Quote Originally Posted by Moonlite View Post
Doesn't it mean that the duty finder was stacking premades all into Maelstrom. Even the duty finder is plotting to help Maelstrom win more. So if premades were freelanced a long time ago, was it working properly even then?
No, it had been broken since 3.5 when they added the ability to go as Freelancer.

Essentially, premades were placed in each GC based on priority. Mael > Adders > Flames. If Mael were full of people with freelancer turned off, they went down the priority list to Adders and so forth. This in turn caused multiple premades to matched together.

The JP playerbase caught on to this very quickly after 5.18 dropped. They even had a poll on Twitter to see how random it really was (or wasn’t, in this case)