In my opinion I believe boosting can ruin some ranked experiences. I haven’t come across it too much myself but I have seen and heard people openly admit to boosting a friend’s account. I think it one way it ruins because the booster will obviously be of higher skill level and dominate several games on that account. Then assuming the original account owner comes back to play ranked. They were at a lower ranked only to be boosted to a higher rank by a friend. If they play at their now elevated rank with a lower skill level I feel they’d drag the team down. Anyways does anyone have experience that supports this?
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I had a friend who got boosted from silver to diamond. It was obvious they weren’t better, but they always insisted that somehow they were stuck in “elo hell” before.
Interesting that they always needed a certain person with a smurf account to continually boost them.
I also stopped talking to them after a while. Was starting to realize that this person put all their problems on other people rather than themselves.
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So think of this for a moment…
We’ll use this example…
I’m a DPS player. Been playing since season 11. Made it to gold season 12 and made it to plat season 16. I’ve been stuck in plat for 6 seasons (as of season 22 I climbed into Diamond on my main).
Realizations:
As a hard stuck platinum player, sometimes I would group with smurfs, but most of the time I’d soloqueue. My experience grouping with smurfs is we’d usually get matched against other smurfs.
Unless your smurfing friend can outplay two smurfs (they can’t usually) then you’re just going to lose. If you win games, because of PBSR, you’ll make minimal SR gains but your MMR increases because you’re winning games you shouldn’t be.
So if you go into soloqueue as I did, you’ll lose most, of not all (Plus more) SR that you gained until your MMR/SR approach correlation… It’s (kind of) how the rank system works.
How smurfs play:
Look at the performance of a smurf. My T500 friend who buys gold accounts from time to time, will end up putting out unreasonable numbers…
(across 1+ hr of play time)
35-40 elims/10 mins
12-16,000 dmg/10 mins
4-6 deaths/10 mins
How to climb (DPS only):
If you’re a DPS player and you think you belong in the next Elo, @ minimum, you should be putting out
10k+ dmg/10 mins across main hero
and have a K/D ratio of 4.5+/1.
When you look at T500, GM, Masters, Diamond, Platinum players in their ranks what you will see is between (2.5-3) K/D. What this means is playing at peak/consistent performance (always thinking of positioning, making your best “avg performance” shots, not feeding, etc) you’ve stagnated in terms of rank.
The only way to improve is to up your lethality as a player… How hard you have to play and how much focus on minimizing mistakes is pretty based on rank.
Final example: this season when I did placements, I lost 3/5 games and placed 3107. My K/D is approximately 2.25/1 across my hero pool. So my performance was below where it needs to be to maintain my S22 peak of 3170…
Based on this, if someone is a DPS player and they want to climb into gold/plat, I can “usually” look at their profile and determine, you need to work on survivability, or you need to play a hero that does more damage.
If you don’t want to play a higher damage hero, then you need to adjust your current hero play style to maximize uptime (damage definitely doesn’t always matter). Perhaps the hero they’re playing, they’re playing incorrectly…
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I mean kinda. Back in like season 14 or 15 when I wasn’t at my best (ranked wise) I ran into a tank player who I spent the next like 7 seasons with and we picked up other players along the way and one of the players we picked up whose t100 support admitted to me that I was low-key boosting said player (which I didn’t think about, we were both gold when we met). So I am a healer main and up until role I quite literally only played support from seasons 8 or 9 to the season they introduced role que and then I started to delve back into the other roles a little but I stayed a healer main. The 2 seasons prior to last my support sky rocketed because I just didn’t heal for that tank anymore and looked for groups where I could develop. Last season I decided to solo que basically all season to actually dive back into the other roles more (still a healer main tho) (I duo-d every now and then) because I knew that if I tried to group up, they wouldn’t take me because i didn’t have the “stats” or the “time played” on tank or DPS because that’s what everyone looks at. So my support took a bit if a hit because I didn’t play it as much but I climbed both my tank and DPS into plat and now my tank is mid plat DPS low plat and healer almost back to grace. And inversely that tank player dropped from high gold into low/mid silver. So yea…that’s my boosting story
#unintentionalboosting
#whewthatsoffmychest
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there are at least as much boosted players as smurfing players. ever wondered why in plat and above are players that stand literally still to shoot?
And they are as damaging to the game as smurfs.
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It is the worst, worse than playing against smurf. You can try to deal with smurf with good team play, but you usualy cant do much with boosted player, he will just suck bad and ther eis nothing you can do about it. Worst are boosted tank mains.
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Everytime I get to about 750sr, I start to feel like I’m getting boosted, lucky, or way outside my rank. So I just keep queueing and naturally get farmed back down to my comfort zone of <500.
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That sounds absolutely depressing. If I were stuck at sub-2000 SR I’d probably move onto Farming Simulator or another game suited to my level of desired interaction.
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I play with boosted people all the time, most common in my rank are boosted Mercy mains, they die a ton and have no gamesense which leads to them dying early and tons to Widow headshots, High Noons and so on. If you check their profile, perma Diamond for 10+ seasons, then 3700 our of nowhere. You check their Damage Amplified stats, it’s around 1100 per 10 every season then bam the season they climbed it’s 2200 per 10.
Normally when you have a boosted player in mid/high Masters and the enemy doesn’t it’s a hard go next.
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I’ve played with boosted people who weren’t ashamed to admit it and honestly they played better than the trash I normally get in my team. Anyone is boosted if you believe hard enough.
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Hey could you look at my profile and tell me where I should improve?
My guess is survivability as I tend to play risky when my team isn’t leaving their comfort zone. You can call it the classic “dps stop overextending” when you’re hunting those last two enemies after a team fight.
Or “ok team you wait in choke while I flank 1v6 then”
I LOATHE boosted mercy mains the most. They actually think they’re good players (90% they are not).
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Yes… dealt with a boosted former bronze Rein main who charges on cooldown and holds up shield and stands at choke. You have a hammer!!! I don’t know why they ask to get boosted if they’re just going to drop immediately.
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I mean… You’re high plat/low diamond as I am (28-32 is the same game to me. GMs describe it as the most inconsistent range of performance because some games you’ll play like a masters player, some games you’ll play like low plat, and other games you’ll play @ Diamond)…
Looking at your most played, McCree, Tracer, Genji, widow, you’re trending the same as anyone performing in the rank you belong…
Elims/life over ten mins -
You pretty consistently put out 2.59 (McCree/Tracer) but your Genji is only 1.9 so you need to practice winning the 1v1 with Genji a little more or flank less… You’re also only getting 2.82 dragon blade kills/10…
Try to boost all of these percentages by at least 10-15% (which for the most part simply comes down to dying less and killing more)… 
As you said…
When you start leveling out performance wise, your damage numbers drop. However tracer and Genji aren’t super damage dealers (they’re more eliminators) but you could definitely aim to boost your McCree damage a lot more. Or maybe you’re playing into double shield so another hero choice is required?
Edit: it’s all subjective right? But if we were in gold, I could simply say you’re dying too much and not doing enough damage. But the higher you climb in RQ the more the games are heavily decided by tank participation… So your damage numbers drop a lot… You have to get pretty aggressive and/or adjust your play style a little bit…
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I encounter them from time to time. If they are really playing way above their actual elo, then it’s hilarious and usually the whole lobby makes fun out of them.
If they are “only” like 500SR above their elo, then it’s just frustrating for the team that has them.
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Diamond consists of the most boosted players and the most cheaters because low Elo players get boosted by friends (fall eventually) and cheaters don’t have the game sense to outplay the real masters/GM smurfs…
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Diamond is realistically the rank you can get to by mastering any one/two of mechanics, positioning, and reactions/gamesense. Hacking just gives them one of those for “free”.
Exactly… The level at which you learn team play and game sense at varies…
Climbing higher requires more…
Kinda what makes lower ranks annoying too, since you need to at least be semi decent at the other categories to reach diamond. But in silver-plat they can be there because their aim is trash but be a smart player otherwise, or have decent aim but make the most stupid mistakes when it comes to positioning and game sense. At least above diamond you can confidently say they should have decent of 2/3 of them, even if they may not be nearly as good at a hero they swap to mechanically compared to their main/otp.
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same tbh. Mercy mains trigger me a lot because they act like holding M1 means playing good and if they hold M2 it makes them unique and much better than all comparable Mercy mains.
Besides Mercy is a good pick sometimes but as soon as she stops working you need to swap her as she’s fairly exploitable.
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