its very easy for someone to say they dont care about something, but it also common for like minded people to meet each other.
so it wouldnt surprise me that your friends would be like you.
a sad truth though is that people lie, they say things like “yeah i dont care about my rank” then go rage post on the forums about one tricks ruining their matches.
I mean, they were just people that used the group finder. But, yeah, I could see that bringing only a certain type of gamer.
Maybe some people do, and they are the loudest, which is why I think you believe that, but the quiet ones (that don’t lie) exist, and are probably far more in number.
Have to agree with this. Seems far more likely that most people are honest and not going around rage posting.
that is possible, but i cant base an opinion on the invisible people. i can only say what ive seen
and for instance you see it alot on these very forums. if you pay close attention, you’ll see someone say things like “im not hard stuck i just dont care if i win or lose” but then later on you’ll see a post or reply from them that says things like “yeah people need to learn to swap so they can stop ruining my matches”.
these 2 statements cant coexist.
yet if you really pay attention you see these contradictions from the ‘average’ player constantly
i had a conversion with someone i think yesturday, maybe the day before. where in the span of a day (across different threads)
they talked about how he doesnt play comp anymore and people should put effort in qp, how he’s gm and modern gm’s are boosted and so on
and with this it was easy to put together an image of who this person was.
just one post wasnt enough to say it, but that person was a very ego driven player that was blaming everyone but himself for his losses.
so he felt the need to go into random posts to trash other peoples accomplishments.
but if you asked him point blank, he’d deny all of it even though the evidence was right their in his own actions.
Meh the mom or dad playing half hour for fun is not the same as sweatlorcmuffin, that’s the difference.
Also one of them touches grass more
I appreciate the sentiment, but it’s skill and game sense that keep us silver/gold players where we are.
However, I believe a large number of us aren’t really trying all that hard to get better either… we’re completely content playing the game at this level. I mean I don’t put a whole lot of thought into my hero choices or playing a specific strategy… hell, grouping up is considered to be an elite strategy at our level (and that’s good enough for me).
Way too often as I said in another post picks are generally overrated while strategy is overlooked.
Now at high masters meta does start to matter because play is at least semi optimized.
I dunno, I just run Lucio into everything. I don’t feel that there’s anything the enemy can do that I can’t adapt to. I respect how fast everything can kill me. I’ve made every support duo imaginable work.
On tank I have tried and tried and tried again to counterswap the instant I feel it’s worthy of doing so. Has it increased my win rate? No. It lowered it. On tank my best hero is Zarya. If i just one trick Zarya I actually believe I can climb on tank cause she fits my playstyle of baiting out the cooldowns and then trample them when they don’t have them.
Her beam weapon also fits me more naturally than the other tank weapons. Sometimes what you are good at is better than what trying to force a character you aren’t good at because it suppose to counter this or that.
I say let the Ball specialist be the Ball specialist. That dude prolly has thousands of hours on that character and understands it. He knows his counters and how to play around them.
When I used to find teams on LFG the guy who said “I’ll play anything” was always trash. I liked having specialists on my team rather than Mr. Flex.
My philosophy:
Play to your strengths. Adapt with strategy. Chuck Samito’s hero tier list out the window.
as i said, you can play anything if your willing too. picks simply adjust the difficulty
like if your team has a rein and your lucio, you can speed him in and out. this makes his life easier and thus the enemys life harder but if you swapped to like…brig, their isnt much your doing to help him but you might be helpin someone else.
hero picks are often times not why someone loses but its something ppl love to complain about
but it feels like most of the complaints about x being boosted or the matchmaker being bad are just people who arnt good enough to play a hero into a situation being put into that situation.
its that they arent boosted, its that the difficulty level spikes alot more then it used too.
but people blame the matchmaker for that when its just rng and you go next.
I’m going to say this as directly as I can.
You really need to stop making assumptions about others you know nothing about. This sort of assertion is exactly the ego I was talking about.
When I was describing a reason someone is in lower ranks, I wasn’t talking about myself. I play more than the average player. I’m literally just describing what I see in my friends who are ranked lower than me and in people we see in quick play.
In any case sorry to everyone else wants to have a discussion, but I’m turning off notifications on this post since I’m over this since it has devolved too far into pettiness.
And cant group up to save their lives!
This was me he was talking about and none of that is accurate. Let me get you the link.
Here it is. Not the first time Chiyono’s gone down a rabbit hole but boy he really charged down this one.
Just look through this top 500 thoughts thread and count how many times Chiyono mentions “ego” 
I like that part in particular. At no point am I talking about losses. In fact, I win more than ever in qp and comp (granted comp I play the least).
It’s can be a factor NGL. Mostly at higher ranks though.
The problem is that lower ranks do not understand basic play errors they make.
A common one is DPS pushes up trying to get a pick when rest of team is dead instead of waiting for team to respawn.
A lot of times dps just don’t play with their tank or pay attention to anything their team does which creates problems when the fight rotates and thus they need to rotate.
Supports and sometimes DPS common mistake is trying playing directly behind tank rather than at an off angle. On Zarya I exploit this mistake almost nonstop and bulldoze past the enemy tank and beam them down before they can get to safety.
My point with all this is usually the most coordinated team will win in Overwatch and picks will only start mattering when mistakes similar to what I mentioned are minimized in a more optimized environment.
So there’s a grain of truth to what OP says but I think higher level players really do a poor job of addressing nuances related to how this game works at different levels of play and how unless you can just power through it with sheer mechanical skill there’s no one size fits all for what you tell a plat player to climb over a person in masters.
They make different mistakes that carry different weight depending on how optimized the meta is.
its a factor in all ranks, its just easier to out scale it by improving and then being able to outplay it in the lower ranks.
it becomes more noticeable by gm because its harder to outplay people when they arnt making ten thousand mistakes a second.
it doesnt prevent people from climbing, like metal ranks love to claim, but it can make it more difficult to win a match.
this was true in ow1 but in ow2 its become alot more potent.
like if your a plat genji player and the enemy team is runnin double sniper, ana and zen with a a rein as the tank: this makes the genjis life really easy…but if the zen swaps brig and the tank goes zarya all of a sudden the genjis life is a bit harder.
swap the snipers for sym and torb and the genji cant engage on anything without risking death.
a really good genji could still carry this plat match, but he’d do it by punishing mistakes the plat genji wouldnt recognize or be skilled enough too act on.
if you take that plat genji and give him an ana for nano he now has a much easier to act on win con. so even tho the entire enemy team is harder for him to engage on normally with nano blade he’d still get value while the smurfing genji wouldnt need the nano to do it.
so the ana made the genji’s life easier while the enemy teams was making it harder.
which is what i mean by it scaling the difficulty for players.
honestly thats not even just dps, thats all roles.
a really aggressive support will do the same, and plenty of tanks try to play like they are rambo.
its more that the lower ranked players dont have the awareness to know whose alive and they dont have the experience to know how to play around their team.
(when i say playing around the team i dont mean team comps, i just mean engaging when they are all together)
Yep, asking them to swap and they take it as you telling them you are bad swap and not understanding that is an advice to help the team and themself
Imma talk to my Silver friend in a bit lol
Good way of putting it tbh
Pretty much, yeah 
That’s true. Idk why OW was ever labeled as the “easy” fps though. This game is probably the hardest fps that is currently popular.
I don’t mean as a person. I mean understanding what can kill you to calculate what risks you can take. By pride, I mean things like “Oh, I’ll just Blink into this Ashe’s face. She won’t hit the shot on me.”
That type of stuff is so common and I don’t know why.
Disagree. A10 explains that you need to play a bit differently with different levels of skill. Most of his coaching is contextual, so everyone can apply it to some degree. Awkward gives the most basic concepts that are really easy to misunderstand. A10 might lead to less effective gameplay, since he plays more passively than necessary in low ranks, but I can’t see someone watching him and throwing after.
In defense of the low ranks, a TON of streamers, forum posters, self-proclaimed “coaches”, and twitter/ reddit posts tell you to lone wolf your way out of the metal ranks. Nearly all the advice I’ve seen posted recommends being fully self-sufficient and carrying your team. While I do get why they say this, having another post claiming they lose due to not cooperating is ironic.
Are we really taking seriously a Smurf complaining that his teammates at low ranks aren’t as good as him? Like obviously that’s the case. And no, I don’t think what’s holding back the average bronze player is their attitude lol
a10’s def has more potential benefit, but coaching if done incorrectly always leads to throwing.
such as tellin metal ranks to always play safe: they’ll never off angle
id say awkward’s UR2GM’s for dps heroes are probably a net negative, but a10’s are probably a net neutral thing. cuz some ppl will benefit alot while others might not benefit at all but it wont universally be bad for people.
the issue is you have to simplify things for the metal rank player without losing important information.
awkward over simplifies some things while a10 doesnt simplify it enough.
a10s might make someone give up on playing the hero while awkwards will make them over confident.
I don’t disagree this is a fact.
My point mainly is that this doesn’t go away as you climb the ranks. People aren’t as quick to switch just because we’re GM
Dude who cares. This is Overwatch, not CS:GO.