How does storm point keep making the cut?

"I shouldn't HAVE to..." is a slippery slope. There are a lot of things I never had to do in the early years of this game that I'd prefer not to have to do now. But here we are. You work with what you have.

"the map design is so god awful and physically doesn't fit with the small 60 player count" Strictly eye of the beholder here. I've got so used to the newer, larger maps that now I feel like I'm choking when I play Olympus. But then again, I like a good mid-range poke and that's very easy to get going on Storm Point. Or it WAS easy to get going on Storm Point before they took the only viable weapon in the entire game and put it in a care package. But I digress.

I can only speak for myself here, but in my experience you can a) memorize the path of the drop ship and b) watch people jump, and then you pretty much know where everyone is and where they're going to go. And if you listen for the circle signals then you pretty much know when they're going as well. I have to admit that this level of predictability exists more in lower skill lobbies than it does in ranked diamond matches, but there's still some truth to it as you go up the ladder. I've always used this knowledge to avoid enemies until the circle makes them unavoidable, but there's no reason why you couldn't use it for the exact opposite purpose. If I can NOT find them consistently until I have second place then I bet you could use it consistently to find fights at virtually any point in the match. They may well be multi-squad pile ups, but beggars can't choose.