This is something that I still can’t get. There was this guy that was high platinum. He was a friend of a friend. I had to stop playing with the team because our losses were mostly caused by him. I played one game with only him, and I was horrified at the way he played. He was worse than every Silver/Gold player I have ever seen. He was definitely worse than me. And yet he was high plat.
Another player was apparently a Master playing on a Gold smurf. I was tanking several games, and mostly had to stop him from suiciding (which didn’t always work) And when I went to soak the lane he was in while he was doing a camp, he couldn’t understand why I was in lane, getting the XP he would have missed. On the last game,we were on Tomb of the Spider Queen, with 62 gems out of 65, carrying about 21 gems, and he called to push the enemy core when we could have just turned in AND gotten the boss for a guaranteed win. (We died at the core, with him dying first ,front lining as Azmodan, which he believes is a super good hero)
How do players get to high ranks when they play so poorly? I’ve seen it several times and I can’t understand it.
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Legacy MMR from old HL and TL, or playing in premades. Ensures their silver butts never fall down from plat or diamond no matter how many years they play.
I speak from experience, my win rate was around 60% for a long time. My profile will show my highest rank as Diamond 1 in 2018. But I achieved that by wiggling my way into dia/master parties daily.
My solo WR in Storm League has hovered around 45-48% so far and my rank varies from gold to plat, I’ve been as low as Silver 1. There is no way in hell I can beat legit diamond players without my friends playing in a party with me.
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Boosting because how SL works. Seeding from old TL, where he got boosted because how old TL worked.
That’s basically it.
If we had solo queue only, a player like that wouldn’t get past silver, maybe would even be stuck in bronze.
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But how does the system keep you there when you play solo?
It doesn’t, I’ve dropped a full two leagues after almost everyone I knew stopped playing HotS and can’t find a party anymore. So much for “forced 50% winrate” lol. I currently have 46% in this season. I’d love 50% 
I’ve even been briefly Silver 1 in January, though that stint fortunately only lasted a day.
People who still stay at ranks they don’t deserve to play in, are playing in premades and still find teams to play in.
It is amazing how high you can get up the ladder with 4 competent allies even as a potato.
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It’s a conspiracy. If you’re losing, then a Blizzard employee must be out to get you.
Most master player in TL was silvers in HL so there you have it. You properly got some players that actually dont belong in your league.
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Part of the issue is that some people are better at micro than macro. A good ktz can be dumb at macro and still carry games with amazing combos.
I have the opposite problem where the only hero im consistently good with is rehgar/johanna. If i play them i can control the game but if they get picked banned and im playing my third best tank ill suddenly act like a gold player.
Finally communication is a HUGE ISSUE. Bronze-plat everyone thinks that they’re good and dont need advice so they get tunnel vision with their own shotcalling. Coring might not have been the wrong call but if 1-2 people back out or everyone is low health it becomes a bad call pretty quickly.
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How did you get to your rank, when believing a boss + gems = guaranteed win?
Theres not enough details in post for you to come after him like that. In general 5 man with boss and exposed core is a guranteed win.
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The enemy only had one (damaged) keep left (mid), with the objective and the boss, their core would have fallen even if they had wiped us.
At the start of every season does the system allow you to queue while partied with people if everyone you’re queued with hasn’t done their placement matches? I know that placed and unplaced players can’t queue together but I’ve never tried it the other way.
As far as I know you can. But placements have very little impact on your rank.
Well I mean a dev said MMR is based off of wins and losses only and since your MMR is your rank, wouldn’t it put you in higher leagues if you win? Or does it use past seasons to calculate your rank as well?
I’m not trying to be annoying I’m just trying to make sense of all this personally. I have so many questions about MMR, rank and things like that and I’ve heard different things from different people and I feel like I get it, then someone says something else and I get all confused again.
It’s because there are so much bad players, that the enemy team also get them, and then your 4 man just carries/plays better than their 4 man. Sometimes your 4 man even carries 4 v 5.
Or these players just don’t play enough games to actually lose a lot and drop ranks.
At this point the best solution would be delete SL, make a solo queue ranked mode only and reset everyone’s mmr. That is the only solution for ranked.
Maybe they played a lot of ranked games.
In general not dying is good. Chu8 died 7 times on Valla one silver (or such) match. They still won that match. Chu8 died on average 3 times (or some such low number) during silver (and also on average with Valla). Was he doing poorly that match? No. His enemies were just good at screwing him, which was unlucky.
So not dying is good. So stay in spawn.
Low mmr caused by bad stats basicly means you have better players with you. This is why you have it as a smurf so easy and how many bad players get boosted
I’ve seen this a lot too. Not just platinum players but some diamonds as well. I think it’s either their MMR from the past keeping them higher than they should be, or there’s probably an element of boosting going on with large stacks carrying people.
First off, your analysis of why they are bad could be wrong. Not saying that you are, but from the limited information you give, and a fair amount of your post history making me scratch my head, it’s a possibility.
Secondly, players are not fixed in their performance, especially as it pertains to playing heroes they haven’t mastered. If you see someone perform badly in one moment, it doesn’t mean they have consistently been bad in all their games. I’ve seen this with GMs all the time in QM or in ranked where they try “meta” heroes that are supposedly good or new heroes in QM, but they themselves haven’t mastered yet. They can be awful.
I think one of the biggest problems though, is that how lower ranked games incentivizes certain behaviors to do the least amount of work for the most effect to win, which often amounts to mindless soaking, which is one of the least skilled things in the game. It’s so much easier to just push a lane all day to kill idiot minions than it is to respond to a lane that is being pushed against and fight against a human being. The skill requirements are completely misaligned.
This creates this bottleneck in around platinum where players have actually done decent just by ignoring players, which when you think about it is TERRIBLE. However, once players do have the skill to respond to these players, they just can’t climb anymore, and so you’re left with this person that knows how to soak and not much else at a decently “above average” rank.
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