal for some of us, but it’s a relatively small percentage of people that feel that way, and the game is old enough now that most people who were going to fall in love with it have probably at least heard of it by now.

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Ick…

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I love farming bots, makes me feel better. Win rate definitely went down to at least a coin flip after the change, everything was more sweaty than usual.

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Eww the temporary thread is on Reddit :nauseated_face: :face_vomiting:

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Not really thrilled with this so far. I played 7 PVE (Patrol) missions in 6v6, at the 10k+ ps level. My take on it is this: you can’t afford to make a mistake; there are no margins for error. I can see where if you’re a weaker player, or have less powerful stuff, or you’re at the bottom of the team’s PS range, hoping the team can carry you probably won’t cut it anymore. You’re forced to get involved sooner than later because one person hanging back will be a heavier handicap to the rest of the team. I won’t speculate on lower-ps matches where sealclubbers thrive, but I doubt there’ll be anything to celebrate there.

I’d rather it stay at 8v8 (even better if it was 10v10). I didn’t notice any affect on queue times, but the matches did seem shorter.

I’m starting to wonder if there’s any unstated reasons for this “experiment”. Could it be that it lightens the load on the servers? With all the new wizard weapons (and whatever else is planned for the future), the servers must be working harder, and maybe the devs are concerned about impending degradation on the horizon, or increased lag as time marches on? Just speculating…

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Welp, I was already feeling disappointed in the Dev team after last year. Seems it’s finally time to stop supporting Crossout.

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Yep, 24 Energy of Turrets. Just need to buy 8 more Spears plus the four I own for Melee challenges will be 12 spears swapped for 4 Turrets. Upgrade to Chameleon Mark 2. Cloak, ram, die, repeat. Almost a guarantee to get the minimum 40 points. No strategy required, just cloak, ram, and die. The 24 Energy Special Weapons will be equal power score, The upgrade cloak will raise my power score slightly.

Another one will be fast, cloaked, frontal shotguns. Ram, fire, kill or be killed but get your 40 points.
6 cloaked shotgunners versus 6 cloaked shotgunners, what fun!

Also, I guess I am on RU tonight, but when is the stupid player base going to change tactics and go get a capture point! Get the GD capture point or fight to the death at the base, all together, all 6 go straight to enemy base, avoid the enemy and get the damn 150 points! What the hell good is a Doppler when idiots run into a 4v6 fight like they can’t see the map?

Also, it took 28 battles to get 20 patches, 8 more than my average!

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In every match I have at one point big lag, it ends with me most of the times hiting wall or missing the enemy (I use melee weapons, almost the only thing I have fun with in this game), sometimes its a fun ending. If I am not allowed mistakes in a battle, than I think I will do something else (another game). I play the game to relax and have fun. Not to get stressed by reading chat about how I ruined somebody game by making mistakes that I cant do anything about.