There has to be a better way to get out of bronze

Competitive Discussion
1

I am new to gaming so i deserve to be in bronze but bronze is so frustrating. For the following reasons. I am sure the rest of you have seen them. How have you navigated it to make game play more fun without getting exasperated?

  1. Tanks late to the front line. Zero has already sounded and they are still on their way.

  2. Team members just of exploring the map. They are actually not fighting at all just looking around.

  3. leavers (we all get those)

  4. no clue about good positioning. I see DPS run into “suicide zones” all the time.

the list goes on. Theses are just a few.

3 Likes
2

Nobody ever said comp was supposed to be fun…

Gamesense, positioning or raw aim will get you to plat.
Gamesense is going to be the hardest to come by, but it comes with playing and paying attention to everything.
There is actually a lot going on in a match that you need to keep track of as you climb. The better you are at that the better you understand when to use situations to your advantage.

Watch back your games to see what was actually happening. If you hit Ctrl i it gives you a good overhead in the playback.

3

There is a good way. Don’t do those stupid things yourself and do it consistently.

All it takes to really climb is to play the game better than the elo you’re in - be it positioning, ult usage, mechanics or callouts.

Your team mates might do stupid stuff all the time but it’s not your job to make them climb - focus on climbing / improving yourself.

4 Likes
4

To get out of bronze you have to learn how to play the game and try to consistently find one other person you can work with from your role to win team fights. Those fights will win you rounds. Those rounds will win you matches, those wins will lead to you climbing.

If you are in bronze and can’t get a 60% or higher winrate, you are struggling for a reason. Identify it and fix it, if you can’t get advice from people who can coach you. Many coaches trying to make a name for themselves offer free coaching.

5

How to get out of Bronze: Play better than a Bronze player.
You are frustrated that Bronze players play like Bronze players. Relax. That’s why they are in Bronze to begin with. Same as you. Stop focusing so much on your teammates and just worry about yourself.

Play better than a Bronze and you will climb out of Bronze. Focus on your teammates and you will never stop feeling frustrated even if you were in GM.

2 Likes
6

Focus, focus, focus.

Season 16 I climbed from 600 to 1340, Season 17 I climbed from there to 2100. My peak in Season 17 is the highest I’ve ever been. I was stuck in Bronze for a number of seasons. I was using hardware that limited my ability to aim and acquire targets. Fixing that enabled my focus on playing a single hero to be more fruitful.

A few things to think about:

Are you playing too many heroes? You can’t be good at everything, try one tricking a self sustain hero such as Mei, Roadhog, Moira, Soldier 76, etc.

Do you have any hardware or settings that are a major impediment? Go look up videos about mouse sensitivity… Check to make sure your monitor doesn’t have a huge amount of input lag… Is your ping dramatically inconsistent or horribly high? These things won’t prevent you from climbing, but it can make it unreasonably hard.

Record your games / use the replay feature. If you want someone online to help you identify some problems to focus on, you’ll need to record them. Use the replay feature to watch what the enemy did each time you got killed. Review your position for every time you died, and figure out ways you can make yourself safer or more deadly to the enemy team. The best games to learn from are close losses.

Never allow yourself to blame teammates. Always accept responsibility for your SR. It’s under your control, you CAN get out of bronze.

Play more games. Doing placements and then only playing 2-3 more games in a season is not going to change ANYTHING about your rank. You really need to get in 50-100 games in a season to make any significant improvements in your skill and rankings.

Don’t expect to win every game. If you’re in the SR you belong, then you would expect very close to a 50% win rate. If you’re better than your rank, you might win 55%, 60%, maybe even 70% of your games, but you’ll never win them all. Don’t get discouraged about losses. Close losses are the best for learning.

Just because someone is a higher rank than you doesn’t make them a good coach. Take advice with a grain of salt, and get information from multiple sources. Jayne on twitch and youtube is an amazing coach, and he gives a great deal of good information in his videos. Sometimes his advice doesn’t feel very applicable to Bronze, so don’t worry if it feels like you can’t do what he says to do. Especially if it is trusting teammates related. Get to Gold, then worry about how teammates should expect each of the other roles to behave. You’ll still be disappointed if you want things to be like the pros, but you can start looking for good synergies as you get higher.

4 Likes
7

From bronze it should be the easiest to climb out.

Record your games (the worst game possible) and let some plat / dia + review it
Or better some coaches like jayne as they can think inside the elo better than a hard stuck plat/dia

And work on the biggest mistakes you do

Maybe swap your heroes?

8

This is some good advice but I would expand this a bit. I am a tank main and I did a few experiments with climbing out of Bronze and Silver ranks as a tank. I’m a high plat/low diamond tank and I had a hell of a time trying to climb out.

The main reason is I tried to coordinate and play with my team way too much. I basically was giving my enemy and sadly, my own team, too much credit.

The best way to climb out of Bronze as a tank is to focus on yourself because trusting your team will hold you back. ( don’t go rushing in solo of course but focus on your own aim and situational awareness)

Also, team dependent tanks like Rein/Zarya will make it harder. I’d stick to Hog/Orisa for easy self reliant value. Winston and Sigma also are great but they require a lot more skill and have some pretty obvious weaknesses.

3 Likes
9

hey everyone, thanks for your responses. Got some good things to think about.

10

Welcome to bronze hell.

11

Moral of the story: You too can be gold in 4 months of coaching, focus, determination, and sweat!

Just don’t count on ranking up as DPS because queue times. A normie has to have the Overwatch game client open for 60+ hours for +1000sr.

And imagine how many pharahs, widows, doomfists, bastions, etc etc, you’ll have to literally solo solve as support to net dem gains. Its a solid ~20 hours of frustrating work to go up a tier as support, if you hard carry 60%.

There just insn’t enough upwards mobility to go full tryhard anymore. Not for pixels/rank in a game that is basically euthanized.

12

Are you expecting to be given gold for free? I’m confused what you even mean.

Edit 1:
People should not be given a rank that they haven’t earned, and don’t belong in. Everyone is happier when all of the people in the rank have as similar skill levels as possible.

Edit 2:
I didn’t work that hard to “fix my rank”, I worked that hard to improve from belonging in Bronze to belonging in Gold.

Edit 3:
I do not think there are large numbers of people who are in the wrong rank. Brand new accounts potentially have incorrect rankings right out of placements, but by the time they play 25 games their rank is pretty accurate. There is no ELO Hell. There is only getting to higher ranks by getting better at the game.

3 Likes
13

Nice jumping to an extreme lol. What was there to be confused about? It would take months to casually rank up in the currrent system, even if you were ALREADY good enough.

If you gave someone an ‘instantaneous’ skill change (e.g. bronze to gold ability), a 60% win ratio yields 1-2 wins per hour, so maybe 50sr per hour, or 20 hours for 1000sr.

This is giving way to much benefit of the doubt to the system. Its mostly only platinum+ smurfs and the annecdotes of their boosting that could 60%+ out of bronze, and most of that was via dps hard carry pbsr. We haven’t talked about the new regime, which is an even more fetid cesspool of smurfs, trolls, and idgaf than before.

You’re basically saying the ‘skill’ required for bronze-to-gold is more about grit and grind and mental endurance than changing anything about your actual in-game skill.

No. As per the math. The hell is the forced grind.

14

you don’t get out of bronze with style, it’s a slow climb

15

Back when the streak bonuses were much higher (both wins and losses), it was actually pretty easy to accidentally get boosted to a higher rank than a person was capable of playing at simply by going through a lucky winning streak. It was also the same when falling. That’s why streak bonuses were toned way down. Now, those small “lucky” winning streaks don’t put you up all that much, but also small “unlucky” losing streaks don’t nail you hard either.

Naturally, in every single game out there, you really would have to grind to tangibly and intangibly get better first, which would THEN result in ranking up. There isn’t a single game in existence that lets you do something like an accelerated Bronze-to-Gold kind of ranking up, because no one goes through an “instantaneous skill change”. That kind of skill change has never existed, it does not exist now, and it will not exist in the future, no matter what the game or skill. No exceptions.

16

To get out of bronze don’t play like penguin learning how to use Excel .

17

In rankings design we call them ‘warpzones’. And in some ranking systems the reward structure is that you basically swap sr with the people you defeat, like a winner/loser micro-tournmanet thing. In other systems, you’d eventually qualify for the ‘trial’ match, winnning tons of sr for a win because if your skill is there, why are you grinding…

And instantaneous skill is an argument device to show how ridiculous the current structure is. Imagine letting your certifiably platinum twin brother play your bronze account. Again, it would take him over a week at full time effort.

18

Name a game that has this. And tell us why it applies to Overwatch.

With that being said, from what I’m understanding, what you’re presenting only makes sense in a kind of system that allows you (you singularly or “you” meaning your “team”) intentionally and specifically find a higher-ranking challenger that accepts, and thus, if the lower-ranked player(s) win, their rise in ranks would be accelerated as a result. This does not exist in a game where you have randomly-generated teams of closely-ranked (or close-enough on the extreme ends) players. Also, with what you’re presenting, there would have to be incentive for higher-ranked players to put their own rank on the line against lower-ranked players, otherwise that’s just a waste of time for no real reward.

I’d say that it would take way less than a week over a full-time effort (so, let’s say 40 hours is full time, it would take way less than that, because you still need around at the very least 10 minutes for a full game to play out.) for a certifiably Platinum player to get out of Bronze and bring it to Platinum. Anyways, the point is, games still have to be played out. I’d say that because of that, your idea about a “warpzone” ranking system absolutely would NOT work here.

19

Ov3r9k, that is the lamest response I have received so far.

20

Hey there,

I’m really sorry to hear that you are struggling with Bronze. One of the issues is that the further down in bronze you get the harder it gets due to all the Smurfs. I have been as low as the 700s before, so I know your pain.

I have added you to battlenet. Hopefully we can have some fun games and we can work together in climbing up a little bit (hopefully you are within 1000 SR of me, I’m around the 1500s). Then eventually if all goes to plan we will be at least both be around the same SR so we can try and improve on it a bit easier :slight_smile:

Jack

2 Likes