ill add you later this week

I don't really understand the win streak system. It makes sense for groups of 4-6, but solo/duo/triple queue is so contingent on teammates and the enemy team that it seems pretty arbitrary to me whether you can go on a win streak.

Wouldn't mind so much -- I get that better players will go on win streaks more often -- except that the normal laddering process sans win streaks seems super slow. Getting like 14SR for a win when you're performing well makes it pretty hard for those of us with lives to ever ladder up.

Of course, it's entirely possible that I'm a scrub who belongs exactly where he is.

why do so many people seem to think that the point of a ladder system should be for them to move up? the point is to put you where you belong not increase SR based on time played

Streak systems are in all modern competitive games because people quit when they lose too many times in a row.

Hadn't been playing this much, but had surgery last week and I've spent the last week in bed. Didn't have time to get a good pc setup near it so been on the PS4. 60-54-6 so far hovering in the 2700's mostly. Played a ton of bastien, i feel bad sometimes but he's so OP. I've noticed the thing a lot of people do poorly is they commit to staying in turret mode too long/much. If you're a more mobile bastien, turret-heal while running- turret, you can be obnoxiously effective.

It's really frustrating playing against zarya's at this level, when you have soldier's/bastiens who just blast the **** out of her while bubbled, (the whole time) and in every killcam she's at 100.

I think posting here is bad luck. I thought I'd record SR per game. Just for nerdy fun. I went from 2756-2430 in 10 games. 0-9-1.

Had 2 or 3 when someone left. 2 in a row with the same group of 3 people on my team that went widow/hanzo/torb. Had one where I had gold damage with Zen, while we had a bastien, soldier, pharah and roadhog.

... Its been tough

lol that is a rough strech

playing lijang, take first point and our team is at 20% (!!!)

someone quits and the MATCH GETS CANCELLED

**** that ****

And then there are matches where someone on your team starts out AFK and you're hoping they AFK out so the game cancels but then it doesn't cancel and you die and then that person finally picks a hero and you're starting off at a huge disadvantage.

Don't know if I was running good before or not, but after not having encountered any throwing in comp before I've now had two sets of throwers two out of the last forty games I've played in competitive. One group kept jumping off the map over and over. Other one set up a teleporter over the ledge and when we stopped going through it would intentionally try to get in our sight lines or obstruct us other ways. Would have won or drew that second one for sure too if the two throwers weren't in the game. So irritating.

Or the opposite - the game logged me out literally right when the doors to spawn opened. I was able to get back on within about a minute, but of course the game was cancelled since it was in the first 10 seconds. Lost 50 SR and got temp-banned for 10 minutes.

If it would've happened 10 seconds later, I could've gotten back without penalty.

I haven't played much competitive in the last 2-3 weeks. Most games have just been toxic, which both usually results in losing and isn't fun. I've been in a big downswing and I think maybe one or two games were just regular losses, while the rest have been with toxic teams or leavers. I've been enjoying QP or Mystery Heroes more.

I mean, hell, I had a game the other day where I was Zen and the opponent's Pharah was pounding us. I commented that we didn't have a good counter for her (not criticizing, just pointing it out) and the JUNKRAT on my team started going off on me, telling me she was my responsibility because Zen is hitscan. After I said I am discording her and trying to take her down, someone else backed me up and informed Junkrat that Zen is not hitscan, that his shots have travel time and it's not easy to beat Pharah with Zen. The toxic player proceeded to call both of us ******ed and said I could kill Pharah if I didn't play ******ed. This went on the rest of the game. I didn't say anything else unless I was encouraging people.

We actually did quite well on offense (Eichenwald) and I played pretty well with Lucio - we just came up short in the castle. Of course, when the other team's Junkrat killed a bunch of us with his tire in overtime to win it, our Junkrat called us all ******ed again, criticizing everyone for not shooting the tire.

..and next two games, 1) likely win turns into draw when guy on team disconnects and never comes back at start of attack round after we had great defense, 2) up 17-0 start of Oasis, guy on other team leaves, match gets cancelled.

Most people feel this way because most people overestimate themselves and feel they are under-ranked. I agree with you on the purpose of the SR system.

My view is that as a way of measuring where you should be placed, awarding extra ranking for win streaks is arbitrary and, unless accompanied by "losing streaks," artificially inflates SR. And I think most folks' sense of accurately moving up/down the latter would be better served by deciding how much you move up/down the ladder based primarily on the delta between the two teams' SR and less on stuff like streaks.

Winning is more fun than losing, so I think I'd prefer my SR was lower than it 'should' be.

Yeah, I hear you. But the game can also be more fun when you play more often with teams that are actually trying and somewhat competent (e.g., not trickling in, which happens in basically 95% of games below platinum, and a lot of platinum games as well). For folks that are stuck at lower levels and cannot put in a ton of volume, it can be very hard to climb out.

It also seems that you are "anchored" to your previous ranking pretty strongly. E.g., my friend's SO went 10-0 in placements (by some miracle) and still was placed in silver, which I presume means that her previous seasons' results put a pretty heavy finger on the scale. She is much better now than she was when she first started (she was new to games in general), but she will probably never be able to put in the volume to climb beyond gold.

No easy answers here. But it does seem that there is such a thing as "ELO hell" for people who have really improved over time but don't have the time for the grind.

Everybody else is getting better too, though.

It's like poker was - bronze is still penny stakes, but everyone above has wised up over time.

I'm with you here. The good part of competitive is that the players generally try to win and try to communicate/work as a team more than in other modes. Which can be great when things are going well. The downside to that is the toxicity when things aren't going so well. Guys who are on mic with 2 minutes left in the game, complaining that the game is lost because teammate X won't pick hero Y. (Hint, there's 2 minutes left and all we have to do is take point B. We can still win!) Guys who berate you for your pick based on a really small sample size (I was being flamed as being a terrible Roadhog after missing my first hook!)

If your only goal is to have fun and shoot some fools, I can do that in QP/mystery heroes. Sure, sometimes my teammates aren't really trying to win either. But sometimes neither am I. I normally play either healer or tank. But sometimes I just want to go DPS and wreck some ****. Sure, I'll die a lot. But it's QP/mystery heroes. Who cares? Sometimes you rand the team with 6 squishies against 6 tanks. But sometimes you'll be the 5 tanks with Ana and you'll feel unkillable. (Had a game with 3 Zaryas. We were unkillable. We seemingly always had a bubble on us and our charge was always above 50 during an engagement.)

Well, it's ELO, not some magic analysis that grades you on accuracy and stuff, so you're going to have to grind. If you've improved more than the player pool, that will get reflected in the SR, but it's going to take a lot of games to show up, and the player pool is also still improving as a whole so you have to keep improving to keep ahead of the tide.

"ELO hell" is where Silver/Gold players who are just good enough to notice when their teammates suck think they need to move up to where people respect their raises, it's a total fairy tale.

elo hell is a team of six people each thinking the other five are the reason they lost

I do think it is not pure elo though in that in game stuff like time on fire modifies the SR change. maybe the system has been tweaked since then

I'm interested in folks' views on how much of a impact you think each individual team member can have (e.g. what % increase/decrease in % to win) (and on the negative side, assuming folks aren't intentionally throwing). If, as I suspect, that impact is fairly small for the characters best at carrying and even smaller for others, then this would suggest that a sizable number of low-volume players are over- or under-ranked.

Not saying this is a problem or that SR/ELO should be more sensitive, just that I think there is more to the idea of being "stuck" at a skill rating than just people who overestimate themselves thinking they deserve to be ranked higher.

well it obviously depends on what your "true" skill is compared to the game you are in. somehow every great player on an alt ends up ranking highly and not stuck in gold.

Holy hell, I actually won a couple games today and the players on the team were nice from the start! We even commented in pre-game that it was nice to see everybody getting along and not arguing about hero choices. I warned them that if we started losing, I'd start calling them "******ed" and "trash." We weren't a great team, but we got along and made just the right late pushes to get the job done.

Even in the game I lost, nobody was a dick. Nobody used mic communication, so there's that, but at least it was a good, fun game with nobody needing to be reported for chat abuse.

Never got the toxicity complaints about this game. It happens but rare to me, 1 in 10 games will someone be a dick, at least in the bronze to gold levels. Leavers though is a different problem.

As far as "impact" its a bit sad that for the most part you'll need 2 tanks 2 healers, and the other 2 people have to do much "better" than the other 4 in order to be effective - but the problem is the "worst" players will gravitate to those roles.. and there's double the characters for it. Bad design imo.. should have excised "duplicate" characters like hanzo/widow soldier/mccree tracer/sombra imo. Or make it a 7 player game.

IDK game is pretty damn good as is.

People tend to be bigger dickheads the higher up the ladder of any game you climb from my experience.

have you ever watched a GM play a new account through bronze, silver, etc.?

one person can practically carry an entire team when the mismatch is really big

obviously if someone is just a little better than the people they're playing with, they're going to be pretty close to a 50% winrate

and yeah, people who play fewer games are more likely to be over or underrated