Contradiction

I’m not even sure what suggestions to make other than role queue; honestly more rigidity in team compositions would be better than a mosh pit full of five DPS heroes and one healer. To kick this off, I’ll start by saying that Overwatch has a serious problem with its Competitive mode. The scenario described above isn’t the fault of Overwatch necessarily, but it still is the end result on multiple occasions while playing Competitive. And it isn’t fun for anyone as a result.

The SR system becomes increasingly ineffective at providing a good gauge of a player’s actual skill as a result of this, too, because it seems to weigh wins and losses with inexplicably harsh consequences, not accounting for individual players who may have played their role well. At this stage for me, it is meaningless, because while my statistics have shown an objective, concrete improvement, my SR ultimately has not risen to reflect this. And, frankly, no matter how skilled anyone is or how well they play a role, they cannot possibly make a noticeable difference on the outcome of a fight that eleven other people also have a profound influence on.

To put it bluntly, if your win percentage remains below 50%, you may as well get comfortable in whatever league you found yourself in, because you won’t be leaving it any time soon. And the forces that determine the outcome of a fight are often out of the control of individual players.

If I can’t get my team to cooperate (and there are uncooperative, toxic people in these matches a few times too many), the end result is a loss for everyone. I won’t suggest the game force ineffective players to switch, that wouldn’t work; but something has to be done before more people stop playing the game, either because of wildly inaccurate or stagnant SR measurements, or because of players who won’t play as a team.

Loss after loss after loss stack up against players who increasingly feel they can do absolutely nothing to make a difference in a fight (please understand and address how disheartening and discouraging this is for so, so many players who just want to get better). These losses stack up against those who are truly playing to win (that’s what Competitive is about!). It’s the fact that I can’t win no matter how hard I work to communicate or be a team player, and it is constant reinforcement for the fallacious notion that teamwork doesn’t work. Except it does, tremendously, we know this, but it’s totally eclipsed by the notion that the game doesn’t seem to care about individual effort to this end. It just sees results.