<500 SR And Trying To Rank Up?

Competitive Discussion
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How long have you been playing?
How many seasons did it take you to get all the way down to sub 600 SR?
Did you find people consistently getting worse as you fell?
Was it easier to kill people as your SR dropped?

I did not observe anything except for an increase in likelihood that trolls and abusers were in my games as I sunk below 1000 SR. When I say trolls and abusers, I mean people that were verbally abusive, and clearly had thrown to get down this low in SR. I literally couldn’t go a single game below 1000 SR without seeing a person that clearly didn’t belong there. The only hope was that the smurf / troll / abusers were balanced on both teams and things seemed to at least play out like something that resembled a balanced match. In my experience before role queue, it was more obvious who was grouped, so the carrying was more apparent.

This is absolutely not true. There is not any significant difference between players within around 500 SR, especially not those that belong in those ranks. I base this on observations of getting bronze players with their gold buddy trying to “carry” them. The gold player isn’t better enough to make up for the person basically two tiers below them. You do not have to carry games to rise in SR. You just need to avoid being the reason that your team loses, and contribute more positively than you contribute negatively.

It’s completely normal in Bronze to waste ults. Both teams will be doing it… Sometimes a team will use 5 ults to win a single team fight, but that just creates an opportunity for the other team to take back. It is also very typical in bronze for people to throw ults into clearly lost fights. This is normal, it’s typical. You don’t have to be perfect in your ult usage to climb to silver. You just need to waste your ult less frequently than the others in Bronze. It’s the same with aim, usage of cover, grouping up, etc etc.

You absolutely will not look like a thrower compared to other people THAT BELONG in Bronze.

I’m sorry to ask this, but do you have something that makes it difficult to use the mouse, see the screen, or hear things in game? I cannot fathom someone spending 25 hours a week in <500 SR and staying there unless they want to be there. If you spend 25 hours per week for 4 years on Overwatch Competitive, then maybe it’s time to find a game that fits your talents better?

You literally just need to perform the basics of this game: Shoot the same stuff your team is shooting, be in the same general area as your team, and do the basic functions of your role to be high bronze.

No, never do this. If you actually want to improve, watch Jayne’s coaching videos.

This sounds very much like trolling.

Getting out of sub 1000 SR sucks because of the smurfs / trolls / abusers more than anything else. The main thing I did to get the hell out was to one-trick a highly survivable character such as Mei. Focusing on a single character and getting better with their abilities matters quite a bit. It’s also important to NOT think you have to carry your team. You are not what has to win the game all by yourself. You just need to do your role and die as infrequently as possible.

Differences, yes, because everyone is different, but within a +/- 250 SR band it’s all going to average out. Some games you will just click and frequently punish someone that is making mistakes you know how to take advantage of. The next game, you’ll have an opponent who knows how to make you pay for the mistakes you routinely make. There’s variation in a game. There’s also variation in the matchmaker. Sometimes you’re the highest SR person on your team, other times you’re the lowest SR person. Those games aren’t dramatically different. They are mostly determined by the chemistry of the team, how well they work together, and whether the heroes they are good at synergize well together.

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Yes, people actually can get to <500 SR without intentionally deranking. Once you get below ~700-800SR there’s really quite a lot of smurfs (inb4 ‘GM is only a tiny percentage blahblah…’: SILVER and above are smurfs at <1000SR, they don’t have to be from freaking GM!)

Just as ‘throwers don’t hurt your SR’ (if you’re not a thrower, 6 chances the enemy gets a thrower, only 5 chances your team does), smurfs who are trying do hurt your SR (if you’re not a smurf, 6 chances the enemy gets a smurf, only 5 chances your team does).

On top of that, you’re in a mix of trolls, throwers, drunk players, stoned players, under-12-years-old players … which makes it really, really hard not to tilt… and/or become one of the drunk/stoned players… or any rate, in some way let the insanity of the matches affect your own gameplay in one way or another.

Even if you manage to keep an even keel, it’s difficult to know whether or not you’re improving… everything is extremely chaotic, and people will endlessly spout off bad ideas … usually in an attempt to blame someone else, but also in a road-to-hell-is-paved-with-good-intentions way when they’ve been inspired by some youtube video to ‘carry by being the friendly shotcaller’ … except they’re bad at the game, so their calls are all bad too. You can try to get good advice from other sources (streamers/youtubers/written guides), but frankly speaking those sources are all written about a game that is completely different from low Bronze.

Obviously, if you have solid platinum skills, you should be able to grind your way out, but if you have ‘should be at 1720SR’ skills… you just can’t make much difference to your own SR. You have to grind hundreds of matches in a single season without any playing on tilt to get out.

I’ve been at <500 SR, and after a lot of daily aim-training and deathmatching, careful avoidance of playing on tilt, deliberate memorization of healthpack positions and routes too/from them, “selfish” instalocking of my DPS main, refusing to play in groups (if you think smurfs are bad in solo-queue bronze, large-stack bronze will teach you what bad really means… OTOH you might get lucky and face throw-stacks instead of boost-stacks, but it’s really just a coinflip that you can’t affect),I did manage to drag myself up to ~1470SR … and then there was role queue. Between the long DPS times and the general chaos of the new system, I’ve just not had the motivation to do much more than placements since, and playing mystery heroes for events rewards grinding is almost certainly making me worse at the actual game, so meh.

Anyway, while down there, I met plenty of people who were genuinely stuck. Many of them were much younger or much older than the average player, or were on really terrible equipment and/or connections (I have a good PC now, but my connection is still terrible). A lot of them of course would imbibe ‘just a couple beers’ or ‘just a little weed’, which isn’t exactly throwing but is pretty much self-handicapping. Others simply come from a background of other games and keep trying to solo carry and kill the whole enemy team in ways that just don’t work very well (although they can give the illusion of working sometimes because if the enemy team is throwing and/or just that bad… sometimes you can 1v6 the enemy team in <500 SR matches.)

Oh, and as a note, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a match with an average SR below 680 or so. Almost always in the 700-1200 range, very rarely in the 680s or 690s, so basically anyone in Bronze at all gets dragged into <500 matches, and even low silvers aren’t immune on a bad day.

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well, first of all, my profile is open, so you can see fully my performance. I’m not sure when i got the game, probably not long after it released. i have 432 hours in game. I bought the game, but didnt really play it a lot, as i was mostly into WoW, so, id play OW a little here and there. I didnt really start playing heavily, until a few months ago.

my earliest competitive game was season 10. as you can see, i placed 2192 gold in open queue. only played 5 games in that season. season 11, i started 2119 and ended 1935 with only 6 games played in open queue.

i didnt play again until season 24 where i placed 1511 in support and ended at 1084.

season 25, started 1110 ended as 961 support.

season 26, started at 1066 and ended at 841 support / tank started 1434 and ended 1134.

season 27, started 950 and ended 782 support with 81 games played / tank played 17 games, started 1167 and ended 1164.

current season:

support - start 876, currently 570 61 games played
dps - 1543 with 2 games played
tank - 1298 to 1137 with 24 games played.

hard to tell, my skill level is such that i cannot really judge how well others are playing. if i had to estimate in my gut feeling, id say, no, seems like everyone has played about the same, there doesnt appear to be any change, as far as i can tell, to the level of skill i see in other people. games are pretty much the same from where i began the season (867) to where i am now (570).

not that i can tell, no. again, i play mainly support though, so, im probably not the best measurement for how well it is to get kills. ive been mostly a mercy main, until recently, and now im playing more baptiste and ana, and moira.

well, there are people that are verbally abusive, not because they are throwing though, mostly because they are just mad because someone isnt playing the character they want them to play, or, because they just like to be a smart mouth and pop off in chat.

i find this happens frequently, but im not sure if it happens more frequently the further down i go. maybe a little? hard to tell. i do know that i often find people in my matches of a skill level that seems to be much higher than the level we are playing at. the problem is, are they a smurf? no way to prove it. perhaps they are just a really good bronze player, perhaps they are improving their skills and are getting better and working their way up. perhaps they are a smurf…who knows, there’s no real way to know, and if you ask, they’ll just deny it anyway. ive gotten to the point where i dont even worry about it. even if they are smurfing, it’s not like anyone really cares, and even if you report them, nothing will be done about it. i just kinda decided to accept the beating and move on, because it doesnt really make any difference and getting mad about it isnt going to solve any problems, so, my opinion now is…who cares.

now, there is one caveat to my story. i wasnt always 500’s SR. last season, and this season, i was able to maintain around an 850 SR, by playing mercy only. id lose some, and win some, and my SR would rise and fall, but always seem to settle around 850. then, i started playing other charcters like bap, and that was when my SR started to tumble. i only get to play on weekends, so i essentially have 2.5 days a week to play (friday night - sunday). in under 4 actual days, my SR fell from 850 to 570, simply by changing my support character.

what I have noticed, however, is that, once i started to fall, there was no way to go back up. i dont know if this is because of the presence of more smurfs (doesnt make sense because you would also have smurfs on your own team, which would balance things out), or if its just that because the skill level has dropped so much, and my inability to carry a team, means that i cant force my own way out of the hole im in with the skillset i currently possess. the only options for me are to either, improve my skillset and claw my way out of the hole, or just accept that i dont have the time to commit to playing every single day and that i will likely just always be a low bronze player, and just try and make the best of it and play as well as i can for my team.

in any case, i assure you, not all <500 players are derankers, im sure there are more just like me who really are not good at this game.

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Kinda, it’s a part of it but that’s also a skill check in knowing how and when to avoid them. The smurfs that I know about normally hang out in the 1000 area more than anything. 700-1000 is where you’ll get them. After you hit about 1200 you don’t see those players anymore and the same for below 700. You just have to realize that THAT is part of the game as well… and overcome it.

quite true.

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It does not balance out. There are 6 slots on the enemy team that could be a smurf. Because you are not a smurf, there are only 5 slots on your team that could be a smurf.
For this reason, if there is a smurf in your match, there is a 54.54% chance they are on the enemy team and not yours (or the same chance of the enemy having more smurfs if there is more than one).

On the other hand, the same math applies to throwers, but in that case, it’s to your advantage to have a thrower on the enemy team.

If there are equal numbers of throwers and (trying to win) smurfs, then it balances out.

You might think since smurfs must throw to stay low rank there must be more throwers than (trying to win) smurfs, but many smurfs derank in large stacks, so you will not encounter their thrower games in solo queue.

OTOH, there are also tilted/trolling throwers, as well as people who are ‘throwing’ only in the sense of being too drunk or stoned to know which way it is to the point, so adding them into the mix it may in fact balance out. Or not. Likely it depends on the day, but there’s really no way to measure that precisely.

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well, the math works out the same either way, because, if you look at someone on the other team who’s in exactly my same situation, then there is a 54.54% chance that the smurf is on my team. my point was, the smurf is not always going to be on the other team, it may be on my team as well.

in any case, my original point was, i dont think my tumbling SR could be attributed to smurfs because there’s a good chance someone on my team may be smurfing as well. at the end of the day, it becomes not even worth worrying about because, there is just no way to stop it, and blizzard cant, or wont, do anything about it, so, its just to be accepted that if it happens, that’s the way it has to be. i can only accept it, and take the beating, and hope the next game is better.

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I think making Role Queue Solo Queue only would go a long way to stop it. Most throwers that I’ve encountered and engaged with were throwing down to group with a friend and try to get within 1000 SR of each other. The truly horrible people are those who throw down to <500 SR just so they can really screw with people.

Maybe Blizzard could have some sort of a gambler’s addiction problem resolution effort, throw an intervention if you are on a 10 game losing streak where you have to stop playing Comp for a while, go through some intensive training to help improve your skill and really coach people into the proper playing of the game. This would be beneficial to people who really were struggling, and provide a disincentive to those who were throwers… Not sure. Just brainstorming for this paragraph… :smiley:

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That’s not how statistics works though. The non-variable is you, the known person who is a non-smurf matching into 11 others who are not known until after choosing. You can’t have a 54.54% chance that the smurf is on your team and a 54.54% chance the smurf is on the opposing team.

Look at this another way, if you want to consider more points of view: in a series of games with 11 ‘fair’ players and 1 smurf, each match will have 6 fair players against the smurf, and only 5 fair players with the smurf. There’s a small but consistently better chance (6/11 vs. 5/11) for each fair player to be against the smurf rather than with them.

It’s a small factor, but a real one. In the long run, though, IMO it doesn’t really keep you from climbing as there are certain portion of your matches that are balanced. It’s unprovable, but I feel like there are at least as many throwers (and effective throwers like drunks) as there are smurfs.

While they ‘balance’ in some sense, what that does do is increase the number of matches that are simply out of your hands, thereby dragging your winrate closer to 50%. That makes it very grindy to get out, but not impossible.

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I hate that we have to think like this but it is the best way to reason the situation.

You touch on it very briefly at the end of your post but you have to take into account that a smurf will even be in the mix at all.

I ran a study for multiple seasons and over the course of ~400 games I only had a 5% chance any single game would have a thrower or noticeable smurf. So, in essence, it’s a percentage of a percentage that any given person will have a thrower on their team or a smurf on the enemy team, instead of on YOUR team - with your team having a 16.6% less chance of either (due to you, assuming you’re not the smurf nor thrower)

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Yes, of course. I’m just trying to demonstrate that the effect of smurfs on your game is not a coinflip, but a slightly negative winrate (assuming the smurf always wins).

Actual calculations for ‘unfair’ players on your whole winrate would need to account for the chance of any given slot being a smurf or thrower, and they can be combined all sorts of ways including none on either team.

When I was keeping closer track of the smurf population in triple-digit bronze, I found it was nearly a 15% chance of having at least one Known Smurf in the game. (A “Known Smurf” being someone who had a history of both matches of active throwing and matches of exhibiting unreasonable skill for Bronze.) I only had a few dozen Known Smurfs in my list, but the population down there just isn’t that big to begin with.

Which reminds me of an important note for people trying to climb out of triple-digits bronze: Do Not Taunt The Smurfs. You will be matched against the same ones frequently and they do talk to each other, and if you rage at one (especially cussing them out in voice chat) they will make a pet project of picking on you.

Also, if one of your teammates rages on a smurf – add the rager to your avoid list. This will drastically increase your chances of matching with the smurfs and against the rager and getting some free wins. Plus, nobody wants to be teamed with a rager.

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Yep the games down in <500 aren’t about in-game ability. SR down there is no longer (or never has been) fit-for-purpose metric. It’s more about intelligent queueing (active avoid/dodge/snipe), flist management, when you play, who you know, etc. It’s nowhere near a meritocracy and the devs know it and do nothing.

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Believe it or not I was on their “no wins” list.

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In-game ability is not entirely meaningless. E.g., the difference in skill between being crushed by golds in deathmatch and being able to hold your own is tremendous. ‘Hold your own’ not meaning winning matches or any specific score really, just being a threat and having a decent chance of winning any given duel.

A lot of the scoring of Deathmatch is kill stealing anyway, which is irrelevant to competitive… but the Deathmatch modes are about the only way to compare yourself to other ranks since people screw around so badly in QP and most other Arcade modes.

But on the other hand, yes, a little care with your social interactions and taking the effort to update your avoid list every day will help a lot.

Friends list I’m not so sure about… unless you literally have a smurf friend boosting you, I think you’re better off being in solo queue. Remember that being a duo increases the chances of matching against a duo, and you really want to reduce your chance of facing the smurf-helping-a-friend duos, never mind facing the larger groups that pro-boosters prefer.

I mean, the game is certainly a lot more fun playing together with nice people on voice chat, so y’know, I don’t know that you should let ranking up deter you from grouping. But if ranking up is your goal, grouping is going to hurt.

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I am a level 5 endorsements player at the precipice of gold (1922 Tank, 1956 Support, 1974 Damage, and 1991 Open), so I know a little bit about getting along with people. I absolutely never group up for Competitive. I’ve tried it with friends, I’ve tried it with LFG, etc, and it does not work.

Kaawumba details why the LFG option is a penalty in the “Matchmaking and Groups” subsection of his excellent guide: How Competitive Matchmaking and Ranking Works (Season 28+) - #2 by Cuthbert-11649

I am futilely asking for Role Queue to be Solo Queue only in my topic: Competitive Suggestion - Solo Queue

I think Competitive is harmed by groups, always. Group games are the most imbalanced for me. There are 9 game modes available to play in groups that are not competitive. Maybe there should be one that seeks to determine how good your group of friends are, (Team Queue), but otherwise, let’s find out how good YOU are in Competitive by requiring you to Solo Queue.

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Not sure that do they ” belong ” there, but there are probably somehow handicapped persons in this game who probably are more like clad that they have online video game instead thinking what rank they are, they play for fun.

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If PBSR works as it’s intended, a single win on a player that has sufficiently deranked to <500 should immediately pull them out of <500 into 750-1000 range.

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PBSR doesn’t affect MMR. MMR is used for matchmaking.

Based on what? Nothing in any of what any dev has said, or what has been compiled in The Guide suggests that anything like this will or should happen. Please read the guide.

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You really do cling to this terrible write-up of a blog post.

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I don’t believe this is correct.

While the original reference (Scott Mercer) does talk strictly about ‘gaining and losing SR’, the post only speaks about SR. This is almost certainly glossing over the idea that SR is a scaled tracking of MMR, as he’s talking about the SR you gain and lose from wins and losses (which is really a gain/loss of MMR, which is then reflected in SR because SR follows MMR).

AFAIK, the only times SR is adjusted independently of MMR are for leaver penalties (which are just to make you feel bad, not to change matchmaking) and Rank Decay (which is meant to force you to grind for end-of-season rewards and not ‘rank camp’, but without changing matchmaking).

Performance-based modifiers on the other hand are meant to change matchmaking and get you ‘more quickly’ to fair matches, which wouldn’t happen if it was not a change to MMR.

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A useful skill to have when playing against a smurf is to have your game be one of the ones they want to use for deranking, not one they want to use for stomping. So if you pretend not to notice they are smurfing and just say stuff like “good round everyone”, they will find it boring to stomp your game. But if you cry about smurfs or try to 1v1 them they will enjoy stomping you immensely.

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