So there are a lot of people (as usual) complaining about their rank, or not even complaining but not understanding why they are at their rank.
I’m compiling a list here (from the viewpoint of someone who has been Master every season since at least Season 8) of all the ways someone could have deficiencies in their play that could cause them to be stuck in their rank. I will be posting the short list with no descriptions then go into more detail beneath them.
Hero Pool
Hero Knowledge
Map Knowledge
Gametype Knowledge
Mechanical Skill
Awareness
Reaction Speed
Strategy
Good Hardware/Internet
Dealing With Pressure
Not Tilting
Communication
Hero Pool: This is how many and which heroes you can play effectively, directly affecting how many and which heroes you can counter and shut down if needed, in addition to being able to fit into more team comps. This is very important. If you can only play, for example, Reinhardt and Orisa, as soon as you get into a game with a Rein or Orisa one-trick, you’re now in serious trouble because you will be performing at a sub-par level no matter which hero you fill with, as Rein and Orisa together can theoretically work, but it’s not ideal. If the enemy team has a Pharah (or, worse, a Pharmercy) and you only play projectile DPS characters, you are an active detriment to your team because nobody can depend on you to deal with them.
Hero knowledge: This is knowing exactly what all of the characters in Overwatch do, who/what they are strong or weak against, and how they are typically going to be behaving throughout the game. On maps with death pits, for instance, if the enemy team has a Lucio, you know you will have to be VERY careful around those pits because Lucio will be actively trying to boop your team into them. Positioning yourself is a very important part of playing any hero correctly. If you’re widowmaker, you don’t want to be playing the same way you would be with reaper, for instance. You have to know what kinds of environments are good and bad for your hero, or even your team as a whole, to be in.
Map Knowledge: This one is critical. Map knowledge is an awareness of a map’s potential routes, chokepoints, flank routes, and strategic places to lock down or avoid. If you have no map knowledge and you go against a flanker, you will have absolutely no idea they’re behind you until they’ve gunned down at least one person. If you only know of one way to siege a location, the enemy team will only have to defend against that one angle, whereas if your team tests all of the possibilities in your attacks, you might find a route the enemy is not comfortable or efficient in defending. This is true for the flip side as well, you need to know how to deal with enemies coming from all potential attack paths.
Gametype Knowledge: This covers awareness of all facets of how each gametype works, including but not limited to how overtime works, how much time is given for each round, how the ticks on the objective work, how the cart physics work (including allowing things like bullets and earthshatters to go underneath it) and the differences in cart speed based on allies near it. This is not the worst thing to be lacking in, but it’s not good either. If you only need to stall the enemy for 45 seconds for one tick of the first point on the final round and then bring a team with an entirely unsuitable defense for the map, you will get rolled right over on the first engagement and lose the game almost immediately.
Mechanical Skill: We all knew this would be on here. It doesn’t matter how well you know the game if you can’t hit the broad side of a roadhog. Mechanical skill covers your aim, reload timing, movement weaving, map traversal, and split-second decisions based on what’s currently happening. If you lack in any of these areas, you will have a much harder time climbing. If your aim is really good but you can’t make a snap-decision to literally save your life, you will frequently be dead. Reaction speed ties into this so I won’t be writing that one up.
Awareness: This one is all about your hearing, your ability to decipher what’s going on, and your ability to predict what everyone else is actively trying to do or set up to do soon. Reaction speed is also a part of this. If you see an enemy Rein getting a bit more adventurous than usual, if you have enough awareness, you’ll know he’s likely fishing for a “fat shatter”. If you lack awareness, you’ll sit there right in front of Big Daddy Rein and take it like a good little boy when he decides he wants the Play of The Game. If a teammate of yours is making pain sounds from somewhere off your screen nearby, you need to be able to figure out why ASAP and help them if they need it, or they’ll soon be dead and you’ll likely be next.
Strategy: This is very important. Strategy in Overwatch is all about picking the right tools (heroes) for the job, creating a plan of attack, reacting and changing the plan (and heroes) based on what the enemy is doing (or not doing) to stop you, managing your ult charge and timing effectively, target prioritization, and anything else that involves making choices. If you spend a ton of time doing something completely ineffective because your plan is bad or you can’t effectively execute it, you’ll lose over and over again to that same situation until you figure out what you’re doing wrong and make changes to fix it. If you’re always blowing ults after a fight is already lost or so early it makes no difference, you will be one ult down in the next teamfight and have a much harder time.
Good Hardware/Internet This is self-explanatory. If you’re generally a better player than others at your rank, if you have a garbage mouse or controller that has sketchy movement, bad buttons, or periods where it won’t register what you’re doing, you will frequently lose engagements you should have won. This goes for monitors as well. Something is currently wrong with my monitor for Xbox, and every few minutes my screen will tear horizontally at the top and work its way to the middle of my screen, causing a huge distortion, before it fixes itself. If this happens at a critical moment where I really need to see what’s in front of me, I might miss every shot I try to take while that distortion is happening. Having a good, stable setup (including internet that is sufficiently fast and doesn’t randomly drop you) is very important.
Dealing With Pressure and Not Tilting You have to be able to keep a clear head. If you get repelled from an objective a few times and immediately start thinking the game is over, you’re creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. You will start focusing less and making even more mistakes. Sure, teammates can be inexcusably bad, but if you start focusing more on that than on the game, you will slowly sink into a similar level of play throughout the match. You’ll start not caring, not focusing, making more mistakes, and bringing the rest of the team down with you.
As for pressure, you need to be able to not start flubbing up everything you are trying to do when it’s crunch-time and the game’s outcome could literally depend on you not flubbing everything up. Missing a critical shot, misfiring an ult, focusing the wrong target, not healing or otherwise doing enough to protect a teammate, and many other things can cost you an entire game at times. When you’re sweating, breathing less, and cramping up, your consistency can win or lose games.
Communication: This one is admittedly broadly overrated. If you are lacking in some of the things above, like strategy, awareness, and team comp building, then communication is highly valuable. If, however, you are almost never given valuable information from teammates’ callouts and nothing productive is coming from chat, the best thing you can do for yourself (if you don’t plan on doing callouts yourself, for a myriad of very good reasons) is to turn voice chat completely off, and text chat too if you’re on PC. The chat can be very distracting if teammates are not using it properly (this is called trash comms, which includes but isn’t limited to talking about things that aren’t related to the game, making every callout 3+ times in a row, making bad calls, talking to someone else in the room with them, loud music, a terrible mic, everyone talking at once, etc), you are better off disabling it than trying to focus on the game through it. Most critical things you can communicate to your team are on the comms wheel. This is a widespread problem even up in Masters, supposedly the top 3%(?) of the playerbase. I literally went on an 8-game win streak as soon as I disabled chat, because I was suddenly laser-focused on the game and could hear everything better. I didn’t need callouts because I was already aware of them and there were no distractions.
If you are in bronze, with absolute certainty, you are lacking in almost all of these categories. That’s literally how bad you have to be to be bronze. Being proficient in just two categories would be enough to shoot you up to at least mid-silver. Most golds are deficient in the majority of the categories but typically have a decent handle on a couple of them. By the time you reach platinum you’re probably decent at about half the list, diamond is only marginally better, masters typically are good in most categories but can still be terribly deficient in a few, and GMs/top500s are good at just about everything.
This list took a long time to write. I hope it doesn’t die like my last topic.