I may have to concede that Zones is indeed awful. I played last night and despite all the terrible losing streaks in all modes, this may have been the worst. Shattered back to the ok line once and STILL did not manage to climb back up and out after the rotation. I was rotating through a ton of weapons, none of them worked, because any time I faced one enemy I was in firing range of 2-4 enemies. Part of it is the maps. My team were good killers, they had tons of kills, often more than me but half that of the enemy team, but what they weren't was good survivors. And they were even worse inkers. In many matches the entire map up to near our spawn was enemy ink, and the enemy was effectively positioned at all exits. How did this happen? Because my team would race THROUGH the enemy ink to go brawl. I would get few kills because I would spend the match painting the base and closing entrance routes....with a charger....and my team would endlessly SJ to me to go hop THROUGH the enemy ink back into the battle arena. In many cases we did not claim the zone once. At all.
Similar things happened in TC after, but that was at least redeemable. SZ was NOT redeemable.
Has anyone noticed a correlation that when Salmon Run ins running match balance in ranked is really really awful? Like your wins are all easy and your losses are all easy (regardless of which end you end up on?) I wonder if there's a gutting of the ranked player base when Salmon is running and it's causing trouble.