This game is just busted. It’s absolutely busted. I have an account in high Platinum (2900) and I also have an older account in silver (1900) that I haven’t used in a while. I hopped on the silver account to duo with a friend of mine. And what I witnessed was unreal.
Too often, matches are legitimately more difficult to win in silver than they are in platinum. It’s absurd. The level of difficulty, team coordination, and general skill you see OFTEN, not just sometimes, or rarely, but OFTEN in silver/gold is mindboggling. It’s simply at too high a level, too often, that far down the ladder. I was playing at the same qualitative level that wins me matches in Plat, but in silver it just somehow wasn’t enough. This creates a weird paradox where you’re playing at a rank that is notoriously considered “bad” and yet, it’s still difficult to win there, even if you’re legitimately above that rank.
So many people of clearly different skills are compressed down into gold and silver that telling people to “just get better” is an absolute lie from my point of view, having witnessed it firsthand. Unless you’re essentially preaching “get as good as a high plat, low diamond player” to get out of freaking silver/gold. To have to be THAT good to climb is preposterous, and it clearly indicates that something is broken SOMEWHERE.
Like clockwork, I’m sure there will be people who say “well hey, I climbed out of silver!” That’s all well and good, but my point is not that it’s impossible to climb out of silver or gold, but that the degree of difficulty for the average silver or gold player is absurdly, unreasonably high. Overwatch has created a system where you have to be FAR ahead of the average gold or silver player to climb out of silver/gold, which is sort of like requiring a freshman to have the knowledge of a junior to pass their freshman classes.
Yes, yes and I know about the lone wolf tactics where you go dps and try to get an early pick and carry, and all that stuff. But that is an incredibly unfun, frustrating, and pressure-laden way to play Overwatch. And it assumes that you even main a character where those types of tactics are viable and you survive these high-risk encounters long enough that you don’t get picked, returning the team fight back to neutrality
“Silver” and “gold” are now meaningless naming conventions, they’re placeholder terms for a giant collection of people who are actually quite good at the game but who for one reason or another cannot climb. I don’t purport to know what those reasons are, but I do know that there are enough of these competent players in silver/gold to present serious impediments to the average player climbing.
Should everyone improve at the game? Yes! No argument there. Should one be required to have the skill level of someone 500-800 pts higher than silver to have any chance of climbing out of SILVER? Hell no.
I had to assure my Silver friend who’s not terrible by any stretch that they were struggling to climb in a hopelessly flawed system, and that it wasn’t all on them. Players are not competing in a neutral environment where skill is the only factor. They are playing in a system with various designs and algorithms, and a system which appears, at this point, hopelessly broken and out of whack. It simply has to do a better job of getting people to where they belong, rather than creating this giant amorphous mass of relatively skilled players all blockading each other from climbing.
And before I get the inevitable “well you don’t deserve to be where you are in plat then,” I have a 75% win rate on my main in plat, which is at 2900, and am still climbing quite easily.