MostExcellent
Hosted three outstanding plat games on a preset map/unknown enemy as ACA/PPR weapons build. Two games were on London against reapers and collectors, almost flawless mostly due to gigantic effort of a very good juggernaut who consolidated the defenses very well. IIRC, nobody was ever sync killed and all players were quite even in effort. Both games took barely over 20 minutes and again IIRC were full extractions. Against sync kills, instead of usual scorew..g with the mooks, it helps a lot to dark channel the banshees when they spawn. This stops them and makes them siting ducks in the middle of London for the whole team.
The third game was set to Krondor/U and it took awhile to fill the lobby to assemble a team of bravehearts. Mostly, people just left after seeing the setting. Anyhow, it were cerberus and it went pretty well for a Krondor game. There was am excellent AIU with adas rifle (I gues that works on EDI bot as well as anything else) and two other players tried to contribute as much as they could by doing objectives and using consumables. And again, nobody was sync killed, well, maybe on extraction wave. There was another ACA with collector assault rifle, who I think posted here about why he was kicked. Actually, he was reasonable. Did not kill much but did the objectives, revived, and was sticking around. The game took awhile, about 27+ minutes but went very smoothly.
General observation number one is that it is better to have no more than one infiltrator on the team. It helps to evenly spread the aggro. Well, it can be four infiltrators but then aggro is switched unpredictably. Observation number two is that quality of random games is oustanding if people are reasonable. I have had an absolute nightmarish plat and even gold games on Krondor with friends/BSNers, very good players, where everyone was dying left and right a dozen time per wave. I think, in the Krondor game I died only twice and was promtly revived each time. Same was true for other players in that game. So, my pug experience has been actually very nice and refresing.