After yesterday’s wonderful discussions on top500 smurfing, I think I can offer a solution to people who think unranked to gm is good and educational. If you bother to call it “education,” I think you should also care about the ethics of it, right? And a top500 player starting in silver lobbies is not very ethical, and I hope everyone agrees on that, cuz these people did not give their consent for a top500 dude to steamroll them and “educate them.”
Here’s what I suggest to all the content creators who carve to educate people.
Make separate lobbies for each rank with 9 people. Those will be bronze, silver, gold, plat, diamond, master lobbies. You have the audience and you can form these lobbies, just like Jay3 does.
Start from bronze, play with the first team, and then switch the teams (so people don’t blame for bad teammates and etc). If you win on both sides, you can prove the obvious: skill ranks you up.
After each win on both teams, move to the next lobby, silver. Do the same, if you win both, move to gold, and etc, you get the point.
Win your masters lobby game, you "get gm,” you educated people, you did not smurf, you did not ruin games for others, you made your audience happy that can play with you and against you, you can comment during the match and explain, share the match replay codes with everyone too. You excluded smurfing and imitated ranking up to gm without harming anyone’s gaming session.
If you bother to call your unranked to gm “educational,” then please have some ethics. Otherwise it’s smurfing, cuz top500 dude playing matches in silver-gold lobbies with people who did not consent to be educated is just bad. I have seen my wife playing in silver against obvious smurfs, and it’s so obnoxiously bad…
Streamers won’t do any of what you suggested because it’s far less effort to just make an alt account and play ranked, and that’s what has proven to give them the most clicks. I doubt many of them are actually motivated to educate people, because if they truly were, they would do so in ways far better than “unranked to GM” that don’t involve ruining the experience of lower ranked players (and often unnecessary rudeness and smack talk), such as coaching & VOD reviews for example.
Obviously. Have you ever watched one of them? Do not get me wrong, smaller creators definitely put the effort in. But the people who regularly do these? Nah. I do not even know why they bother to put educational in the title. If I saw that and wanted to learn, realized I was lied to, I wouldn’t watch their content ever again. But maybe that is just me. It is pretty clear Overwatch players do not have the highest standards or we would not be here in this current state.
The content may be educational and somewhat useful to some, and will have the potential to educate a large number of people to at least some degree.
Coaching will be more effective per individual. However, it will also help less people as it is personalized. It is also less convenient for both the coach and coachee, and good coaching is rarely, if ever, free.
These are the two realistic options to help people accelerate their improvement as a player. Not taking players into a no-stakes custom lobby. The kind of players who would participate in such an activity will be different than many of the other players you may encounter during a normal ranked game through the matchmaker. (In short, its a different environment)
Even if it was educational, it’s only educational the first time someone does it. I’ve seen some individuals do multiple unranked to GM runs and it’s exactly the same fundamentals being ‘taught’ with little to no difference.
Unranked to GM Sig : “So I’m not going to use gravitic flux here because we are down a load of players and just need to regroup”
Unranked to GM Zarya : “So I’m not going to use graviton surge here because we are down a load of players and just need to regroup”
Yeah, I think it can be educational, as long as there hasnt been another done recently enough that the hero it was for has received no significant changes, or the game itself has not changed significantly enough.
Theres also stuff to learn about each hero that is specific to them, even if there is a lot of overlap of fundamentals.
Yeah there’s hero specific stuff to learn, but I don’t think those things are rank specific. I could learn the same from someone talking through their play in a GM game.
However this would require effort and they don’t actually care about educating people and nothing is to be learnt from this anyway…
With even less effort they could just ask people to send in their videos from xyz ranks where they could break everything down, but the thing that gets them clicks is them actually trashing the server for “teh lolz.
It’s free advertising for blizzard so they don’t care to do anything about this
Dafran is the perfect example.
He was the guy calling everyone out on smurfing and how bad it is.
No one cared and as a streamer it’s easy money so he decided to do it on every character.
And he said „don’t blame me, call out the company allowing it!“
And smurfing is a thing since forever, every competitive ranked game has them.
You can’t play league without getting smurfed.
You can’t play valorant without getting smurfed.
It’s part of the gaming culture, is it good or ethical? Hell no.
Will it change someday? Probably not.
So find a way to deal with it.
Try to coach your wife, if you know any fundamentals about the game, I bet your wife can learn them from you.
She doesn’t have to quit or give up.
Literally everyone I know, had go through that process to succeed.
It was hard and not fun.
I started in plat back in the day, dropped to low gold and had to work my way up.
And it took me 5 seasons to get to gm.
It was frustrating to get smurfed on, masters players literally gatekept everyone in high plat/low diamond.
It felt like the Everest to climb on.
I didn’t gave up, I wanted that.
And so did everyone else, who was not gm since season 1.
Even outside of rigging it means they are his fans he picked in discord, they will be playing a lot more coordinated than say a solo q lobby, also most would be trying to impress him and stuff.
it will make for not so good matchups.
Not to mentions teams will know who is awkward and focus him too.
That doesnt matter to him though or people he is trying to educate,
I will say this off all the u2gm trash out there, awkward is actually educational and applicable, the issue is most dont actually follow it properly and use it as a excuse to throw,
this is just a bs excuse and we all know it. They just like to smurf and stop on low elo players, it gets views and its easy to do, that’s all there is to it.
