I don’t think the SR / MMR mechanics are the same for someone who has been in bronze for multiple seasons with low skill measurements and someone who has just fallen to bronze. The system will likely be trying to CORRECT your SR back up if you just fell to bronze, whereas if the system has you belonging in bronze, the ability to climb is significantly different.
I honestly don’t think that throwing to bronze and climbing proves anything.
Despite your second sentence being questionably relevant, your first sentence is probably still true. The reason that thrower trolls are so damaging to bronze gameplay is the demoralization factor. People get into game after game where things are determined by things that feel completely out of their control. Depending on how low SR the games are, they may be completely out of their control, especially if they’re trying to flex to tanks and support such as Rein and Mercy.
I just climbed this season from about 800 SR to 1200, and I attribute it to one main thing. I started playing a single self sustain hero, never flexing, never switching. Even though that hero was brand new to me this season, I still just focused on learning the mechanics of the hero, watching videos, practicing in QP, and I climbed. This renewed focus is a change from last season, where I was focusing on a hero in a similar fashion that was one of the worst self sustain heroes. This new focus led to the second most important thing (in my lame bronze opinion) - Willingness to play more competitive games. Playing 20 comp games across a whole season isn’t enough to go anywhere. You’ve gotta keep playing more games, not just to improve your skills, but also to give the incremental SR gains enough room to work. My SR gains are only on average 1.08 higher than my SR losses. If I had a 50% win rate, after my 63 games this season, I would only be up 68. Fortunately, I also have a 58.5% win rate, so my overall movement has been from 909-1197 (+288) (I went down from 909 to 812 over the first 13 games of the season, and my peak, at game 61 was 1244, or a 432 range) I have also gotten significant benefit from recording all my comp games, and tracking statistics in Basilisk’s spreadsheet (google " Basilisk’s Overwatch Performance Tracker (Updated for Season 15)").
In summary, the damage that thrower trolls do is to get bronze people to quit playing competitive, or to stop learning how to improve.
I’m working on that montage video to prove my point, 99 percent of the bronze matches I encountered are my allies and my enemies rigging the matches, the ones that are not rigged are the ones who want climb but gets bullied not only by the enemy team, but also their ally team. Competitive bronze is a joke, and I think those who are stuck there for a very long time throughout the season or multiple seasons needs an SR reset once the season ends.
Look you can’t have an understanding of what a real smurf is when you have only been playing the game for 1 month.
Are you seriously blaming your struggles because you ran into smurfs?
I’m hard stuck in gold. I run into smurfs a lot.
On mercy you have 4 hours. You are 5-19
You average 8k healing a game
You die a lot vs bronze players
You never damage boost and only average 266 amp a game
You resurrect on average 2.6 players per game
Early on in my Overwatch career when I was ‘hard stuck’ in Gold I used to think this is exactly what happened. I thought I had ‘career’ dead weight preventing me from any serious gains to get out of what I believed was my ‘ELO Hell’.
I later discovered that this was not the case and had nothing to do with the age of my account or the 2 seasons I had been stuck there, but instead I simply hadn’t learnt the lessons I needed to to rank up.
These days if I were ever to play in gold it is almost trivial to get out now that I know what I was doing wrong.
The MM simply doesn’t work the way you think it does, in fact I think it is highly responsive to your most recent games so once it ‘clicks’ you will shoot up through to your next plateau.
I’m not basing my understanding on my own experience, but the best documentation I have found. What I’m claiming is that new accounts and thrower accounts have an increased uncertainty about the skill of the player, and therefore increased willingness to adjust SR. Especially in a thrower account, I would expect the SR and MMR to have a large gap, with the MMR being higher than the SR, and therefore there are built in mechanisms to correct the SR toward the MMR.
The get better argument is just dumb man. Can you really not see what is going on. I feel like all these supporters have blinders on for some reason or don’t play enough to see this garbage system in action. Please get good at observing things around you. Start focusing on yourself and get better, maybe even find a life coach. If you can record your interactions with the world maybe I can help you myself, let me know.
As a Bronze person who has climbed around 400 SR this season, I don’t think it’s dumb. I think most of us that have failed to climb in the past have been unwilling to change some of the things that are required to climb. Winning more games in bronze may require different choices than winning more games in Silver. Winning more games in Gold will require different things still.
I was trying to find a video from Jayne talking about plateaus in the climb, but I can’t find it. Generally, he said that the things that got you to where you are sometimes actually prevent you from going higher, and they have to be unlearned to progress further…
I’m definitely no expert, but I’ve watched videos of people who are
That’s actually the best advice I could ever have in a competitive experience,
It’s not about getting gud where I’m stuck at, It’s about finding the right teammates with a similar skill level to climb up with.
Its dumb argument for people who dont have interest in getting better. I think you shoud get better at observing things around you and maybe you will climb.
Not sure why are you talking about real world. I am not complayining about my life on these forums. I am happy with my IRL.
New accounts do have an increased uncertainty about the skill of a player and do adjust SR more than an established account. I cannot vouch for thrower accounts and am uncertain how this relates to your claim. However, this is not what you were claiming you stated this:
which mentions neither nor does it mention people who just fell to bronze (or any rank for that matter) .
Furthermore because new accounts are the minority a vast majority of players are on a level playing field when it comes to their opportunity to advance so the discussion of whether it is harder or easier really is irrelevant in this context.
The person I was responding to had recently documented his new account that placed in bronze. He was climbing relatively easily out of Bronze.
For throwers, I have heard many stories of throwers saying how hard it is to stay in Bronze. This leads me to believe that throwers also experience the system trying to correct them back upward to SR ranges they used to be in, based on their performance and the uncertainty levels that are very likely to be present due to the significant changes in SR that happened quickly due to the throwing.
If people are gaining significantly more than 10 SR per hour, then the system is probably moving them in correction mode.
Hey Fascination, fairly sure we’ve played together. I totally agree - maybe it’s because all the college kids are out right now. Hopefully it will get better in September.
I have heard this before and have tested it time and time again.
I have a second account with a super low SR (was mainly to practice hero’s I rarely play) and I have tried to see if I was actually as good as my main SR tells me I am Mid plat/low Diamond.
Sure enough when I start using hero’s I regularly play I climb out of Bronze and Silver in a heartbeat. It usually takes a little bit of a Grind in Gold. Weird place Gold is but dedicated play and focusing on my own plays always gets me back into plat.
Several people have pointed out and pretty much proved how little smurfs and throws effect your SR.
Heck I might go back to that account and 2-trick a few heros I never play and see how long it takes for me to pull it out of Bronze and beyond.
Just find someone who is gold or plat to duo with on your next placements. Youll jump up to about their rank and the problems will be better, not solved, but better.
Honestly the best way to climb is to hard carry solo or 2-3 stack. 6 stack you’re almost always going to go up against a 5 or 6 stack so, while your team will be more coordinated, so will theirs. If you’re running into a lot of throwers though stacking may be what you need to get out of bronze. You should be aware that it only gets marginally better. I started in bronze and peaked at 2800ish and still ran into throwers in plat. Just keep in mind that the other team is just as likely to get them as yours is.
All you can do is try and improve on your favourite characters and forget about SR and ranks. The great thing about low ranks is that you can learn new characters and experiment. Take advantage of this and have fun.
There are a lot of chilled out people in gold and below who just enjoy playing the game. Higher up people can get uptight because they feel they have a rank to protect. It leads to toxicity and all kinds of negativity. So my advice is forget the SR and just play.
My season 15 high was 890.
Here’s a thing i’ve leaned : Solo queue is full of throwers, smurfs and people fed up with the game.
When you use the lfg, it’s an extra step. LFG’s people want to climb and will try their best.
I’ve climbed to 1400 only queuing with randoms on the lfg.
Two bronze friends recently both peaked gold
It’s possible, record some gameplay and improve, maybe narrow your hero pool to 2-3 heroes or onetrick a single one.
