Sad state of affairs.

Heres the thing though. The friendly DD did not speed forward to get early spots, in fact the friendly DD turned away from cap. If the enemy DD *did* speed forward, your friendly BBs would be spotted but unable to return fire. Their only recourse here is to reverse to avoid being spotted.

I play a lot of DD, and while you will always have a reversing BB or two, you can minimize how often that happens. First, ping the cap that you plan to contest, and then move quickly and deliberately in that direction. Understand that your BBs and cruisers will not move up if they think they will not have spotting, and players in the know tend to follow a DDs lead.

Im not a reverse in a battleship type of player. But I saw there, when the DD turned away from cap I would have gone full stop and been muttering “wth is this guy doing? Guess I’ll wait and see where he goes.”