Hi all, I want to preface this post with a little preamble about my experience with OW. I pre-ordered the game on PS4 and played it quite often from 2016-2019, peaking in low Master and spending most of my time in Diamond back then. My hero pool was primarily Pharah, Sombra, Zarya, Hog, and Zen as comp used to be 6v6 open queue and the capacity to flex was expected. Personal life got in the way after that and, aside from playing the game for a few weeks when Overwatch 2 launched in 2022, I returned to the game in 2026 after the Spotlight more or less completely fresh. I've thoroughly enjoyed seeing all the new Heroes, Maps, changes etc and I've tried to come back to the game with the mindset that I'm a little older and have significantly less time than I did ~10 years ago. With no average ELO to base me off and 7 years of game to catch up on, I was placed in Silver 3 in Season 1 and made my way to Gold 1. I've been watching hours and hours of streamers who play the heroes I'm most interested in, and I've been using Spilo Coaching's VOD reviews for heroes in my general rank as a resource to learn the game philosophy and what I should be doing. I've been studying way, WAY harder than I ever did back in the day and am really committed to detaching 'self-growth' from 'rank', but that's become really difficult for the following reason... The quality of games in these ranks are extremely volatile, and it feels like a hell of our own making. By 'volatile', I think what I am trying to explain is the spectrum of understanding of the macro of Overwatch as well as the mechanics. You see a lot of posts from lower-rank players often blaming the team and not themselves, because from their perspective they've done all they can, but the team have let them down. In almost all cases, their share codes get picked apart of their own mistakes, but at least until that happens these players do genuinely believe that their team held them back. They are guilty only of not knowing what they don't know and not knowing how to improve. I believe the high end of Gold to high Plat/early Emerald is this hellish sweet spot where this spectrum is at its widest: players with great mechanics but very little understanding of role or positioning being matched with people who try desperately to take good angles but are either forced to take bad ones or are let down by their own mechanics...and this creates a lot of games which feel like they're a complete coin toss as to who wins, where most feel compelled to run it down main and bash into each other at a choke until one team beats the other in a battle of attrition because no one really trusts anyone else to know their role and execute them. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that lower-rank players seem to actively favour old, familiar maps that discourage anything that isn't standing in a choke while the tanks endlessly shoot each other. Torturous maps like Shambali, Nepal, Hollywood, Eichenwalde are going to win the map vote to anything that isn't King's Row, and the entire Flashpoint game mode might as well be completely disabled for all the opportunity those maps get to be played (which makes the freak occasions where they do end up winning by a minority vote or random map vote a terrible experience, because no one knows how to play the maps). Even newer control maps like the reworked Antarctic Peninsula or Samoa don't get a lot of love despite being some of the coolest maps in the game. Everything is Escort/Hybrid, filtered from Oldest -> Newest. The irony is, therefore, that the general consensus is to find comfort in the familiarity of maps that actively take agency away from them, and this encourages the habit of teams constantly playing down main all the time, which makes taking off-angles or trying to take advantage of a pick to feel like an isolating suicide mission. I've found that the solution to most of my problems in comp down in these ranks is just 'play Sierra' and that has been shockingly impactful given that I simply don't play her. There's been a bunch of games this week where I've played Tracer/Shion, took an angle, got a pick, applied pressure, and my team have not pressed the advantage, then I've switched to Sierra, stood on main, shot the Sigma shield until it breaks and watch my tank walk forward. I think this is because people see the state of the tank as the indication of what the 'advantage' is, and that's why it's so common for tanks to just tunnel vision one another at best, or have my tank tunnel vision while the other actually takes space at worst. It makes me feel like I'm being rewarded for playing heroes that exploit this ELO's fundamental weaknesses (Sierra, Torb, Bastion, Freja) rather than winning because I'm actually improving at the fundamentals expected at the ranks I want to one day get to, and that's started to make me feel like I'm wasting my time by 'trusting the process' and losing on heroes I like and trying to apply concepts I've learned when I can simply play those heroes, shred the team because they're all stood on the payload, get a dopamine hit from seeing the green bar go up and get closer to those higher ranks by trying to run before I can walk. The kicker for me is that, after all those hours of learning, improving on my heroes, trying to apply concepts, accepting the value of 'quantity' (you get better the more you play) as opposed to 'quality' (the game-feel of 'fairness' in player skill level), I moved up to Emerald 5 — but for as much of an achievement I'd like to consider this, as this rank is just a replacement for aspects of Platinum when I started earlier this year, it means my all that effort has currently only translated to roughly a single division of improvement (S1 Gold 1 -> S5 Plat 5 equivalent). As such, I've tried to reconcile that growth as a player doesn't necessarily correlate with a steady upward trajectory of rank - which I do believe - but this new Emerald rank has made it difficult to even see if there is a positive trend at all. All of this has led to this general feeling that metal ranks are like a crab bucket where games are very volatile and almost random in how the games pan out. I understand I'm a fixed 10% of the players in the lobby and, if I'm playing at a level worth more than 10% we'll win more than we lose, but I don't even really feel encouraged to 'work on my game' because it doesn't feel like it has been improving my impact or consistency on the game.   submitted by   /u/No_Break8749   to   r/OverwatchUniversity [link]   [comments]