• Overly defense-oriented game modes disproportionately reward teams which rush to objectives and then camp at them over teams with mobility. It's hardly possible to find a gap in the armor when the defending team has very little incentive to move. There are a few specific aspects of this overarching theme that deserve their own mention:
• Lack of sincere secondary objectives reduces the relevant number of points required to be contested for a victory to a very small number
• Many objectives in Skirmish, for example, are typically placed so close together that the amount of ground that you need to hold to hold multiple objectives is further reduced. Many city maps' ownership revolves around a tiny smattering of choke points.
• Horridly defender-oriented map design. If an objective isn't in a tiny room with a small number of immutable entry points, it's in the midst of a pack of defenders' cover/emplacements surrounded by great gulfs of empty space where only a tree could fail to figure out where attacks are coming from.
• Utterly unreliable spawning, particularly for attackers. This is a gigantic, gaping hole that makes meaningful attacks on contested objectives an uphill battle. Dust has been leaning on Uplinks for 3 years even though they're garbage as a main spawning mechanic. In practice both CRU's and Uplinks are easily camped (this is particularly egregious for CRU's) because of a total lack of spawn protection. The cloaking mechanic has never been enough considering that all the available spawning mechanics dump the aspiring spawner in pinpoint accurate locations to be killed off while they're still disoriented from coming out of a black screen. Without a way to avoid crossing the "fields of death" on all of Dust's maps, players inevitably lose interest in pushing.
• Power disparity and creep in equipment. The most recent round of tiericide is a great start, but I doubt it's strong enough to give more than a taste of the kind of game improvements we can see from figuring out proper power balance. Dust's asset cost system gives an incentive for a winning team to put on better gear (as defenders, their risk of losing it goes down), while the losing team is pushed to move into cheaper gear (for fear that their lack of defensive footing will lead to a higher likelihood of losing it). The gear gap has been such that it was quite literally impossible to have fun or remotely fair fights as someone in, for instance, STD gear versus someone in PRO. Without 25m SP for all the right bells ans whistles it's still impossible. As soon as the match starts tipping one way or another the power gap on both teams widens, and without relevantly powerful support from teammates even players who want to use better gear can't possibly justify it.
• Clone counts which punish attackers from attempting to apply non-flipping pressure to objectives, which is absurd. In pub matches you're going to have a relatively uncoordinated team, and any time you make an unsuccessful push on an objective you move towards being ******. Clone counts are definitely stilted to favor defending players.

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