My initial reaction to this game when playing with randoms really remains the same, if you're playing alone or even with just 1-2 other friends, the bad matchmaking and unfair games will make it extremely unfun.
However me and 4 friends have been playing 4-5 man squads with sometimes just 1 random and we're having more fun with it, not just because we can all coordinate with mics, but we're winning more games and having more close matches, in fact we're playing ranked now and won our first 6 games in a row.
For those who bought the cheaper cut down pack that requires more grinding, or even for those who just wants lots of renown, one tactic you can use right now is to go into the options and select preferences for terrorist hunt, disable all the maps except the "Presidential Plane" map, disable all game modes except protect the hostage. Now go to terrorist hunt and set terrorist hunt to "lone wolf" which means you play singleplayer offline, and set the difficulty to realistic. Now you can alt tab the game and leaving it running in the background, you will be put on defence on the first round and the realistic bots will storm the plane quite fast and kill you, you're awarded 26 renown for participating in the match and everything in between restarting the match is automatic, which means it will keep playing in a loop slowly earning you renown. You can get something like 5-6k overnight with the 6x slower renown gain of the cheap version of the game. I've basically unlocked most of the operators now.
I've also noticed that a lot of the operators are really bad or next to useless, especially a lot of the defenders, there's really not a huge number of good defenders, there certainly are more attackers with useful special abilities. You want to look out for these operators especially:
- Glaz the sniper is my new personal fave, he has what is essentially a rail gun you can use both as a sniper rifle and in CQB. If you're used to any kind of hit scan or bolt action style one shot weapons then take this. Easily one of the most imba guns.
- Fuze with breach grenades is great for clearing bomb rooms and getting easy kills (don't use him on hostage rooms!)
- Kapkan and his new (no longer rubbish) trip mines are good if you rush from spawn as defenders and lay them on outer perimeter doors, again these are easy kills.
- Jager is super fast and can lay his active defence drones down and then use his speed to get to another part of the map. Best for "roaming" which allows you to get behind attackers and slaughter them.
- Blackbeard is incredibly OP, the shield covers his head so put him in situations where only his head is visible (prone face forward, head sticking over cover or through a window, or leaning around corners) and he's next to invincible.
- Frost these welcome mat traps are some of the best traps in the game, deadly behind windows and behind deployable shields in doorways.
So many of the other operators are next to useless, many of them have abilities which aren't helpful, can be easily countered or are completely redundant. I think one of the biggest things that has turned the tables with our games is the fact we left our games grinding to get renown and bought all the best operators.