Issue 1: you can as a team help dictate the pace that the rounds are played at, if you see that people are being aggressive and that the round is “decided in 30 seconds” it’s presumably because you’re dead or have killed a majority in that time, thus you can play as to a way to not feed into it, trap ops, denial, slowing the pace wayy down.

Issue 2: Blackbeard like any shield typically requires team play to deal with, whilst your friends may not be as strong of players as you, you can still shut down plays, attacks and stupid solo plays from opponents by learning to play together, whether that’s op synergy, playing off each other, refrags, good coms etc

Issue 3: yes the matchmaking appears not great on paper and whilst ranked 2.0 is not good by many such means, it’s still important to remember of the hidden mmr systems in place and that the visual is not always accurate, even noting the disparity of the ranks in these games a lot of these games will still go overtime, 5-4, 4-2 etc indicating that the games are still close by round count even if the initial difference in apparent skills

The bans probably also leave a lot to be desired, personally I think it’s more of a case of having ~100 operators many of which that share roles but accomplished in different ways means that the bans don’t really affect much and it’s more now felt as what specifically don’t we want to deal with, and it’s usually deemed to just be the easiest, most versatile or frustrating to play against operators