Ahhh Your Reward for Carrying yet losing is

Yes but that doesnt mean dps is not doing good job.

Urban dictionary is a few guys on the internet who put a site together. They’re not an authority. They’re not an official body. If I whip up a website and include a definition of carrying doesn’t include “winning” we’re no closer to resolving this.

Whether a contribution “mattered” is in the eye of the beholder. But the contributions of a player are an objective reality. Someone can make fantastic contributions to a cause or organization or group, and that group may not have met their goal or objective. That doesn’t change the extent of the person’s contributions. All their work and effort is not undone by the team’s failure to have met the goal.

If a set of game-related statistics/contributions is amazing and the team wins, those same statistics and contributions aren’t suddenly – not amazing – because they didn’t. That doesn’t make sense.

Further, a player can be said to be carrying a team mid-match, before the final outcome. As in “Wow, this guy is carrying our team,” a common usage of the phrase even though, of course, the match hasn’t ended. So carrying is not JUST about winning.

Some do, some don’t. And some are right to use it, and some aren’t. As it relates to OP, we don’t know which is the case.

True, it doesn’t. But you asked why he brought up gold medals, and then suggested that it’s expected that DPS would have gold. Mentioning that he’s got gold medals does say something about his performance (albeit without also being proof that he’s doing amazingly well on DPS). Medals might matter and they might not. This idea that that “medals don’t matter” isn’t true. Sometimes they matter, sometimes they don’t.

The tilt is what makes you lose games

If you took responsibility, hired a coach, looked at your vod reviews, changed your mindset to a positive and confident one, joined a community full of top players and committed climbers, learn the match-up and a game at a high level and made incremental improvements to your game everyday - you wouldn’t be blaming your team. Because youd be climbing. Climbing is in your control. Its just that you need to exercise that which is in your control

99% of people don’t do this though. Its unfortunate because of all the resources available. But fortunate for you because the vast majority of your competition will never do it

Nah, one can critique a system in which extraordinary measures are required to climb. I’ve used the following analogy before. If trigonometry is being taught in the 7th grade, there are ways to pass the class. It’s a different question entirely concerning whether or not trig should be taught in the 7th grade. Matchmaking can be done to either make it harder or easier to climb, and people who feel that matchmaking is intentionally or permissibly grindy or difficult are free to criticize a system they view as unfair or unjust, and there’s room for that criticism and conversation.

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i entertained your idea a few weeks back but i thought about it a bit since then.

it’s a waste of time imo because the system is fine. if you actually find your errors in your gameplay, it shouldn’t take long to climb if you make the necessary changes.

time spent complaining about your team/system/meta/jeff kaplan is way better spent in actually doing the right things that make you improve. you’ll improve in that time

if we take a look at OP’s match history and compare it to VODs of people to people in his elo and as wellto high diamond players, im 99% sure that we will find that OP is playing like a silver and not a high diamond

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I respect your opinion on the system being mostly fine, but I disagree, and that’s ok. It’s not necessary that we see the situation eye to eye. I also don’t think improving and talking about/critiquing the game are two sides of the same coin. They’re two different things and they serve different purposes.

I mean, if we’re doing a relative ROI valuation here, one shouldn’t be playing video games at all.

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Why do you think you deserve to be in diamond if you can only play one character well?

Imo you’re only to able to use medals in an argument is if you’re having gold healing as a non support. Otherwise it really isn’t useful for anything.

I don’t think we should listen to someone who calls alot of people a bad team and believe they are carrying their entire team just because he thinks he is the entire backbone of the team.

They’re playing Phara, which isn’t a good pick but a little bit viable in lower rankings. OP isn’t adjusting to their team, he’s too focussed on himself.

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On some level, there is a correlation between statistics and match outcomes, and medals and efficacy. Do medals tell the whole story? No. Can they be part of the narrative for why a team won or lost? Absolutely. And so when people make arguments and bring up medals, from what I’ve seen it’s mostly a datapoint in a larger argument. More often than not, getting gold medals in some area is often better than not getting gold medals in that area (provided they’re the right medals for the right character).

Whether medals matter or not is really determined on a case by case basis according to the argument the person is making, how outstanding the medals are, how many of them there were etc. I don’t think one can make the argument that medals always or mostly matter or never or mostly don’t matter. It’s situational.

If a person is playing well, the way Overwatch matchmaking works as I understand it, they’re likely to be the best person on their team, sometimes by a very wide margin. Very possible that this person is often saddled with bad teammates. It’s hard if not impossible to know whether or not the person’s claims are true or whether they’re generally good at observing and accurately assessing what’s going on in their games. I know in my own games (when I used to play), the majority of the time, the experience felt awful. And so it’s hard for me to dismiss people’s complaints out of hand. It stands to reason that more often better players would complain about worse players, rather than the other way around.

And it’s very often the case (especially at certain ranks) that to win in Overwatch, catering to or supporting your team just fails as a strategy. This is why when players like ML7 do these bronze to GM streams they just frag out, even as supports or main tanks, rather than playing the typical support or tank role. And then as they rise in rank their play style gradually adjusts to what’s more standard given their role.

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carrying only happens if you win, if you lose you didn’t take anybody anywhere

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I tend to disagree. You can carry and lose game too. Carrying really represents amount of work you do in match, how much more you did than others. Win or loss is still result of team vs team. I did lost games when I was carrying hard doing 3xmore work than my Silver team mates but still lost anyway.

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Medals can say something true, though players who say they did better more damage than a DPS as a Tank wouldn’t mean the DPS would’ve been playing bad so to say. This could also mean the Tank wasn’t doing their job correctly.

They can certainly say something, though it’s harder to pinpoint whether or not if it was the Fault of the Tank or the DPS in that scenario.

Same could apply to other things.

Medals can be used for matches, though not a rank overall.

Though as OP has described, they’ve gone down alot of rankings. With that it would mean the System wouldn’t mark him as a very good player anymore.

Honestly OP could’ve prevented this if he just grouped up with some players.

No, carrying has to do with the share of the work someone did and the value of their contribution relative to the team. If they got 75 elims, they didn’t suddenly NOT contribute that match because the team lost.

Winning is a measure of how well each respective team did as a whole and how well they conformed to the win conditions.

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Correct. Winning or losing is a statement about the team as a whole meeting some objective. Carrying relates to how much of the burden is being shouldered by a player/some minority of players.

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To me, herein lies maybe the core problem with Overwatch. And it also accounts for why I think you have to be at least 500-800 SR better than your current rank (which is in itself is unfair) to climb at anything other than a snail’s pace.

And I don’t see how I can elaborate on this point without zooming out a little and looking at Overwatch from a bird’s eye view. I just had a great exchange with someone on this forum who reminded me that Blizzard is a business, and they’re in business to turn a profit. I’m sure they’d love a happy and pleased fan base as well, but any time a business interest competes with player satisfaction, the business interest is going to win (to clarify: when player satisfaction wins out, it’s still the result of a business vs. satisfaction calculation).

Overwatch doesn’t exist to be the fairest possible system for players. It doesn’t exist to make the greatest number of people satisfied/happy (although there’s often a significant overlap between customer satisfaction and revenue/profitability, but not always). Overwatch exists to make the most money possible while improving Blizzard’s long term prospects. That’s it. Ok phew, now that that’s out of the way.

Higher skilled players can often be countered by weaker players by doing nothing more than counterpicking. There’s a great argument to be made that this is a business decision; because in setting up the game this way, they’ve made the game accessible to far more people. If an Ana player is getting dove by a Genji she can’t handle, she can switch to Moira and her odds of successfully countering the higher skilled Genji player increase astronomically (with the net effect of perhaps providing the same or more value when you consider that she’s dying less than she would have as Ana). And so this players gets equal value while shutting down a higher skill player, again, allowing lower skilled players to remain competitive, ultimately expanding Overwatch’s player base.

Better players are also hard focused more often. Either out of annoyance or a desire to win or both: a player that’s doing well can often simply be “Sombra’ed” out of existence, or dealt with by any number of questionable low-skill vs. high-skill Overwatch matchups (and there are many such matchups – a point of view shared in a rant by Seagull in one of the most watched and upvoted community-created Overwatch videos to date). You get the point. So often to climb, players have to be so good that they’re actually good enough to win battles or deliver value despite the existence of many relatively low-skill counters. And here’s where I think the 500-800 SR numbers comes in to play because, until you hit that SR disparity, this is often very difficult to do.

There are a ton more examples of how Overwatch makes the game harder specifically for better players, but I haven’t got all day, and this already pretty long :slight_smile:

Getting back to Blizzard’s business decisions and how that influences gameplay. Playing well in Overwatch does not grant you the right to play with other players who are doing well. What it does it make it more likely that you’ll get worse players on your team, sometimes much worse. Overwatch doesn’t say “ok, here are the elite players in plat, let’s put them all together.” No. For Blizzard, that is not a good value proposition. To create a better experience than they deserve, bad players are paired up with better players who must carry them. I think the long term effects of this is that it burns out and frustrates better players, and over time I think they will start to play worse and fall in rank. They gradually stop doing the things that made them better because “oh hell what’s the use anyway.” They don’t practice as much. They watch fewer instructive videos. They stop warming up. They’re on comms less. They switch less. Etc. Over and over, Overwatch sends the signal “what difference does it make what I do?” because again, fairness and a great competitive environment is not the goal here.

Overwatch does not treat good and bad players the same. Players get different experiences very much based on the way they’re playing and how often they’re winning and losing.

All of this is to say that good players doing poorly is not solely a function of their skill level. Unfortunately they are not competing in a system optimized for fairness, nor is fairness the driving force behind decision making – as I mentioned earlier, it’s profitability. Shouldering all of the burden on a good player for that player failing to climb, in my opinion, misundertands the landscape, and as assumes that Overwatch is a fair system that treats everyone the same. It doesn’t, and it isn’t trying to.

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Hm, so when you are 2300 ranked player and want to climb to 2600 you need to be skilled as 3100 player? But what does that mean because by that logic 3100 player has skill of 3600 player. And 3600 player need skill of 4100 player, to be 4100 player, you need to be skilled as 4600 player and to climb to 4600? And now your logic is screwed because thats basicly the top already.

If you want to be top1 you need to play like top1. There is nothing above it. Your opinion that you need better skill than actual rank simply doesnt make any sense to me. I climbed to Diamond on all 3 role and in no way I played like high diamond or low masters. I know how diamond players play and I played like them, thats why I climbed. 3000 SR skill is enough to climb into 3000 if you play like lets say minimum of 10 hours per week.

If you have skill of 3500 player while trying to climb from plat to diamond? You will climb definitely faster than 3000 SR skilled player. So higher skill level helps but is not requirement. It will only save you time.

that might just be the nature of a team based game, not the problem of blizzard’s matchmaking. if you want to climb just 100-300 elo, it will take you long as balls. you have 5 other people on your team, if you are playing only slightly better than them it makes a lot of sense that you climbed slowly…

like imagine you were playing basketball or any other sport where you were only slightly better than your team. would you be able to carry games consistently?

it makes sense that it’s slow. this doesn’t have anything specific to do with overwatch’s matchmaking system.

Exactly. I feel like Mikosan believe that its too slow. But it slow only when player is improving at slow rate. I have seen people who climbed hundreds in few days after fixing their mistakes.

And as I said before, certain things will affect rate of climb too, like grouping up or heroes you will pick.

Still believe SR should be more skill based and not as much win based.
I get the Secret Elo things, but it looks real flawed.
For exemple, if you play healer in silver or gold, even of you are master, there is just no way you gonna have the same heaing stats as a master. Your team is gonna be so misplaced that even the tightest of plays will not bring the stats.
SR should be based on performences within the game, compared to other players within the game.
I might get 4 golds medals against gold player, but probably wont against master. In the end, performences should be more rewarded.
That would also makes things less frustratng when loosing but still having done good, the game would recognised it.
At the end of the day, we are all only 1/6 of the ressources. A win/lose SR seems to bring to much randomness in the equation.