I recently saw a video where a streamer was talking about how getting stomped against people at a much higher skill level than you is actually good and helps you improve.
My question is, how exactly? I get in some cases you can see characters do things you wouldnt expect (Low Elo Widow vs High Elo Widow), but in most cases it’s just a sea of frustration because you know you’re playing against someone with a vast amount of experience over you, and you have a very small chance of actually winning.
Every time I’ve fought people in QP from higher ranks, it never feels like a learning experience but rather a “This matchmaking is awful” experience.
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You referring to the SVB Smurf debate? Because it covered the topic pretty well.
The argument in-favor was that you only improve by facing people better than you, and the best way to strive for improvement is to be proven sub-par.
But, the counterargument was that there’s a goldilocks zone of challenge that’s optimal for learning. Too little challenge yields no lessons, and too much challenge detracts from engagement.
The podcast raised many more points for & against, but these were the main ones.
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I think the best way to improve is to play against people which are slightly better than you. Then you get punished for things you normally do and can adjust accordingly. If you play against smurfs which just roll your team then you can’t do anything to adjust your mistakes because your team is busy respawning all the time.
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It was actually ml7’s recent vod of the Starwatch tournament in the first match. I love the guy, but his words confused me there.
I understand fighting people better than you, but getting locked in spawn or constantly rolled by a team of people excessively better never feels good at all
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Putting you against players marginally better than you will probably see you improve and learn new things.
Putting a load of golds against a team with a load of masters players is pointless for all involved.
Sadly this game seems to like putting players with massive differences of SR against each other, making it even less fun than it ever was (which is quite a feat).
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Exactly. There’s only so much I can learn from “Oh, this is what its like to fight a GM while I’m in plat.” Fighting a rank above you or even fighting a high Gold while in low Gold to me is understandable because that’s a reasonable difficulty to help improve your skills since it’s not oppressively difficult.
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It’s simple, higher rank players will punish you for making mistakes which low rank players wouldn’t punish.
Low rank players wouldn’t understand that they are mistakes and wouldn’t learn anything because they have skipped ahead of learning why what they just did was a mistake.
Just as someone who has just learned how the chess pieces move being put against a world champion won’t ‘learn from their mistakes’.
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I agree, but the difference between high and low can actually impede your progress, since if you’re dying too frequently you won’t actually get to play the game to try other strategies
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I’ll play devil’s advocate, but the argument I hear comes from a competitive mentality. (often T500s)
People that are competitive see the unfun defeat of a stomp as an opportunity to improve. It’s not fun, but fun doesn’t really come into the picture if the goal is to win. Defeat is a fuel to improve yourself.
But knowing ML7, I also wouldn’t be surprised if he was making a joke. His sarcasm can be subtle sometimes. I’d need to see the clip.
A lot of it just seems like coping to justify smurf accounts and unranked to GM content, there’s been a significant pushback from the community that high ranked players going into low ranks to mess around actively hurts the game so they have to come up with a counter argument.
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From what I could recall, he was talking about his tournament experience, and that usually the first matches are stomps because all of the lower ranked teams are going against higher ups so the matchmaking can be off balance.
He used to be on the teams getting stomped, and his advice was that it helped because it taught him to keep going. And while its an admirable thought, I don’t agree that the approach generally works and can actually disuade people from improving.
If im playing ranked with the constant factor that 1 or 2 of my 5 games will have a GM Smurf farming me and my teammates for an ego boost or unranked to GM challenge, it doesn’t make me want to improve since nobody is getting to a GM level from Plat in just a few games.
That’s in a tournament setting where people are trying and they will be reviewing the replay with a coach. Your average player this does not apply to since they’re not going to have someone sit through every quick play or comp game to review the replay and work through their mistakes. And when it’s that high of a skill gap you are not going to be able to spot many yourself, you really need a coach or someone way higher skill than yourself.
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You are making mistakes all the time and just not being punished for it. That’s why most of what low rank players are doing is just a long series of rapid mistakes.
If you just rage instead of thinking about what you can do better then you won’t learn from the mistakes at all and you will keep repeating them. It’s not about the rank it’s about your willingness to learn as an individual.
What do you mean? I learn the most when I sit in the death screen for 95% of the game and solely spectate without being able to participate at all. 
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I learn nothing from a match that I win in a stomp fest.
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That is a fair point, tournament and online play are very different so the advice could be solely directed to tournament play rather than general OW play
Wait, are you saying that people that are way better think it’s ok to smurf and ruin the fun for worse players, and justify it by saying “they’ll learn from the experience”? Like, they are trying to make it sound ok that they do it to their viewers?
Having seen several unranked to GMs, these guys know they are ruining many 10s if not 100s of games for people trying to have fun, but they want the cash from the view so they don’t care. That includes ML7 and the like who come across as all nice, but then happily go around stomping all over low level players to look good and make money.
The sad part is that OW2 is so boring and repetitive (same heroes stay meta for way too long) and not that fun to watch and these streamers rely on getting views to make a living, so they have to do stuff that will attract viewers since just playing OW2 normally won’t. I find it hard to understand why they still hang around in such a dead game. The viewing numbers on twitch are terrible and going down.
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The problem is here theres a big difference in what those mistakes might actually be.
For example, a Gold Junkrat player on King’s Row might just spam bombs down chokes and get value that way. A gold player on the enemy team could adapt to this by contesting the enemy junk in an open area off to the side or on high ground to avoid the spam and have a better angle to pressure him from. This is a real time change that a Gold player could reasonably do at their skill level.
If a GM Junkrat however sets up in the backline and KOs a support in 1 second and is already 15m in the air ready to shoot again, a Gold player is not gonna process that well enough to know what the mistake was and how to reasonably play around it. Hell, even GM players struggle in situations like that.
The point is, you can learn from your mistakes, but if every move you make gets punished, even when you’re trying to improve, then it hurts significantly more than it helps.
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Ofc you improve, you might start to use another spawn door after you’ve been running that one same door 5 times in row and got headshotted by top500 widow smurf.
In all seriousness, it will just make you either to uninstall the game permanently or to throw 50 games in row in hopes of easier games.
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