Anyone any idea how to improve the situation?

Zero-K breeds bad players by enabling stupid shit in TAW all day. At this point, I don't have any mild solutions better than purging the community. I hope tomorrow I can think more calmly about it. Today I stopped playing ZK and revisited other games because palladium didn't get going and TAW is cancer.

The early exits (-282 and -304) shouldn't count; players failing to join or dropping minute 1 is a different problem entirely.

For the others, there mostly wasn't a massive difference in the amount of backlining going on although some players were frontlining ineffectively (mostly Dirtbag, Puppy and/or Skuttle); if a large team loses a game off of the decision of one extra Red Dwarf-rank player to go gunships, it's probably a symptom of broader coordination issues or getting outplayed more generally.

The one glaring exception was the 3-player Singularity Reactor rush in -292, where one of the frontline players was also lagging/crashing during the opening.

The residual complaint, I think, comes down to the anti-synergy between one particular two-stack that kept going on katastrophe's team later in the sequence.

This is not a trail, I do not think we need to worry about the level of documentation related to an issue that we know exists and has been a long term underlying problem in the game. I do think we need to expand our understanding of additional problems that contribute to this issue as a whole and start working on more than just a solution to the potential backliner problem. I am suggesting we should expand the scope of things that are contributing to the health conditions of Zk as a whole and not fixate exclusively on this issue.

https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425264 - this seemed fine for frontliners? You had one backliner. (trollbot backlined)
https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425279 - you had three backliners, so 4v5 frontliners. (ruru, trollbot backlined, vxd air)
https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425282 - early exit
https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425292 - two people rushing singus and then a nuke at the back (trollbot and imbombu). A third (ruru) backlining. Opposing team also had three backliners (824654 with army at back and fusions, psaniac on air, chonky with GS).
https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425292 - trollbot backlines flooding dirtbags to the front while slowly building singu. Ruru backlines as air. Ibombu makes units this time. Chonky backlines with GS. Opposing team has two backliners making this 6v7 frontline.
https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/2425304 - You instant resigned.

Okay so basically some players are mostly doing the same thing every game. But with players this consistent their elo is based on them playing the way they do, which means teams are balanced around them playing this way too. I didn't feel these games were unwinnable.

To be clear, I empathise. We can acknowledge that the way some players play is frustrating while also realising we can still play around it or avoid it. The players you're consistently struggling to play with are chonky, ruru, trollbot, I_bomb_u. If teams are small and there's a critical mass of these players, maybe avoid? This is especially the case in small teams where they're required to hold a front to not autolose.

As for playing around it, I found that I struggle a lot less when I settle short of the 50% mark on the map and wait for my team to catch up. I play positions where I feel comfortable 1v2 or 1v3 because I know I'll have to pick up some slack. These players usually contribute eventually if you give them the space.

quote: If teams are small and there's a critical mass of these players, maybe avoid?

quote: Now, yes, sure you can say the viable alternative is too not play the game. But I do not think not engaging with the problem will solve anything. So, any ideas about what could be done?

As a personal experience I also feel that some people's (repeated) play style that leads to nothing, make me not enjoy the games and it determines me to ocasionally stop playing for that day.

I think this is mostly a social problem altough I find it very hard to put myself in the place of people doing that. I have seen funny, imaginative, although very toxic trolls, but for me that is not the issue. What I perceived as complete lack of interaction with team, map or situation is the issue. I can't understand why don't those people play bot/chicken games - what do they miss in those? Do they want / know that their play style upsets others? Do they get that much joy from ocasionlly winning 1 in 10 games, by luck? Is it a language barrier? What else could it be? Please share if you play like that, or if you talked with someone that plays like that...

Note: based on my statistics there are more people (around 50%) more hours spent playing bots and chickens that casual taw, so lots of people do enjoy playing by themselves, is not that uncommon.