Skill does matter, but getting lucky with your teammates in general (such as getting good teammates or landing shots just right) play the biggest factor more than just being skillful.
You can be good at your role/character but still keep getting dragged down in rank if you are unlucky enough to keep getting crappy teammates.
Trying to crawl up the ranked ladder is basically trying to crawl up out of hell.
Not really. If you play in group, the higher you go with group, the exponencialy harder it will be for you.
Solo q is most effective way to climb, there is only few exceptions like mercy for example, which isnt best hero for solo q.
“just be t500 and climbing is easy”
Thanks jeff.
It’s not a ladder, it’s a bell curve. You don’t climb by playing the game more. You don’t climb by getting better at the game. You climb by getting better at the game faster than everyone else.
If every single player was as skilled as a top 500, 50% would still be in gold and below. Not because they are bad, but because they are not the best.
Groups are due to their oversimplification most likely, they even admitted already that your chances on winning increase in full stacks. Have your highest group member be a mechanical skilled dps player and see for yourself. Keep in mind its simply group size they use to offset groups, now there are a lot of ways to use that in your favor.
Solo queue is far more random and with recent role lock implementation it might have become harder for some roles and players (depends on how its handled). There is a reason why a lot of games don’t allow mixing if it isn’t for queue time reasons 
Its not, i dont care what they say. I have my own experience. Only advantage of playing in stack is if all members are equaly improving as they are climbing. Which is not the case with randoms in lfg at all. That only works in team where members play together several times per week and taking it seriously.
If you will be playing with randoms or friends who are stuck only result will be you being tilted as you have to carry them hard everytime when they climb over their elo.
The game matches you with teammates with similar MMR to yourself and your MMR is based on your stats.
I wouldn’t have 6 accounts topping out within 50 SR of one another if it was luck. That type of consistency doesn’t happen by accident.
Is this reaction to me? Becsuse i am pretty sure your mmr goes up even if you perform bad but win games.
No I was replying to the OP.
in order to climb, you already have to carry in solo q. You wont climb without being an impact player that sticks out, with groups you simply alter the conditions and avoid randomness.
You gain control by preselecting, and yea if you don’t do it properly (randomly) you’ve gained no advantage over random team, nobdoy claimed its guaranteed. If you simply group up with players after a successful match you haven’t really utilised groups properly.
You still have to outplay the other team but try doing that with similar skill difference yet on your own under random conditions every match.
Anyone who truly thinks this is just not good enough at the game and overestimates their own skill.
But as you go up as 6 stack not only you will have great change to face people who have serious coordinated teams but you will have to carry them harder and harder as you win games. In solo you are usualy balanced ou with others around your skill level. You carrying for example friends in group is artificialy making their sr higher than they belong.
If you will go play as 2500 player who belong higher or who is simply on way up by improving, lets say to 2800 and you will take another 5 2400 friends, who dont belong higher(meaning they are stuck in gold) every game which will be victory will put you under more preassure as you have to carry other 5 more and more as you win games.
In solo q, you will usualy get players where some belong higher and some belong lower so it will even out.
Ok… If you think skill has nothing to do with climbing, ask yourself what would happen if you put a high Masters/GM player in Diamond & below. Would they rely on luck to get out? Or would they get out of that rank fairly easy? With your assumption on how ranked works we can draw the conclution that players are equally good in all ranks and there’s no skill disparity what so ever?
If you wanna climb do more than the bare minimun on your preferred role. Go above and beyond, play like you’re better than your peers in whatever rank you find yourself in.
Solo queue is easier because if the inherent disorganization. Any given match is random people assembled in a team based on having roughly equivalent SR. But they won’t necessarily work well together as a team.
A good team will beat good individual players playing disjointly in Overwatch; barring the individual players’ skill being 2 ranks above the average rating. But for everyone mechanical influence on a match will hit a “hard cap”.
When you solo queue you minimize the chances that you will have strong team synergy, but you also minimize the chances you will encounter it.
Grouping is a more controlled way to climb if you are truly encountering wild swings in match quality solo queueing. You will play matches with the same group of people. These people want to work together, as those are the players that use LFG (usually). You remove the randomness of matchmaking, but are now in an environment where the team you face will be equally organized. So your games will be more difficult and hotly contested because good teamwork is really strong in Overwatch.
I wouldn’t go as far as to call solo queue totally luck based, in fact I think that way of playing benefits the more technically skillful player. Those will be the only ones that climb consistently in an environment like that because they are more likely to single-handedly influence more matches on their climb until their lack of teamwork catches up with them. But honestly, that won’t be until Diamond/Masters if they are really strong mechanically.
TLDR; solo queue IS wildly random, but succeeding in it is NOT based on luck, but your skill (and mental fortitude…).
SR Always goes up with a win, but MMR specifically does not have to according to Jeff Kaplan.
I’m pretty sure I saw him say that MMR could have zero change on a win or loss due to other factors, during his interview with Seagull.
Bronze player who will team up with smurfs and they will go to gm together as smurf will be dafran level of player will still have bronze mmr but gm sr? If games are created by using mmr, that would cause insane differenct between team balance. I had friend who was boosted from silver to masters and i dont remember anything like that.
So i am pretty sure your mmr will adjust tcloser to your sr if you win a lot and mmr and sr are way too far from each other.
SR “chases” MMR generally. They do stay pretty close (of course they’re very different numbers where MMR 0 roughly equals SR 2350, and MMR can be as low as around -3.0 and as high as 3.0 or so), but just don’t have the same rules. SR always goes up on a win, and always goes down on a loss, but MMR does not HAVE to. MMR can adjust much faster than SR.
I don’t think that’s possible. If a person was being carried hard by someone, their SR gains would be much smaller than the carry. The carry would have to go throw again to stay within the 1000 SR limit.
Honestly, throwers and carrying are why I want Competitive to be split into Solo queue and Team queue.
That’s simply statistically wrong. In a given match, there is an equal percent chance that every random on any given team will be either good or bad, throwing or smurfing. The distinction is your existence on your team.
If you are just slightly better than average for your SR, then your team will have a slight statistical advantage. This may not impact a single game, but in the long-term it will, as you consistently slightly outperform, you provide slightly more value to your team, and you slowly climb.
As long as you are always doing your best for your position, then you’ll get to the rank you belong in, with only a slight caveat - climbing requires improving. It’s definitively easier to fall than it is to climb, as losing a game generally requires much less effort than winning a game.
People don’t climb because they’re lucky. If you get lucky you’ll have a short winstreak that will pop you up ~200 SR or so, but if you actually climb, then you need much more than just luck on your side.
I don’t see them ever putting in a Solo-queue only mode. This game was not designed for that, and they already made a giant concession to the playerbase at the very beginning during open beta that Competitive would allow stacks of less than 6. This game was meant for strict, organized teams of 6.
That’s basically what I’m saying the entire time.
Leaving and similar actions cause zero change same as broken matches