Another frontline

[Cidel]

I see where you're coming from ThirdChild, I really do, and I agree with your list of reasons why people die/fail to score/throw matches/what-have-you. But like Geryth says, there are some reasons why the Maelstrom on primal dominates Shatter matches so far and they both correlate to different points people have brought up previously. I've never swapped GCs at any point in time and have the Amethyst Keel achievement so I have a pretty good understanding of the GC behaviors but...-

-Prior to actually posting this, I asked off-handedly in alliance chat on Mael why they thought we had a better success rate than the other teams. The immediate replies from several people were "bots" and apathetic freelancers. And I would agree on both counts. Bots are actually a large factor, especially on Flames. It is so bad for that particular GC on our datacenter that I daresay that it's pretty much a joke among everyone who has seen it (and I have during a handful of Freelance queues). There's no denying that Flame's abysmal winrate is attributed to their (justified) stigma of containing the most bots (even in 72-man).

The bigger issue I've been trying to point out is too many people are convinced they HAVE to turn off Freelancer and HAVE to be in one GC over another to win

The other reason I got was "freelancers who don't care." Apparently there's also the belief that if you're a freelancer on our datacenter, you're not there to win (or care if you don't). Someone guessed that at least 90% of people on Mael are probably native to the Maelstrom GC. One other person even chimed-in with "if you're Mael, why would you freelance?" Even though I agree that this is a flawed stigma, it's obviously a factor.

This is related to how the players on the other 2 GCs lose due to frequent questionable strategic moves, poor judgement and playstyles that cause them to lose leads (or even create bigger score gaps). Third, you pointed out many factors in the last page that are detriments to helping a team win, but your last point:

People lose because they think the problem lies with bots, GC affiliations, and premades, and fail to see all the things they're doing wrong, even in the absence of bots/premades.

-are actually the exact causes as to why people on a certain successful GC will not queue Freelancer when they know their best chances are on their own GC. That and they want to avoid the prevalent stigmas on one or both of the other teams that obviously have truth to them.

These ideas and presumptions back-up what Geryth said earlier, really-

Players that have a solid understanding of the game generally move to Maelstrom and they turn off freelance status, and they win most of the games.

As for people queuing as a group in premades; that is a whole different bag of worms and not a good indicator of any GC performance in most cases (unless of course, they lose). Premades are only relevant to the discussion if every team is running premades at once (which they aren't).