ugh, placement

[solarbird]

Very frustrated. Went back into comp today, went through placement, got placed in low silver (5 wins, 5 losses, every loss but one I was golding in all the things, they say that matters but I really don't think it does). This play in particular was a real “what do I have to do?!” moment, because I cleared the point solo like this several times and we still couldn’t win.

This is a play from one where we did win, but barely. I dunno. I can carry teams in quickplay but apparently not in comp. (And no, I’m not trying to play superstar/carry artist, not in comp, I’m usually the one desperately trying to get people to group up. Like, the last two post-placement games I was in, both losses, the 5-group I was clumped with came into match chat (finally) to tell me that I was absolutely crushing it (as Widowmaker, Tracer, and a little Orisa in those games) but clearly I wans’t crushing it enough, because we lost, and now I’m down in bronze.)

I have another highlight I haven't uploaded where I'm playing Widowmaker on defence, and we hold, but it's a push, but what's crazy about it is that I'm playing some seriously heavy-duty Widow:76 because I fucking had to, and when I didn't on the turnaround (on offence) I was able to buy us the first point with some critical headshots, but I couldn't do it on the second point because you really just don't get to do that in Hanamura second point.

I guess, I guess I wish... I had somebody good in comp who could watch me play for a while and tell me what kinds of things I'm doing wrong. People in these games generally are telling me good things - I had a Mercy on my team giving me absolute hell for picking Widow on defence at Eichenwald and then about three minutes in was damn near pocketing me because I was the one killing everyone else. (We won that one.)

So. I dunno. See also the previous post - people looking at the highlights and stuff and saying this is pro-level play and I am seriously OP. And yet: silver. bronze. What am I doing wrong?

Comments

[alinsa]

https://www.twitch.tv/jayne will do VOD reviews for subscribers, does hero workshops, and other such. He's just getting started in the streaming biz, so sometimes it's hard to keep up with his schedule and such, but I've found his stream *very* educational (especially if you catch him on a VOD review day) even without getting a personal VOD review from him. And if you do get a VOD review from him, I promise he will tell you Every. Single. Thing. That you did wrong.

(His motto is basically "you are shit". He applies this to absolutely everyone, including himself and top OWL players, which ends up oscillating between funny and grating. He does have some really great phrases, though ... my favorite being "PRESS W YOU FUCKING COWARDS!")

FWIW, usually when people say "pro-level play", they mean that you are mechanically very good -- great aim, can 1v1 well, that kind of thing. But that only gets you about 25% of the way there. Knowing when and where and how to engage to best support your team, understanding ult economy and ult tracking, positioning, "gamesense", etc, are far more important. (That's one of the things that really throws off people coming from other games -- though it's possible to carry if you're really good and know when and where to be disruptive, it's really hard to do so. It's very much a team game.)

Example: On the first clip you posted, why did you ult? What did you think it was going to accomplish? Most of the enemy team was sitting on the point, and most of your team was either dead or running back, so you were basically trying to 1v5 the enemy team at that point. Unless you got a team wipe (you didn't), you've at best bought a couple dozen percent towards a capture before someone from their team is back to contest it again. The only reason you got any kills is that their D.Va was crap, though.

Also, getting golds when your team isn't being effective together isn't really that much of an accomplishment -- it's like being on a motor racing team, draining the fuel from all your teammates' cars, and then bragging that you finished the race ahead of all of them (even though you finished in 20th place). If you'd fueled them up, and given them yourself to draft behind, you might not finish ahead of them, but at the same time your team might end up with three cars in the top ten...

Feel free to ignore me, of course. I'm really awful at this thing. I mean, I've been stuck in silver since season 2. But I've also been trying to improve (sadly, I think my lack of mechanical skill is a pretty major stumbling block).

And yeah, the folks in silver (on the PC at least) just aren't that great, and hard to get to cooperate, and that can be super frustrating -- I certainly end up going to bed angry more nights than not, just because of the sheer amount of stupidity and assholery that exists in this fucking game.

Someone on Jayne's discord has a saying, "40% of your games you're going to win no matter what you do. 40% of your games you're going to lose no matter what you do. Concentrate on the other 20%" ...and I think there's a lot of wisdom there. I guess the trick is to not end up throwing a mouse/controller across the room because of the nearly half of all games one has no control over...

Sigh.

[solarbird]

His motto is basically "you are shit".
Yeah, I don't need to feel worse. I don't care if he applies it to "everyone." That style of 'coaching' is trash. It must be effective for some people, though, or nobody would do it.

On the first clip you posted, why did you ult? What did you think it was going to accomplish?
Well, I killed a lot of the enemy team and I kept them busy so long that my team got unbottled and we took the point.

By then I'd learned that if we were going to take the point, I was going to have to kill at least half the other team. That highlight was towards the end of what had been a charge, but I was pretty much the only one to get that far because our team was being killed so quickly. I needed to move the battle backwards - draw their team back towards the point - and that was the extent of my initial goal. But I got more than I was expecting - D.va had popped her shield already (or enough of it that I was willing) so I knew a barrage had a chance.

(Yes, I know the correct thing to do in most play levels is back up and regroup. I'd tried that, and this team wasn't doing it. And yeh, that D.va coulda - should've - rocketed up, but she hadn't been doing much rocketing up, so I took a chance - but I also knew if I didn't take those chances, we were going to lose.)

Anyway, like I said, I kept it alive long enough that some of my team made it back that we actually did take the point back, even though that Genji you heard revving up did end up killing me. We held it for - well, as long as that team was capable of holding anything. That was the one third of that match we won - and we won it by me doing things like that.

getting golds when your team isn't being effective together isn't really that much of an accomplishment
It's better than not.

When I've got a team that can play together, I don't get all the golds. I was playing around on overbuff for the first time a couple of days ago, and it really showed that in stark numbers. (In recent losing games, top 1% of Widowmakers by the numbers. In recent winning games: bottom 30%. I'm not that kind of streaky, I really do the best when losing. Not all the time, but enough.)

One of the things I find frustrating about the potg/highlight functionality - as a Widowmaker in particular - is that it's mostly total damage, right? So keeping enemy Reaper or McCree from sneaking around behind my team for the ninth straight fucking time exactly the same way and they aren't listening to me saying that on comms by headshotting him every 20 seconds never shows up, and I can't post 'em. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(And then there's the games where it's a good Genji and he beats me most of the time and he just keeps doing that and then killing half my team because they aren't on comms.)

[solarbird]

All that said - I know my gamesense needs work. I don't track kills in the upper right corner well enough, I mostly go by audio cues and that misses things. I'm a little better at keeping track of team ults (tho' part of that is getting people to stack well is so futile so much of the time. I signal and signal and when it actually works it's such a surprise, right). I'm good at keeping track of when characters that I play are out of shield, are out of - or low on - jetpack thrust, etc, and I'm real good at ducking Piggy's hook, but my ... sense of the animations in play as cues needs a lot of improvement. I recently changed the way I have speakers set up for the game, so now I can place characters better. (I've had a harder time with spacial location of sound sources since I got hit by the car, but I can still do it - particularly in headphones. But due to reasons, I don't play in headphones much.)

I think part of the problem I have is that it's hard to develop a decent game sense when nobody around you seems to have much of it either.