Not seeing much ‘and why VOD reviews matter’ in this. This just sounds like like you didn’t exhaust all your resources before sending in your own gameplay. Did you look up guides for your characters? Did you actively catch yourself making mistakes? It’s genuinely not hard to improve your gameplay without subjecting yourself to a VOD, and I don’t understand why VODs matter.
It mostly sounds like they matter at higher ranks and levels of play where it’s harder to find genuine places to find your mistakes other than things like ‘oh, I shouldn’t have gone in there’ etc. But I see pros and coaches do the same mistakes they say not to do quite often, and it usually boils down to ‘someone didn’t use x resource on them when they should have’.
I’m also the type of player that doesn’t adhere to the honestly often toxic positivity I hear from people. So many people tell you’ oh stick with it, you’ll always have a chance of winning’ when it is quite clear that, no, you won’t. Sometimes you just get matchups you will not win, no matter how hard you try–sometimes it implies changing core fundamentals of your gameplay on a game-by-game basis.
When you practice something, which the community of OW seems to universally agree that practicing your heroes is important, you’re not going to be able to out-practice someone who has decided to focus on your characters hard limits. Sure, Ball can outplay Sombra, but if that Sombra has decided to save Hack almost exclusively for said Ball, the best you can hope for is playing around her, which already deals a massive blow to your efficiency, before even any fights come in.
So, I tend to leave my games. It’s easier and faster than constantly trying to adapt. You save time on your games, and the only real downside is your win rate plummets but… win rate already doesn’t matter really. Sure, one can make an argument of like… depriving yourself of meaningful practice, but how many Hanzos, McCrees and Ashes does it take to realize sometimes there’s just nothing you can do about them when they decide to play safe? DPS have crept in power now so hard that no healing and no tanks can survive sometimes even one of them. A Hanzo Storm Arrow plus a shot or two and hitting big tank head hurtboxes takes that tank out in seconds. Faster than it takes to actually dive them with more than one person.
To dive one of these DPS now, it takes 3 or more characters, which seems why dive is practically dead when the DPS being dove know how to play their heroes.
But I got off topic, point is, I don’t adhere to and don’t understand why VOD reviews matter. It sounds like you could have improved if you just took a moment and thought about your own gameplay–you didn’t need any outside sources telling you that.
