Quote Originally Posted by Scintilla View Post
I'd agree it's definitely the most straightforward option to overcome premades when playing as part of a random team but, sadly, this doesn't quite go hand in hand with this:


Because of the heavy objective-driven approach of most random teams, trying to get a team to turn away from objectives and take the golden opportunity to pincer the premade's alliance, can be difficult in itself. Not impossible - some teams are more flexible than others and some will just play 'follow the leader' if you run in that direction. However, this isn't often the case (perhaps this differs between DCs, I'm not sure). As much as you may call to pincer them, often there will be a conflicting call to stay at the objective ('no stay and defend. Let them fight') and, generally, players will choose the latter. Even if you were fortunate enough to get them heading in the direction of the premade for a pincer attack, it would only take a node to spawn elsewhere nearby and most of your team will likely change course and head directly for that instead.
It seems likely (although unproven) that on all three maps, optimal strategy is to build BH first, then use that to make capturing objectives easier. Indeed when I point out that you don't get any bonus points for capturing Mid on Onsal, I often get shut down by the assertion our team is there to build BH.

The obvious weakness in this response is that it presupposes simply being on Mid magically creates BH. It doesn't. The team it strongly favors is the one with a DRK+ premade. My guess is that if you find yourself on a random team, particularly one without a couple of DRKs, the best path to winning may be to hope RNG runs in your favor and focus heavily on objectives. Certainly worth trying an early flanking attack, partly to see if the other non-premade alliance is on the same page, but with the premade having an expectation of winning 70%+ of the time on average, it may be the best way of increasing your non-premade team's odds above 15% is to cap nodes and hope for favorable spawns.

In that sense, I guess we can plant this horrible situation at the feet of the devs, insofar as this seems inevitable in any objective-based mode in which premades have the intrinsic win-rate they all smugly report. But my emphasis has always been on changes that prevent the outcome of a match being largely determined by team composition before the "ENGAGE" sign pops.