A few days ago (maybe a week or so) there was a coordinated cavern meeting between TR and VS on Emerald. I was on VS' side and you know what? It was awesome. We had a blast and battled for hours on end, I think the whole thing lasted upwards of 3 hours and spanned 2 caverns (after one was closed we moved to another one). So you can't really say cavern battles suck, because that cavern battle was one of the greatest times I've had in PS. Rather, you should say the
lack of cavern battles suck, because that's how it is most of the time.
There really doesn't seem to be anything fundamentally wrong with the caverns, if you can manage to get a battle started (once we got to < 100+ positions available and the CR5s were requesting help, the people just kept coming, don't think we ever pop locked the cavern but we had it pretty full) then it's a blast. I never had the desire to leave the caverns once the battle got started, and I doubt many other people did either. Even with it's problems (difficult to navigate and unfamiliar map and building layouts) I found I was having a great time. Heck, I even started to get the hang of the bases and ziplines, I actually started making sense of the map. It reminded me of one other time since I started playing PS...hmm...I wonder, what was it? Oh yes! When I first started playing!
. I remember getting lost in the intricasies of the base layouts, and losing my way over the terrain when I was just starting the game. Heck, it took me a good month or so just to get used to the basic base designs.
The problem with CC lies in the fact that there's never anyone down there. And because there's never anyone down there to fight, nobody ever goes down there. It's a self-reinforcing problem that won't be solved unless people are given incentive to go down there. I honestly don't know what it would take to get people down there (other than getting people down there, but that's a contradiction), but maybe this new cavern lock incentive will be just what we need. If/When cavern battles finally start happening on a regular basis, I think people will enjoy them enough to finally not regret purchasing CC. I know that if I had just one or two more repeats of that epic cave battle, I'd be able to justify my purchase of CC.