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

What I’m saying here is I’m keeping them up, I’m relying on them to make it work. In lower ranks, you can do it all yourself, but higher up, I keep them up and buy them time, with the ocassional kill confirm. Naturally if you have a high healing team it means you were taking a lot of damage, but it can also mean a lot was mitigated.

ya, I mentioned they’ll have better positioning and do more damage, meaning you have less time to damage and you have larger quantities of health you’ll be needing to heal, that and they’ll more easily be able to punish you out in the open.

Actually that one was under my response of it being a typical moira game.

The only time I pay attention to the medal itself is when it’s damage, that means something is wrong.

My profile shows me at 5,119 hero damage per 10 minutes and 9,962 healing.

Not so much the gold itself, as it was the damage gold, I got a bit competitive that match about keeping it, lol.

I play flex, so usually end up in the healer position. With mercy down, It’s usually moira or lucio, with mercy for niche things like if we need to power boost a reaper or on defense with the res. I practice ana and zen on my other account.

If you can’t get out of gold/low plat as a DPS main, your mechanics, positioning, and engagement timing are bad. I’ve done bronze->master on a half dozen accounts and top out within 100 SR of the same spot every time. The matchmaker is INCREDIBLY consistent and putting you where you belong.

All those times when someone gets away with 1hp, if your aim was a little better you would have killed them and probably won that fight and maybe even the game. All those times you ult and get zero kills, your timing was bad. You didn’t wait for your tanks to engage first, you didn’t wait for key cooldowns/ults to be out of the way, etc.

Record a video of your gameplay (on a close or losing game, not a free win where you’re slaughtering) and I’ll tell you everything you’re doing wrong.

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This is true because of the existence of:

Given enough time and enough matches, these factors will even out. They’ll work for you as much as they work against you. The problem for anyone with a full-time job and life is the sheer number of matches/hours it takes to climb during a season.

Let’s say you have a 55% win rate. Assuming +25 SR for a win and -25 SR for a loss, it will take 200 matches to climb 500 SR after placements. Also assume, you can play an average of 3 matches per hour. That results in a play time of ~67 hours to climb 500 SR. That equals playing a little over an hour a day, every day for two months.

Now, let’s say you work a full 40 hour week and don’t have a maid and butler to do all your other responsibilities. So, M-F you don’t have any time to grind matches, and even if you did you’re too tired to play your best. That leaves the weekend for serious competitive effort. That means you’d have to play 7-8 hours over the weekend, every weekend in order to climb even if you have the requisite skill.

This is why the smurfs, throwers, trolls, matchmaker elo hell are such a problem. A better matchmaker would allow worthy players to climb without making Overwatch the most important thing in their lives. I get it, people who don’t have to work can play comp enough hours, but a lot of us aren’t children or independently wealthy. We’ve spent the money for this game, and should be able to climb without having to treat it like a job.

The only reason anyone should be stuck at their rank is because:

Not because they can’t grind enough matches to make up for this flawed system.

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Sure, it does take time to climb. But I disagree with you on some basic points.

If you think playing a game is like a job to you, then you honestly should not be playing. The point of playing games is to have fun. Climbing is not actually the purpose in playing the game. Climbing is just the side effect of getting better over time and getting matched with better players. I honestly have more fun in lower ranks than higher ones because there’s much less pressure to perform well since time to kill takes much longer. So you shouldn’t stress if you don’t climb to X rank within Y time. You can have fun in all the ranks.

My first time playing comp I placed in gold. It took me about month to climb to diamond and another month to climb to master. I did this with a whopping 51% win rate and a full time job. I did not belong in a higher rank to start. I slowly improved and learned how to get better while I climbed. I played on an alt last month and climbed from gold to diamond in 1 week. I’m much better now than I was when I started so I climb much faster.

Consider the alternate scenario which is what you seem to be suggesting you want. For every win or loss you gain +/- 100 SR. So you can get to the rank you belong 4x faster. Do you feel this would be better or worse? There are already many forum posts about people who complain when they lose 100, 200, 300, etc SR. There are even people who complain when they lose 50! Or perhaps you would prefer a system where you don’t lose any SR. You can only gain. So there are no more feel bad moments tied to seeing your SR go down. Everybody will eventually hit the SR cap like they hit the level cap in RPGs.

In short, you should view your SR for what it really is. Just an indicator for what level of player you will be matched with. Instead of treating the game like a job where your sole purpose is to make that number go up, play the game to have fun. The number will go up when it goes up. Or maybe it won’t, and it doesn’t matter because you will have fun regardless.

I do like some of the bizarro logic in this thread:

“Your SR is where you are supposed to be, if you are supposed to be higher and play enough, you will climb.”

“My accounts are stable 500+ SR apart.”

“Oh well, you’re not actually really that higher SR, you can just survive there, you’re not really that SR.”

???

Either your SR is your SR, or it’s not. You can’t have it both ways.

What this actually demonstrates (and both sides are a little right) is not so much that there’s some special thing called ELO hell, but that climbing is more difficult than maintaining (and consequentially, for many people, to climb at an acceptably fast rate, they would have to be higher actual SR than where they expect to be to reach that point). This is due to the very slow rate of SR gain if your winrate isn’t absurd, and exacerbated by the averaging toward 50-50 effects of both the matchmaker and all the external factors like throwers, smurfs, etc.

(IE For all the people saying ‘as often as you face a smurf, you will have a smurf’: Yes, this is true. However, do some quick math. Assume 10% smurfs, and that the smurfs reverse a win into a loss or loss into a win at an equal rate, and a player who should have a 60% winrate at his MMR/SR/etc differential, out of 100 games, will have 6 games ‘lost’ to smurfs, but only 4 games ‘won’ to them).

Basically, these things mean you need to play even more to climb, even where your effective SR should make you climb faster.

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If you belong in a higher rank, then every game you play your team has a smurf. The smurf is you. This is in addition to the potential of one of your random teammates being a smurf. There is no excuse for blaming smurfs for your inability to climb. If someone blames smurfs, it is because they are simply not good enough and are quite frankly delusional about their own abilities.

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Read my post, particularly the numbers.

They don’t prevent you from climbing, they reduce the speed that you’re climbing because if you’re climbing (winning more games than losing) you will lose more winning games to smurfs (and to throwers, leavers, etc) than you will win to them. It’s very basic math. Equal proportion bites out of different sized pies.

Which, again, doesn’t mean smurfs prevent you from climbing, nor that leavers do, or throwers, or drunk players, or anything else prevents you. It’s that each one of those things increases the # of games required to play to climb.

Read my post. Smurfs don’t do anything to impede your progress. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Not even to slow you down.

Your math quite literally makes no sense at all. If you have an equal chance of having a smurf on your team as you do on the enemy team, then it cancels out. If it cancels out, then it is irrelevant. Meanwhile, if you belong in a higher rank, you are the smurf. You are in 100% of your games. You are on your team 100% of the time.

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No, it doesn’t cancel out. I understand fractions and percentages are a little difficult to understand, but:

You are climbing. You play 100 games. Based on your skill, your winrate will be 60% (this handles your ‘there is a smurf in every game, you’ argument: its why you have a 60% winrate to start). In theory, you will win 60 games. You will lose 40 games. 20 game differential.

But something weird will happen in some percentage of those games. It doesn’t even have to be smurfs, it can be leavers, etc. Whatever. They turn 10% of games you would lose into wins. They turn 10% of games you would win into losses.

10% of your 60 wins are now losses due to leavers, throwers, whatever. You now have 54 wins and 46 losses. 10% of your 40 losses are now wins. You now have 58 wins and 42 losses. Differential of 16.

And in my experience, far more than 10% of games have something go wrong (be it a leaver, thrower, smurf). All of that will suppress your theoretical winrate of 60% down closer to 50%. It will never go lower than that, which is why they can’t stop you from climbing, but they can absolutely slow it down.

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what if i told you that TIME DOES NOT EQUAL MORE SKILL. You are talking about a grind, not improving at the game. an with teh crap that is soloque its incredibly hard to rank up when best way to rank up is one trick and soloqueing, but it also means rolling the die to get good teammates that wont throw, or the enemies throw more than yours. Thats not skill, that gambling until your u strike the jackpot an go on a win streak(of free wins).

what…you think people are good because they were born with an innate skill that not even the gods can transcend…yeah okay…

It should, but in a team 6v6 environment it is very hard to win every game on skill alone, even kabaji, considered one of the best ladder players in the world, when doing bronze to gm he lost like 4 games in plat, plus matchmaker isn’t the best so GG

Wow he lost a whole 4 games to move out of an entire skill tier? If anything it shows you can carry on skill alone not the other way around.

Mind you he is a top 500 player, considerably he has an advantage, and also he played tracer, renowned for being a “solo carry” character who doesn’t need much help from his team, if you were a tank main who relies heavily on a good team, you’ll struggle ALOT more

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Let me explain how it works in high elo games for the most part… The first team that gets a pick wins the team fight. So all an individual needs to be able to do to “carry” in their elo is to consistently get one pick without immediately dying afterwards.

So the high elo players apply the same logic to lower elos, thinking that’s how it also works down here. It’s because they are out of touch. They think that teams in lower elos are as evenly matched as teams in high elos.

As we know, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The skill variation between 2 random gold players for examples can be like an ocean, compared to the skill variation between 2 GM players. Every GM player at least understands the fundamentals of the game, the objective, and the concept of working together, for example. You would never see one GM player consistently go try to fight a 1v6 on his own the entire game or have a team where half the players spend the entire game staggering onto the point, unless those players are intentionally throwing. And the other GM players would rightly blame those players for the loss in this scenario, not say “maybe if I was better at the game, my team would have won” like they say to the lower elo players.

This is an example of the kind of thing that those players don’t take into account when they say things like “if you lose games, you only have yourself to blame and should focus on improving”

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my internal MMR causes to match against boosters/smurf accounts at 97%
your argument is invalid

Throwers and smurfs don’t have an influence on your match? What if you have a thrower on your team and a smurf on the other?
:thinking:

(You’re right about my case - I don’t play comp much at all. But you can’t dismiss other people’s experiences, as everyone gets different teammates and it sucks to have griefers and smurfs that you have no control over.

I had a game where a kid threw because he couldn’t play doomfist -he played Mei and was walling us into the enemy and emoting in spawn. We got stomped. Is it his fault or our fault?)

Luck in the short run can be different for everybody. Luck in the long run is the same for everybody.

Both of your faults. Your fault for tilting him. His fault for throwing.

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  1. i suck & no matter what happens i will always suck & nothing anyone can do will help me to suck less

I was encroaching on Masters, like, 2 seasons ago. I then hit a HUGE losing streak (down to Plat) and kinda gave up. Shortly after I developed a bad case of Competitive anxiety, causing me to avoid the mode like the plague (bar placement matches) and stick to Quickplay.

Maybe I’ll give it a good honest try next season, though my gold boarder will now make me even more nervous - what with all the remarks people will inevitably make regarding my level and where your SR is at.