Overwatch

Alex said:

I wonder the same. I played TF and CS quite a bit so I'm no FPS n00b, but I'm still straddling the bronze/silver line. I'm sure I'm better than that. My old WoW mates play this regularly and one has a smurf account almost 1k higher SR than me. We grouped together and I was silver across the board almost every match behind him. I know medals don't mean that much. But when I'm some 1300 SR scrub beating out people in matches where almost everyone is gold level? I need to be more confident in matches and take lead. People are so unorganized but I'm only level 55 and I don't even know where to find all the health packs on every map.

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Honestly i would just grab another account. My original is stuck around Silver. if you wanna stick with it hat account and group sometimes i can play on my original account as i do wanna do more comp games on that one..

I started off pretty well on it got into high gold just playing mercy. But after the nerf it pretty much destroyed my playstyle and exposed the fact i didn't know much about the game frankly. Eventually i adjusted but not before going down to Bronze..

Rather then slog back i just got a new account. Placements at 2700, joined up with a team and got up to 3300. If you have the $30 to spend i would just do this rather then slog all the way back as it's not too hard to get lace in at least gold.. The people in Bronze/silver are not nessesarily all bad.. and that's the issue.. You may have an amazing team mate or two one game... or your opponent may.. But another game you may have no coordination and a bunch of idiots.. it's a total crapshoot and imo very difficult to grind quickly unless your a very good DPS, i mostly play supports but i have more success on my lower SR account with Pharah despite not being as good simply because i can actively increase our chances to win more..

I think you guys just need to play the game more and eventually.. you will find the game slows down and you feel far more in control and aware of what's happening. Most ults can be easily avoided if your experienced, although having the right character helps a lot.

Moria is my main and i feel like she's a really good character for new players. it takes a bit of playing her to get used to using fade and managing your cooldowns, healing juice, when to use biotic grasp ect.. But it doesn't take too terribly long and once you get there you will find you die very rarely. You will also find there's very little difference between you and the guys playing her in OWL as her skill cap is not enormous.

Perhaps most importantly playing her forces you to become aware of positioning/abilities ( you can avoid basically every ultimate in the game with a correctly timed fade) of both yourself, your teammates, and your enemies. Plus you should find yourself contributing greatly to winning just about any game.

Whidon said:

I think you guys just need to play the game more and eventually.. you will find the game slows down and you feel far more in control and aware of what's happening. Most ults can be easily avoided if your experienced, although having the right character helps a lot.

Moria is my main and i feel like she's a really good character for new players. it takes a bit of playing her to get used to using fade and managing your cooldowns, healing juice, when to use biotic grasp ect.. But it doesn't take too terribly long and once you get there you will find you die very rarely. You will also find there's very little difference between you and the guys playing her in OWL as her skill cap is not enormous.

Perhaps most importantly playing her forces you to become aware of positioning/abilities ( you can avoid basically every ultimate in the game with a correctly timed fade) of both yourself, your teammates, and your enemies. Plus you should find yourself contributing greatly to winning just about any game.

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I can appreciate your optimism but I've been playing since beta and i think its really just a design flaw. Game is really good if you have 6 solid and consistent people who work together, but outside of that it really lacks. On the plus side, they've created some very unique characters for a FPS, hopefully they can figure out different modes of play that allow it to shine. I've been enjoying FFA lately far more than the base game.

I think the first step to climbing is realizing that you are who is holding back your sr. This will help you be tilt proof as someone else said is super important. If you're blaming your team, you're not playing as a team. If you're not playing as a team, you're losing.

Harsh reality: Literally everyone except pros think they're underranked. It's just not possible for everyone to be underranked though. If you've played enough games, especially consistently on the same characters, chances are your rank reflects how well you're currently playing. "How well you're currently playing" includes not just technical skill, but also decision-making and importantly your ability (or inability) to be friendly and flexible with your team to foster good team communication. If you haven't played hundreds of games the bad news is that you're probably as likely to be overrranked as you are to be underranked.

It took me about 130+ hours on one hero in competitive to start to see the ebb and flow of team fights, when to retreat, when to push in, when to spam shields, and when to try to take down support. There's a lot of stuff that I was doing 50 hours ago that I probably didn't even realize were losing us games. If a diamond player played my account i'm sure they could get it to plat or higher in no time which tells me that you never get "stuck." Sure it may be easier to rise by creating a new account(assuming you even are underranked), but I think it's the wrong mentality. The decision to make a new account is predicated on telling yourself that it's other people's fault you're not climbing, and that mentality is literally what has kept me from rising in the past. I play soldier and have spent way too much time trying to take high ground and to get picks (trying to solo carry using youtube strats by people with way better aim than me) ultimately to get killed by genji, etc when i would be better off supporting my tank in the shield war to support a team push.

i'm still silver but I've been as low as 900 sr so I can legitimately say I've climbed through some pretty bad rankings in solo queue. I've noticed that once I started trying to engage my team rather than assuming they're idiots, team communication and cooperation has gotten a lot better. Remember--you may not be the one who's tilting the team, but if you're not actively working to prevent a tilt then you're not doing everything you can to win.

The issue with this game isn’t that tilting causes people to lose and it’s hard to understand that you are responsible for nothing aside from your own gameplay, not your teammates, etc etc. It’s that even when you don’t tilt, and you do spend real time focusing on your positioning and call outs and all that good shit, you better enjoy grinding out that 51% win rate to do any real climbing since you literally can’t rely on the other people you are absolutely required to rely upon most of the time. When I play 3-10 games a day and one quarter to one half of my games are plagued by leavers (on either side), this totally negates “playing more” like you suggest, Whidon . You’d still be stuck in silver or whatever your other account is on if you didn’t find your current group. If you don’t have a set group, you better be skilled af or be seriously masochistic.

My pals are trying to power level me with their smurf accounts. It's working out OK. We had like a 70% win rate last night. They just want me to be able to play with the whole group we have. We have a solid 8-10 people that regularly play but I'm too low SR to partner with them.

So this discussion made me curious just how long one might have to grind to move up SR from a theoretically "underranked" account. My impression is it's gong to take a while..

I decided I'm going to play my alt account this week in comp as much a possible and see where i am at the end. But it will be interesting to be sure. I did two games already. First was Moira on Anubis, won fairly handily and got gold in heals, dmg, elims. Second match reminded me of what i think many people are complaining about. I played Winston for most of the match, In defense stage i was healed for approx. 75hp total despite a Moira and Mercy on team and we lost badly. I certainly understand the idea you shouldn't blame your teammates and focus on what you can do to improve. But matches like that your better off just not beating yourself up i think. I do think matches where one side is just badly overmatched seem to pop up far more often at this level.

What I love about this game is I feel like its a 12 player puzzle that if you concentrate hard on you can begin to see how it fits together and why you win or why you lose. But definitely communication and anti-toxicity is the big key.

I grinded from bronze to gold in about a week this season. Funny I was plat like 3 seasons ago but I won 5 lost 5 in promos put me in silver and I bombed to bronze. Climbed to 2100 so far. Notice a huge improvement from the trolls that were bronze and the just lets do whatever mentality of silver. People in gold seem to actually want to rank to plat (as it seems like a very attainable goal). I almost had diamond one league but fell short and stopped grinding. The hardest thing is to play a small subset of characters. I find myself constantly switching to whatever as I fill a lot.

Yes, yes he is. Bets on Kyky being sacked today?

Seagull must be really bad at playing WInston or D'Va to not pull him off the bench.

Two first point holds, that's pretty terrible for a supposed tier 1 team. Shambles

Top 500 starts out at 4150 this season. Isn't it usually in the 4300 range?

So someone told me an OWL guy who was actually pretty good got banned from the league because he was sarcastic about another players ability/intelligence in a private stream and linked a meme or something? Maybe one of you guys who follow OWL can tell explain better..

This is one of the bizarre things about esports, aside from the awkward name (just call it professional video gaming or something, "sport" implies athletics to 99% of the population, it's like calling magic cards, or chess "tablesports"). I often see a pretense to wanting to be seen as a major sport like Football, basketball, ect.. yet they seemingly want to eliminate behavior that is widely accepted in sports.

I Wrestled throughout college and was on the basketball team through HS at least. Anyone who's ever played any sports competitively can tell you bad language from players/coachs/opponents ect.. is part of the game and that people often say things in the heat of competition that might be extremely offensive in other circumstances but are not thought of much at all by players.