To coin some terms, there’s macro climbing and micro climbing. Macro climbing is large jumps in SR or from one rank to another, say 2000 to 2500 to 3000. Micro climbing might be 3-5 games in a row (where the player in question is having very strong results). My questions is more focused on micro climbing.
Yes or no? Interested to know people’s opinions on this.
I have to be honest, I never really spent a lot of time in silver.
I started bronze, climbed to gold, tilt queued to bronze and climbed back to gold (across 2 seasons).
Whenever I was climbing through gold (as a tank), it always felt as though DPS never killed anything.
When I climbed through gold as DPS, it always felt like tanks would shield bot and go AFK. And Supports would always pocket tanks and then blame DPS for not hard carrying the game.
In platinum, the tanks were overly aggressive and would only feed. And the supports would always die trying to keep them alive, and again, flame DPS for not getting a 6k every team fight.
I personally always felt as if I was just getting dumpstered on by better DPS players. Looking back at some of my old gameplay from when I was Gold/Plat (I have some VODs saved on my computer and an old YouTube channel) I look back and see that the DPS who I thought were better, usually just had aggressive tanks when I had passive tanks.
Conversely, whenever I would steamroll a team, my tanks were doing their share of the workload and I was just in the right place at the right time to capitalize.
Games in Diamond and Masters have always felt very balanced for me. Everyone was in Comms. Tanks were VERY capable, supports actually knew how to multi-task and if anything, I always was afraid I wasn’t pulling my weight during games.
TLDR: I say no.
My story is the same as Calculus, started in bronze on both PC and console, and nearly been platinum on both platforms… And i’ve been up and down between low/high gold ever since. Pretty sure I can get to plat but need to get to the next level in my play.
yes, its how matchmaker balance games.
me : playing good
matchmaker : Hold my beer, i gonna fill your team with potatoes to backpack
No.
Thats not how it works.
When you are climbing your opponents get more difficult and it is on you to gain more value then the average player at where you are now at to keep climbing.
If you cant do that you’ll fall back.
No, its not.
i think it can happen occasionally, but more as a side effect.
and only when the matchmaker is really desperate to find you a match due to low player numbers at that moment and rank.
if you get into a lobby where you happen to have the highest MMR, of course the matchmaker will more likely put you with the players that have the lowest MMR to balance out. BUT the difference will rarely be huge, as long as you play in a range and time of day where enough players are available.
maybe if youre like lowest lowest bronze, playing at 4AM, then yea maybe the matchmaker will do weird things. or if your ping is super bad. but generally, it shouldnt have a big impact. (im not an expert but thats what ive gathered so far)
also, it can just as easily happen that youre the player with the lowest MMR in the lobby, being carried by your teammates. statistically it all evens out in the end, if youre not a total outlier.
what are you talking about, i litterally play as tank with plats and with masters 1 game and another.
mathcmaker is just a calculator of MMR which place you with people around same number and if they are grouppe it does a balance
if you have one new good sport Tire for your car, and other 3 are damaged or broken. will you be able to drive it?
Ranked is a joke, since they should have done Solo ladder, Party and Team separate matchmaking. but they don’t have numbers to do so, i play with same 50 persons about same time
the better I play, the higher I climb, and that gives me better teammates because they are a higher rank. 
define better team mates
they have more skill at playing? better aim yes.
willing to play as team- not always, i saw more friendly peopl in gold and low plat than in mid diamond
Good answer! Horrible question on my part! To coin some terms, there’s macro climbing and micro climbing. Macro climbing is large jumps in SR or from one rank to another, say 2000-2500. Micro climbing might be 7 games in a row. My questions was more focused on micro climbing. I do agree with you that generally past a certain point, on the macro climb, every member of the 12 person set will get better as you progress up ladder. I should’ve specified that I was talking about the micro climb. I was so focused on the scenario I was thinking about that I didn’t consider that “better results” was too vague.
maybe you should be asking op to define it if you wanna try to go into the semantics 
But do your opponents get more difficult because the burden shifts to a high-performing player’s shoulders? There’s a number of ways to increase match difficulty. One of which is placing worse players on high-performing theoretical person X’s team. You’re saying that’s not one of the ways OW increases match difficulty?
For me it still feels like this. As you said later in your post, the more aggressive team almost always wins.
I mean… I can’t claim to respect “NO STUPID QUESTION” if I don’t offer your question the same level of effort.
So no… Not a horrible question.
The only time I’ve experienced large jumps is when I’ve boosted accounts. When I was learning to play and grinding my rank… It was literally the ugly uphill race that everyone else endured.
I know I talk a lot of shizz but seriously… If you knew me as a Gold player you would not see the same player you do now. I promise.
I can honestly say I remember having 3-5-10 game win streaks followed by 3-5-10 game losing streaks. I was pretty much a 2.5/2.6 player.
I’d climb to a new SR, and then I’d fall all the way to 2505 or 2450 sometimes even 23xx (if I tilt queue’d too much). But every time I climbed back, I’d always hit one or two more games worth of SR higher than my previous rank.
Of course, my MMR was trash because I was still a trash player so I’d only gain like 20-25 SR. Sometimes if I really popped off I’d get a 30 SR game. But the next game would be the hardest game of my life.
I mean… I understand (to some degree) how the match maker works and MMR absolutely works to make a balanced team.
So its possible you’ll have a lower MMR player on your team but lower MMR doesn’t mean they’re bad players, it just means they probably have lower APM or something.
There are plenty of people who’s SR doesn’t necessarily reflect their MMR. YOUR MMR might actually be the highest on the team. But you may not possess the skill just yet to push over that barrier to carry the game where you need to.
I mean… That’s just how Gold/Platinum felt to me when I was grinding it. And most of my Overwatch ranked experience was in these two ranks explicitly. 
BrightTitan I wrote too much again… 
I am sorry
What rank are you??
More aggressive but also more… Thoughtful? IDK…
Gold games were weird… They’d swing between being the best games ever and games so bad I wanted to cut my face off out of tilt. 
Platinum games always just felt like I was getting DPS diff’d.
Why do you think this is more of a fringe case than a regular occurrence? Considering there’s only two ways to control match difficulty:
Why do you think the first scenario isn’t a common practice?
Damn, Blizzard be decreasing the skill of my teammates?
And it can even boost the skill of players?!?!
Yes, diamond players are better than gold players. I really needed to be more specific in my question, and it’s kind of shabby that I wasn’t. I edited the original post to address this.
My answer is still no…
I was just getting outplayed because I was trash.
Not gonna lie, I’m a fan of you. 
I hear you. And I will say this, (and I have played in groups in groups when this occurs and we have all experienced the same thing and talked about it), the only time I have EVER, and I do mean EVER experienced loss streaks where playing my best still results in crushing demoralizing defeats is after long win streaks. I remember one time after winning maybe 7-10 in a row, and then playing Rialto, the other team finished all three checkpoints with 4:00+ minutes and proceeded to spawn camp us so hard we barely made it over the bridge and didn’t get even get around the first corner. It was one of the worst defeats I’ve ever had. I proceeded to lose about 6-8 more after that, again, playing my best. The increase in difficulty was abrupt and unmistakable. The level of coordination and responsiveness of the enemy teams was not just better, but categorically different. There was cohesion, there was peeling, there was aggression (there was a palpable confidence to the way these teams were playing). I’d reasoned that these are the “test” matches you hear about (employed to slow down or deal with smurfs). This continued for several matches until things went back to normal after some number of losses.
Obviously, some player more skilled than I could’ve carried that match (I don’t know how to quantify how much better they would’ve had to be, but obviously player of skill value X would’ve had to be far above me or the average Plat player, which is what I was at the time).
This scenario is consistent, and I’ve experienced it many times. To be honest, it’s one of the things that caused me to give up on the game.
Isn’t this pretty much the definition of gatekeeping?
So mathematically, the better you are, in order to create that balanced team, the worse your “balancing” teammate on the other end of the spectrum would have to be, correct? Let’s assume there are only two players on a team. And the matchmaker needs to ship a match whose MMR equals, 5 (just a dummy number), and you’re a 8, then your teammate would have to be a 2. And you could be matched against a 6 and 4, either of which would curb stomp the 2 (if they encountered them first, and with bad positioning which is common among bad players, there’s a great chance of that) and then they’d team up and come after you, with synergy. I feel like this is what actually happens in OW and it would certainly go a long way in explaining why there are so many stomps.
Lol, it never feels excessive or redundant, and I enjoy the respectful exchanges. You’re never just theorizing without explaining your logic, which is refreshing. And I think you write with the reader in mind which is great.
Trust me, I feel like I write too much too, but I don’t feel like I could express these points in far fewer words.