There are two contradictory phenomenons at play.
If player1 is the highest rated and the other players gang on them until elimination, then why should player1 participate in FFAs at all? At best, player1 is immediately stuck in a situation where they have to defend while any other player builds up passively, and then that other player gets so far ahead no amount of skill can overcome the advantage.
However, if nobody attacks the highest rated player and everybody plays sensibly, the game lasts for hours until someone gets bored and makes a move. At that point, whichever player wins the encounter gets ganged up on by the rest and the winner is just the more patient player. That's boring.
That being said, nobody playing ffa ever wants any map other than ramparts gen (or any other variation of ramparts) where it is super easy to see what's going on as one adv radar will give you vision on the entire land portion of the map and there is only one small path leading to neighbors, so all raiding strategies and expanding covertly are nullified. We're left with silo plays every game.
Ramparts sucks. Ganging up on a particular player is harder to do on wider, more open maps with asymmetrical spawns.
