Alex Klontzas

You don't get ahead by contesting early, you can get ahead by your opponent taking forts and getting themselves frozen out. Unless you get hard siege cheese and no anti-siege, how does your push threaten core until 16-20? You don't have talent leads behind them

On paper just looks like it's made to make clown fiesta games better, because people inherently value structures/objectives even if they have no inherent value. They are used to get ahead in XP economy, forts are legit better to have down now for maximizing XP differential.

Once you start considering objectives/structures as a vehicle for winning game (killing the core) it gets pretty obvious that until very late game they are not worth going for because it sets you behind if opponent manages their freeze

If they freeze it means they are spending resources to keep that lane in one spot, why aren't you taking XP somewhere else on the map? Why are you letting them do that for free? Here is another example: Volskaya. You get Triglav, take 2 towers + kills and maybe a fort, now 1/2

you're 11 - 9 with Heroic advantage. Now you control the items and camps, take more towers and get even further ahead so you're 13/10 for next objective + items, other team doesn't want to fight, you get another Triglav, kill more structures and get maintain 3+ levels forever 2/2

With regards to freezing: if you commit 1 hero per lane, that hero just needs to sit there AFK in soak range letting catas slowly cause wave imbalance. Opponent can't just "get XP elsewhere" because you're planning to gut XP from structures.

All 3 fort front walls would be 750XP? That's less than two minion waves at minute 0. After that, where are you actually getting your XP from, if you end up getting frozen opponent is in control of almost all the XP on the map.

On Volskaya, under new patch (or current tbh), first of all would be impressive to generate 2 level lead on first protector if your opponent isn't randomly forteiting soak, given how little XP is now available in structures, and how little kill XP is early game.