I think a big reason that I’m not enjoying this game anymore is that I care too much about my SR. Like to the point where there are days that I just don’t want to play because I know that I’ll just be really pissed off if I play a competitive match and lose. Even when I have a really high win rate, like 70+% on a hero, I just feel super negative about the prospect of losing and messing up my win rate.
I just don’t want to care anymore. I want to be able to play a competitive game and have fun without caring whether I win or lose SR. HOW DO I DO IT?! TELL ME BROS! I don’t even really enjoy winning, it just gives me the feeling of relief that I didn’t lose.
I tried switching over to quickplay to mitigate that feeling. And it kind of worked, to the point that I don’t care whether I win or lose in quickplay. But that mode is just a joke… There is no sense of progression, as I absolutely destroy my opponents 90% of the time with a 10+ k/d ratio, but the game doesn’t give me harder opponents.
For some reason, my quickplay MMR thinks that I am a silver or gold in quickplay and gives me silver/gold opponents most of the time. And I noticed that people that play mainly quickplay are just much worse at the game than people that mainly play comp. Like it feels like they are 2+ elos lower than their comp-playing counter part in terms of skill and game sense. So when I am playing against gold quickplay opponents, I feel like I am playing against bronze-level comp players every game and there’s just no challenge. Like if you do one thing that works one time, it will work every time for the rest of the game, the other team will never adapt or try to do anything to counter it. For example, I’ve been playing tracer in quickplay lately, and I just flank and destroy enemy back line and then move up and destroy their squishies from behind. Every single time, and the enemy team will never figure out how to stop it or try to protect against the flank. But if the enemy team has a solid defense and sticks together, your team will literally just throw their bodies at the enemy one at a time and trickle for the entire round, never working together. In both situations the game just kind of feels like a waste of time with no teamwork whatsoever
Not sure if this will really help but I used to care a lot about my SR, until I realized that I suck. Now I just kinda play comp for $#!ts and giggles. If I win great, if I lose then so be it
From my experience 2/3 gamers are BOTS. Its generally either up to you or you and a teammate to carry. If you’re lucky you only get 3 teammates that are BOTS and you obtain a quality gaming experience.
That’s true there are a lot of BOT games, I actually had a pretty good 1 today. We lost the team fight on volskaya point A defense, so what does our reaper do? He goes back all by himself, walks right up to the entire enemy team and attempts a death blossom. He failed miserably as expected. Then right after that our mercy stands still out in the wide open and gets easily picked off. What a game…
I fixed this problem by buying another copy of Overwatch for $20 during a sale (Not to smurf) and solely played competitive on it. I also didn’t care what SR I landed at as it was not my main account (Though I suspected I could land much higher)
The main reason I did this was also because I was almost Diamond in season 3, a hand injury left me out for 3 seasons. I played equally as well in Season 7 but barely placed gold (Absence killed my account). I tried climbing this account back during season 8 before retiring it due to horrible matchups, but eventually said **** it and bought another copy of the game, placed Diamond, and have gotten close to Master. Ever wonder why this is a thing people have to do?
Try to focus on playing better… It’s weird, for some reason I’ll drop to like 2700, get stuck there for like a week and a half frustrated, then focus on myself and jump back to diamond… Try to just focus on getting better, like, see if you can judge your success on performing well (getting kills that you need to, not dying etc… NOT MEDALS)
Simply put you are at the worst SR possible for caring about your SR:
If your SR < 2000 you really don’t need to care about SR at any point you can just one-trick Pharah or S-76 and move your SR back into gold - so every season you get the competitive points for gold.
If your SR > 3000 your incentives are aligned, just focus on playing better and winning games:
– There is no PBSR - no need to pad stats.
– Your now in the top 14% of players and as you climb higher you get fewer and fewer players.
The bracket of 2000 - 3000 SR is the worst because it represents 57% of the player base so roughly speaking every time you climb 200 SR you are climbing through 10% of the player base - hence the games you play become significantly different.
To put it another way losing SR can dramatically increase the number of potatoes you get in game (from your perspective).
So I only really have one piece of advice:
Be comfortable playing about 300 SR lower (in your case 2200).
You will find that if you want to win games you can do so fairly easily, but if you just want to play around on a “fun” hero you don’t have to stress too much about your SR.
As a rule of thumb you can gain back 300 SR in about 5 hours if its SR you have lost due to “screwing around”.
I would remember that the important thing is to improve not having a big SR.
Consider the current season (and probably the next one, since 11 is almost done) as a “training” season. the season after that is going to by your climbing one.
Focus on increasing you play time in competitive rather than your SR. Playtime cannot decrease no matter the amount of trolls, smurf, thrower, unluckers you get (just like improvement,you cannot get worse by playing more). So if you were playing 20 hours. Set a goal to reach 40 hours next season.
improvement is about “intelligent grinding”, so use this training season to record some of your defeats and anlyse them. Submit them to a better player if you cannot find out mistakes yourself.
I’m having the same problem maining Rein. I didn’t really care about my SR when I was bronze; I was focusing on positioning, shotcalling, ult management, etc but now that I was 2 games from plat and got into a losing streak I started getting obsessed with not dropping rank…not because I think I’m a great player or anything but because when I hit gold I finally started getting heals and able to play Rein properly, instead of just a moving shield and I really don’t want to go back to that.
If your below diamond, forget about sr and focus on your stats. Screw everybody else in the game. Pick your best solo dps such as soldier, phara etc someone that can self sustain. Never die the entire match, and miss the absolute least amount of shots possible. Always save ults until you know you will get huge benefits from them. Also damage received is a huge stat that blizz looks at, take the least amount of damage as possible as well. If you know that a teamfight is over and you cant safely poke, then stand in spawn until the team wipes and respawns.
Basically screw your team, play for yourself. Your losses will be less, and your gains will be higher.
And everybody on this forum wonders why soloq is such a mess, it basically forces terrible teamwork. and the poor souls that support/tank do it out of the kindness of there hearts, or naivety of how the system really works.
I put on I Don’t Wanna Care by Lupe Fiasco and all my problems dissipate.
Real talk tho, it’s just a number. Play comp to get better and enjoy yourself in an environment where people try to win. If I cared about SR I would have never gotten competent with Ana or Doomfist. But in the end I’m here to enjoy myself and play with my friends, not worry about a number that is literally only important to me and me alone.
You wanna know how to not care about SR? Just remember that life is absurd and that we are hurling through space on a giant ball of dirt and one day we will die and OverWatch won’t matter, so just have fun.
You can’t tell a person who has never been higher than his current rank that he can win easily. If he could, he would do it.
You have been higher than his rank, so for you it’ll be a breeze to escalate in his rank.
You can’t really carry against people you think are your equals. It’s kinda like a mental thing. That’s why for people higher, when they play in lower ranks, they think ‘oh scrubs, this should be easy’.
I agree that pharah could be a nice pick to climb up with. But soldier, as he is now, not so much. At least not as good as pharah.
Personally for me, I’m in the same situation as he is. But I don’t wanna use pharah just to climb cos that would be try herding. It takes the challenge out of the game for me. So what happens when I climb with pharah then want to use Mccree in a higher Elo? I’ll be back down to my original rank in no time.
Mccree is a better pick, but he cant self sustain like i was saying as well as soldier, your not so much looking to be the team carry, your looking for best stats. Between two games if you have above your rank in stats and lose you lose less, if you win you win more. Its a game of averages, if you can play mccree and just stay in the backline protecting the healers while aiming carefully you should have high stats, but you need to watch the other teams comp.
This is why i suggest soldier, he can easily reposition himself, he is forgiving on the accuracy stats vs mccree, and can basically slot into any team without issue.
For tanks your looking for damage blocked, damage received and ultimate kills/stuns. rein and zarya are huge playmakers for this. Hog can be deceptive, you might think your doing extremely well and have gold medals but the curve for him is low damage received, high kills. Hard to do with hog without a lucio or zarya.
Thanks for the advice, bros… I actually DID create an alt account to play on. I did my placements on that account with DPS characters (mainly soldier) and placed at 2740. I played a couple more games as DPS and climbed another 100 SR to 2840 and had diamond within striking distance (I honestly think I am a diamond quality DPS based on my overbuff stats [90+ percentile on most major stats on my dps characters as well as 77% win rate with soldier this season in high gold/plat level games]).
I then decided to switch over to playing support because I was getting nervous about having to play DPS at a new high level and wanted to chill out and just support my team (I think I’m a very good Zen & Ana player as well). And I figured that at high-plat level, I could trust my DPS teammates to be competent in their roles. Unfortunately, that’s when it all came crashing down… I literally had 10 games in a row where my brainless DPS teammates would lock doomfist + junkrat against a pharmercy combo and refuse to switch regardless of how much I pleaded with them to go hitscan (which is actually my strongest role), making these actual unwinnable games. It felt like every single game that I played support, my team got the bad dps players on it, while the enemy team got the good dps players on it. After that, I just tilted into oblivion and started playing random troll characters, causing my SR to tank even further on that account (I think I played like 10 games in a row as bastion, lul)… But yeah, making an alt account didn’t really help because I still cared about my SR too much (since my SR on my alt ended up getting a lot higher than on my main account, before dumb DPS teammates ruined my SR). I should never have entrusted my teammates to play DPS. If you want a job done right, you gotta do it yourself is the lesson I learned.
I think a lot of the reason I am getting so upset about my SR is that I feel like I am not at the correct ELO (I believe my reasoning for feeling this way is pretty solid). I feel like I am at least a diamond-level player and that puts a lot of extra pressure on myself to avoid losses and makes losing (or the potential for losing) feel extra bad. Because then I just thinking “omg, now I’m even further away from being where I belong” and that just causes me to lose motivation to play anymore
