Hello, just a new guy here, and I’m rather experienced with competitive games in general (been to LANs in CS 1.6, Source, Quake, UT, and even CoD at one point because it had bigger prize pools than CS at the time here in my country) and despite that I don’t have the in-game level to play competitive mode and its currently the off-season, I thought I might give my two cents based on what I’ve been watching so far in OWL, friends’ matches, streamers, and so on.

Seagull said on a stream that the best way to rank up is “Get Good”, which I honestly found not only vague, but a blanket statement for something that doesn’t apply that much in how Overwatch’s structure is. When I watch pro matches, I see heavy use of coordination, callouts, so on and so forth. When I watch random matches, what I see are more variations on who’s being used but much less coordination, and a higher potential for griefing (and I’ve seen some) that I’ve never seen compared to my experiences with other shooters and even MOBAs. Another thing I see is the Golden Gun as a reward in competitive, which I think is a horrible idea as it attracts people who do not care about competitive mode, thus truly creating an elo-hell. Putting competitive rewards like this in turn exacerbates the toxicity that any online multiplayer game, and worse depending on the regional culture/way of life (honestly, some players have it worse than others). The rank itself is the reward, no more and no less than that.

And then there comes a weird logic I’ve heard: If you solo queue and lose, it means you’re bad; If you six stack and win, it means you’re carried. Looking at the meta, and I even did some homework on what it was like in Season 1 up to the latest season, two healers have always been a constant in a sense that you cannot have less than two healers and you must have atleast one main tank, and everyone’s free to pick who the next three are. So, looking back at the weird logic, you can be a solo queuer because you have no friends and almost everyone you try adding either declines or does add you but mostly never plays with you, and you end up losing because no matter how hard you try to win the game, if someone else decides to play sub-optimal either on purpose or unintentionally, you lose because of him, and the amount of control a single player can do heavily requires the opposing team to be as bad as your teammates, mostly likely has to be worse, in order to turn the tides. If you stack and win, it means you and your teammates are in-tune with each other to try and win the games, because honestly the best way to get better is to play with a team constantly in order to practice consistency and learn things in a role.

By the looks of this, I am assuming Diamond must mean something as a rank because that is where rank decay starts to come in, it probably means that ranks from Bronze to Platinum is probably where elo-hell is. My friends are all in Platinum, and I intend to join them soon in competitive as they’d like to have a sixth man. But I see myself playing this game solo when they aren’t around. We are our only form of control, and it would definitely suck that we may end up being matched with people who have different things in mind.

Thus why I think the “Get Good” statement just for this game is only barely telling a third of the story on how to truly progress through the ranks. In my experience in CSGO (currently Rank A in ESEA, just a few more ranks until I can play Rank G and S, where the vast majority of the pros just go there to practice mechanical skill), Rainbow Six Siege, and even some competitive matches in TF2 (which really does feel like its on life-support, and Gaben prolly feels lazy to pull the plug) since I’m rather too old to go pro, but still have the itch to be competitive, the part that the game secures mostly one or two roles to truly carry a team and the other one or two are to play around that or those roles, coupled with other stuff that attracts people who don’t care, it just further demotivates progress to people who do care about getting better at the game when they end up being mostly exposed to situations of being helpless and at the mercy of their team’s willingness to win. How do you get good in a team game when you’re on your own?

I have a friend who was once part of a team that kept winning LANs in our country. Though he was an elitist, he did say this “If your teammates are worse than you all the time, you’ll get down to their level quickly. Doesn’t matter if you learn from the best. If you don’t get to test it out properly, you won’t learn properly”. I mean, he’s right. Though from my point of view, I’d say that if the game’s designed in a way that you aren’t allowed to carry enough weight based on your role, its not a team-based game anymore.