I think that’s what Valorant did. Made you buy a pass to earn the seasons cosmetics and then have even more cosmetics behind paywalls.
Although this is great advice, I have done this in the past and never lost ALL of my placements. Or even 5 in a row.
I had some crazy good games too just couldn’t get the W.
It’s a bad feeling finishing placements 250 SR lower than where you left of last season 
. Sadly it was my tank bracket so I probably won’t touch that again this season.
just an hour ago I would have disagreed. But then I had this dva player who was always 1v6ing, taking tons of dmg, and complaining that her hard mercy pocket wasn’t enough. they then proceed to throw the match, and tell everyone to report mercy because they didn’t switch. The game was pretty good, until they started complaining. I rarely play comp because of my fps, but when I did…
Yeah, the balance is good, except for a few outliers that over/underperform in low ranks but under/overperform in high ranks(sym, bastion/widow, ashe).
You bring a good point that I discovered in bronze, where the most alts/smurfs there are. They are the ones getting tilted, more than the actual bronze/silvers. Expecting plat+ level healing, expecting to have a comp built around them just because they’re a smurf, which isn’t fun at all. Can’t do much about the queues unless they add more tanks and supports, in my opinion. I’ve been against an ‘unranked to gm eDuCaTiOnAl’, and it’s blatant smurfing. Yes, the ranks have an uneven smurf/thrower distribution, but it doesn’t mean the people with less don’t suffer too(gold has less smurf than 1.2k sr).
Honestly if you want to have fun in OW, you just need to stop caring about your SR and find parts of the game you enjoy playing. Once I taught myself to stop caring about whether I win or lose and found what I thought is fun I actually started to enjoy playing.
I just wont 5/5 with tank and got placed into bronze… and I’m a decent tank… so… I r confuse
I don’t care about my SR anymore, but that doesn’t change the fact games being a snowball, or just hopeless because of singular reason from “smurf” to “lol we rolled tanks 500 SR lower guess we lose”, gets really old really fast.
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Now? Smurfing has been an unaddressed issue for years now. Not sure where you’ve been.
I stopped playing comp once they overtuned Genji to the point where you had to run him or you would lose as I lost 250sr to just nano-blade simulator and my whole team being burst down by his a10 warthog of a right click in a couple of seconds. Ever since then I haven’t gone back to comp outside of tank placements just to get the emblem.
The competitive in this game is so beyond a joke it’s insane. I’ve played csgo comp for 2.8k hours and the difference is night and day. CSGO may be more toxic overall, but everyone queueing for comp in that game uses their mic and plays to win. This game on the other hand, 99% of my matches the coms are dead silent, half the team has no idea what they are doing and if someone tries to be an ingame leader, they take it as if you just insulted them when you tell them what to do. Something as simple as “Hey monkey, wait for the team and then dive their Ana with me” gets taken as some kind of macho challenge of you telling them they suck. Then they spam the “no” voiceline or just start flaming in chat while throwing.
It blows my mind that a game built from the ground up to be teambased, lacks any kind of coordination outside the top 5% of ranks.
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That’s true, I guess I just don’t go in expecting to win because I always get disappointed 
never said 10 million players.
10 million monthly acct logins.
1 of these is me who logged oen for 1 day of the event and not since.
Just play QP. It’s not as competitive as comp obviously but there isn’t nearly as much toxicity. Also It seems like comp has way more smurfs than QP for some reason? Also not as many throwers because imo people mostly throw in comp because of frustration where in QP people tend to not care as much but they care enough to try a little bit. Overall I find QP to be a way better experience even If you never really get those super intense matches comp sometimes has.
I’ll do my placements and a few ranked matches each season but comp is pretty dead to me rn.
Ranked play needs greater barriers to entry. Requiring a level 3 endorsement would be a safe and effective fix, abusable but to minor degree.
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I noticed competitive integrity really started to decline within the past year or so.
TLDR is that there are too many people in ranks they don’t belong in (both too high or too low). There are also many people on alt accounts don’t care about winning mixed in with people on their mains who do care, which contributes to toxicity.
Case in point:
High Plat / Low Diamond is by far the worst rank range to be in since that’s where a lot of people who create alt/smurf accounts tend to get dumped after their first placements, whether they truly belong in Diamond or GM.
- Common occurrence in any given match: one team fight goes badly, then people on your team start bickering and flaming, then… inevitably it comes down to: taunting each other about who has a higher rank on their main account, or excuses like, “Dude, I don’t care if you think I’m bad, this is my 3rd account.”
Night and day difference between that range and more pleasant ranks like Mid-Gold to Mid-Plat, and High-Diamond to Mid-Masters. The outcome of matches tends to be less dependent on the dice roll of which team gets a smurf, thrower, toxic jerk or boosted player.
This is why… after I made a serious, caffeine-fueled, tryhard climb up to a career high of 3891 in past seasons, I settled back to just do my placements each season, collect the bonus gold weapon points, and play quickplay with friends 99% of the time. I’ve fallen down to High Diamond on my main role (tank) but don’t particularly care to climb back up. It’s just not worth the stress and thoroughly unenjoyable, unbalanced, frustrating matches.
If the game had better competitive integrity, I’d consider pursuing it again.
Oh yeah, I mentioned that High Diamond - Mid-Masters tends to be more pleasant, but it does have the same problem overall… Can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people on my team [friendly/casual] chitchat about how many accounts they have and what ranks they are. You really get the feeling that rank means very little when the actual skill of people on your team is all over the place.
Two things Blizzard needs to accomplish to improve competitive integrity and the consistent quality of matches:
- Find ways to more quickly move players into ranks they actually belong in
- Reduce the reasons why players feel pressured to create alt accounts, so people are playing on their mains and will take the game more seriously