High Diamond/Master Support Player Struggling in Gold

Competitive Discussion
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Hello,

I have been playing Overwatch since Season 1. Mercy is my main hero with over 1k hours on her on my main account. I have been in Bronze where I fell from Gold to around 1450ish way back in season one.

There is something going on, and I thought I would share. I am starting to get a bit annoyed, and do not want to suffer my team with yet another tilted player on Overwatch.

So normally I play Support. I enjoy playing Mercy, Brig, and Ana. I have a couple of other accounts that I play and normally the situation is that I play my best heroes and normally place either diamond or high plat in competitive.

I feel that the system is actually VERY good at determining what range you should be skillwise based on just a couple of QP games before you are able to Q for Comp.

On my other accounts when I started fresh I would check the ranks of the people I was able to. (Used to be easier before private profiles but still doable), and saw that around match 3-4 I would be placed against my normal pool of players in the Plat-Diamond range.

Now for this account I did things a bit different. Originally this account was named DoubleStrafe and I was intending to use it only to use Hanzo because he has always been a favorite hero of mine, but I never put any time into using him. Anyway I level up and again check the ranks of players in my match. Took around 15 matches to start facing mainly golds. I didn’t see many plats or ANY diamonds which makes sense because I am dogpoo on Hanzo lol

Once I finish my support placements I believe I was placed around 2400. Normally I would expect to just cruise to diamond like I normally do, but my experience has been an interesting one, and is the reason I am writing this today. This is what I noticed:

  • I was very frequently matched against the same kind of player I might run across in Diamond/Masters. It was kind of surprising how many very good players are in Gold. Having played a lot of Mercy I have developed a knack for knowing who the carrys are, and it felt like I faced a carry on the enemy team around 70% of the time. It was odd that I kept facing low level accounts like mine who were in Gold but played like they belonged in Diamond+.

  • It is a struggle just to get close losses or wins. The games are close, but I feel like there is a heavy burden on me to perform as close to perfect as possible, and to take riskier plays because my allies are very unpredictable at times and do not position the best. This causes me to have to abandon a lot of players to die because helping would leave me vunerable. This is understandable and I am not saying they should play any different. Just pointing out my experience.

  • I have noticed more cheaters than I normal. I would say around 5% of my games. When I report I get a ‘Thanks for Reporting’ card around 90% of the time when I log back on later.

It came to a point that I questioned if just got much worse at the game. I logged on to my OG account and played some matches in High Diamond/Masters, and after having to adjust for the fact I could trust my allies to be more consistent I was able to play just fine. If you are curious I am a Plat Tank, Diamond DPS, and Diamond/Master Support on that account.

I am just at a loss why my experience is like this when in theory I should just climb back to where I normally play easily. My other accounts did not have this issue. This one I treated a bit differently, but then just came to use it to play the game normally with my normal heroes.

Is it because I am using Mercy/Brig? I don’t believe any hero can be held back just because of the hero. I think when you put in time to improve you can climb on anything, but this account is an anomoly for me.

PF0CG3 <— A recent game of mine that lasted for 22+ minutes. Feedback welcome. Also if anyone would like to inquire about my old account just send me a PM. Also if it means anything I mostly solo Q.

No I don’t care about rigging. Please don’t bother with all that. Just want to know if I am anyone else has experienced similar and what they did as a workaround.

That is all. Thanks for reading.

Love, Peace, and Chicken Grease.

Additional Replay Codes

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Q7SGD8 ← Blizzard World -Loss-

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Everyone who cares about competitive integrity should care!

:smirk_cat:

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I very sure the issue lies with you maining Mercy and Brig, which both are VERY team dependent and cannot carry well on their own, ESPECIALLY in low to mid elo.

Just watch any top ranked Mercy player doing an unranked/bronze to GM and watch their winrates, it is nowhere near the winrates of other heroes like Ana, Bap, Zen and Lucio which all can carry very well with good mechanics.

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Your monkey was afk for the entire defense.

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Oh don’t think I didn’t notice. By the stairs near 2nd point right? Not as good as the feeding hog/rein I had on hanamura who spent the entire match running into the enemy afking and dying, but close.

Good stuff.

To be honest this is the first time I have ever seen people do that in my games, and it happened twice in the same session of play.

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My point is that these reaplays are not gonna strengthen your argument. You are claiming:

and provide two replays of games in which one guy is afk. Well, yeah no sh’t the game is only going to be close if you, the smurf, compensates for the afking team mate.

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I feel like people look wrong at the competitive ladder.

Being higher on the ladder doesn’t mean you’re better so to speak, every rank pretty much has a different playstyle.
One playstyle might be less skilled theoretically but might be harder to pull off in practice in certain ranks, whilst some heroes might be more rewarding than the others.

In my opinion, there isn’t a specific good or bad unless we are talking about a specific playstyle.

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I did say if you want more you can pm me. I just posted games that were tough to play. If you want more games or info just ask, but I don’t wanna just post a bunch that won’t get looked at until someone expresses interest.

I mentioned I am mostly venting here. I will climb in time.

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basically smurfing. so what’s the news here? our forum elite says that they don’t impact your climb. so git gut, I guess?

It’s rigged. You are the designated carry (smurf) in your matches and get potato team mates. On the enemy team is also a smurf to balance you out. For the matchmaker, it’s a “perfect match”. For you, not so much, because you want the climb, not the challenge.

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It’s always been my belief that anybody who finds it easier to play in a higher sr vs a lower sr suffers from the same issue: their impact (value) is somehow reliant on their expectations of their team.

The solution is always the same - work on getting your solo value up! I’m only a mid diamond support but you’ll catch me dead before you catch me losing in gold. I have more fun in lower ranked lobbies because they’re easier.

The long and short of it is, the lower SR the lobby is, the more mistakes there are to exploit. While you may be making less than everyone else as a diamond/masters support, that’s only half of the equation. You should strive to exploit as many of their mistakes as you can. Otherwise you often end up in situations that feel outside of your control. I suspect the matchmaker is better at spotting people who are aggressively climbing rather than defensively climbing, but I can’t really prove that :grin:

I can’t comment much on Mercy because I don’t play her at all, but you can find this value with brig and you certainly can find it on ana. I mean, worst case, lock the nails. Most gold and platinum players don’t know how to deal with it.

My advice to you is to submit a vod to someone of a relatively closely matched loss, where you didn’t know what you could have done better, and very specifically ask them to help you improve your solo value unless they spot some other egregious mistakes. If you don’t know any good vod reviewers there’s likely some on the forums here but you could also drop by emcee on twitch (same url as that name) and he does free vod reviews on the daily :v:

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Yep the matchmaker thinks you’re a smurf and matches you with similar enemies so it’s a fair match / you have a new account and it’s matching you against other new accounts so it’s a higher chance for smurfs. Because let’s face it there are no new players buying the game.

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I will climb eventually so I am not worried that much about it. Was mostly venting about my recent games.

Well it’s not wrong. I am a smurf if I am playing my normal heroes. It is just kind of jarring how different the games down here are, and how there are so many very good players in this elo.

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Well, i’ll tell you why./

IT’s because no matter what the delusional people on this forum want to believe
 1 person can’t win a 6 person game alone. You’re dependent on your team to perform well.

If one person could carry entire teams to victories, the greatest player in world football history, Lionel Messi, would’ve won a world cup. But alas, he hasn’t won anything. Would love for the people on this forum to just tell him, “If you’re good enough, you’d be able t carry the entire team alone”. Just like they tell everybody else bogged down by teams.

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How are your stats as support? Are you frequently getting gold healing and/or the card for most healing at the end of the game? If you’re constantly receiving the card for most healing at the end of every game and still not climbing, then that could suggest something’s up. If however, you’re constantly losing gold medals to your fellow support or enemy support, then that likely suggests that the overall skill of the playerbase has went up, which means you need to get even more stats now than before to rank up.

If you’re constantly performing above your rank stat-wise, the matchmaker should recognize that eventually and start steering you to a higher rank it thinks you belong in by rewarding you more SR points per win.

I don’t know if the matchmaker actually does this, but it makes sense for things like this to exist. Without it, mercy OTP wouldn’t be able to climb out of low elo. So I’d suggest on trying to maintain good stats as much as possible for climbing.

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Gold Healing and high healing numbers isn’t the stat that you should be aiming for nor trying to farm it, because one: it is EXTREMELY easy to farm by going Bap/Ana/Moira/Lucio/Mercy and just healbotting on your tanks.

You won’t win games this way, focus on using your utility offensively and kill enemies to win more, healbotting isn’t how you climb

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Oh this wasn’t about winning, but I was just trying to get to the bottom of why OP wasn’t winning games.

It seems like the overall skillbase of support in bronze in OCE has become so high that often times, I end up losing my gold healing to ally moira or mercy as ana/baptiste. And I just found this interesting because whenever I play in NA, I seem to almost always be getting gold healing (and card for most healing) even in games where I know I performed badly.

Gold medals definitely doesn’t explain how well you’re playing, but it can be a decent indicator of figuring out how well you should be performing at any given elo. Especially if the gold medals are like healing which is hard to get taken out of context, since healing is healing.

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Regarding Gold rank feeling harder than high diamond/masters, is it that surprising? There’s already a general consensus that the lower elo you go, the harder it becomes to consistently win games as support due to lack of coordination which tank and support benefits from the most. Even ML7 has lost a game in Gold despite him playing perfectly, it’s normal. Unless you’re DPS, you can’t really stomp on noobs in low elo as support.

You can hard carry as tank if you go hog or ball in low elo. But if you get countered by the enemy, your ability to hard carry what otherwise would be a losing game is gone since hog/ball are pretty much the only versatile hard carry heroes that the tank roster has.

And as support at least in bronze, often times you’re too busy just trying to keep your constantly out of position, feeding teammates alive to be able to do any meaningful fragging on the side. And supports aren’t really the best at attacking in 2CP either since we don’t have team-wipe ultimates and 2CP comes up frequently in competitive (I wish it was gone already). During defence in 2CP, supports can be quite powerful but there’s a limit to how many consecutive team-wipe ultimates from enemies that a Immortality Field is able to protect.

So basically, you just have to grind your way out of gold even as a high diamond/low master player and I know it probaby feels insulting to you. It felt insulting for me too when I was losing 1200SR games even though I used to hover around 1500 - 1600SR. But if you consistently perform well, I’m sure you’ll climb out of the gold “elo hell” eventually. Think of the bright side, you get to be a smurf for free without buying a new account :stuck_out_tongue:

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By “good players” you mean smurfs. Yes, they are a plague.

Why should we have sympathy for a smurf, complaining about other smurfs? It’s actually quite pathetic.

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If you’re gonna troll can you at least be interesting while you do it?

These other smurfs will not prevent me from climbing. Just might take a bit longer. People have already shared some good insight, so your take fails to impress. Better luck next time.

My profile is open. My MMR is good because I gain more than I lose with wins and losses.

There are a lot of variables in a match so it can be difficult to see what metrics to focus on. For me I usually prioritize like so for Mercy:

Deaths > Offensive Assists > Resses > Defensive Assists > Healing

I have concluded as such. Just had a string of bad games that I normally just bypass on a new account if I just play my mains from the get go. The good thing is I am already climbing from where I was when I posted the thread. I would rather share/vent my thoughts rather than get mad at my team.

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Unless you got to Masters by playing with a premade and are now solo queuing, I’m almost certain that the reason you are struggling to get out of Gold is because Mercy is not that good at carrying.

It’s possible for sure, but a lot more difficult than playing Ana or Bap for instance.

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