There's only 2 reasons you're stuck in your rank

Smurfing comes in spurts. Some days you cant seem to escape them and sometimes you don’t see them for a while. Generally speaking avoid weekends and don’t play the first week or 2 of a season cause people avoid playing their main accounts while they wait for the ladder to settle.

The first 2 weeks of a season the ladder really is a horrid mess.

you can throw any ranks in there i just used silver diamond as an example

some gold getting rolled by a high plat is the same thing

also those smurfs are sometimes on your side and youre the one who gets carried to an undeserved win

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I’ve never been able to dump huge hours into comp so it’s possible when I play I’ve been mostly lucky. The combination of ego with sprinkles of trolls and just garbage people I find most of the time make it feel too much like a lottery.

Most seasons I’ve done placements and that experience alone has been enough to make me feel like my time is better spent elsewhere.

I’m reasonably sure I would climb if I put in the time, but I’m not terribly bothered. If a game isn’t fun I’m not playing it. OW is among the most fun I’ve had in a game when played as a team and about the most worthless experience when you get a team that refuses to.

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That’s fine, and you’ll note my post didn’t whinge about smurfs. I think the far larger problem with comp is lack of consistency with respect to teams/getting people who can play vital roles but that is a subject for the various Role Queue threads.

Gold getting completely rolled by a high plat would indicate you’re likely where you should be, the high plat is a much better player on their way up or you’ve run into a smurf in plat. There are several possibilities; but it’s certainly a better example than a Diamond in silver.

not a silver player, a diamond player stuck in silver because of smurfs and throwers and elo hell

huge difference

this post is obviously sarcastic

You reached plat “once” lol

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I play maybe once a month and people try to flame me for being mid-plat.
It’s almost like I don’t want to play this game enough to rank up.

I really like that phase: not playing enough.

Sounds almost like work, where you ask boss to give you raise, and one responds with “you are not working enough”, without setting any limit on where is that “enough” is.

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“enough” is entirely dependent on an individuals win rate.

With 100% win rate and no PBSR, it would take you 21 games to jump 500 SR.
With 75% win rate and no PBSR, it would take you 42 games to jump 500 SR.
With 51% win rate and no PBSR, it would take you 1042 games to jump 500 SR.
PBSR speeds up the ranking process if you are lower than diamond.

Any win rate over 50% is perfectly acceptable for climbing. But you never would if you only played placements.

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There are 2 tiers in plat like most other tiers.

High plat and low plat are 2 different ball games. High silver and low silver are actually quite different.

High plat widows start to really become a problem if you dont counter them

In my experience, I’d say around 50 games should show you your true sr range.

You run into widows in high gold that need to be countered as well; not all of them. But a completely uncontested widow is typically going to make for a bad time in my experience.

The combination of not so great awareness and positioning tend to result in even mediocre widow’s being very effective; how great of a player do you need to be to shoot people with a sniper rifle standing out in the open? Most of them aren’t that difficult to contest however.

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That is the thing about the gold widows that have aim they tend to fold the second you put pressure on them.

At plat and above if you don’t contest you are screwed and if you do contest the cost is incredibly high. Better hope your team can do a 5v5 on a consistent basis.

It’s true that if you grind enough you will eventually get to the rank you belong. But because of all the throwers, smurfs, elo hell, questionable matchmaking etc., that doesn’t make the game any less trash. Of course it can never be a perfect system and there is always unwinnable and unloseable games. But I think a lot of people, including bliz no-sell the amount of such games as being in the 5-10% range, which would be fine. In reality, it’s probably closer to 30-40% of games that won’t matter at all how you play. And before some GM tells me I’m wrong because they climbed out of silver with a 90% win rate on their alt, that is not only a completely irrelevant and meaningless argument, but also a big part of the problem in ranked.

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I think, honestly, OP is right. Both teams have smurfs, throwers, and leavers. It’s not just your team. Is it healthy for the game? NO - but it’s not the reason I can’t climb. I am not a good player. I am trying to critically examine every death - and most of the time, I find they were just straight up my fault. Peeking on a Widow, getting caught in a D.Va bomb because I was out of position with no where to hide, or just straight up missing cues.

In addition - if I’m really honest - I’ll have to admit at least HALF of those deaths led to a snowball condition - I died, then the tank died, then everyone died, allowing the cart to move, or etc. This means my stupid death directly caused a loss (sometimes).

I still firmly believe what Jayne says about this - 1/3 of games you can’t lose, 1/3 of games you can’t win, and 1/3 of games your decisions matter in winning or losing.

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Nope. Sorry. I have 2 other accounts. One is 1000 SR higher than this account. My other one is around 750+ more than this one. Maintained those 2 like that for quite a few seasons now and this account I am on dropped me from plat to silver in 1 season. So, sorry but you are wrong.

Yeah this seems about right. So 2/3 of the games I could either play my best or my worst and it won’t matter in the end result. It’s too high of a number in my opinion.

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How much is enough, 20 char

See my main is 19xx silver since season 9. got a fresh account in season 12 that placed exactly 2545. The moment placements were done I got 3 leavers in my next 3 games. Before that, my placement and quickplay games had players from high gold to low masters; I asked many players in my placements what they though I would place as and they though the same, probably plat. After the games with leavers I said screw it and ‘let’ myself fall to silver.

I thought player behaviour would improve in higher ranks but i was wrong. there is no need to put myself through all that trouble just to have someone ruin my efforts. I gave up on climbing and ‘decided’ to stay in silver

When you come to the realization that rank doesn’t mean anything aside from match making, you will actually have more fun the lower rank you are as the games become easier and easier which allows you more freedom to play in any way you like. :wink:

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