Alex Klontzas

If you are 3+ levels down you have down more than just lose one objective. It takes significant mistakes for this to happen in a competitive game (the kind of: lets restart the scrim, this should never happen in a real game, useless to practice for)

What do you expect will happen if a team starts contesting objectives early, takes fort, loses their wave control because catas and gets frozen out of XP? They already get no structure XP basically and then also lose minion XP because of catas.

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

I think the important thing is what you mentioned, "on paper" is all you have to go on so it's fair to question it. Ultimately though, if there is ever a situation where taking a Fort is not the right choice, we will react to that immediately.