I learned to not sweat individual games. You’ll have long losing streaks. Random crap happens.
But if you just keep playing competitive regardless, it evens out. Actual skill will slowly rise regardless of the random elements, and scrubs will float forever in mid-to-high silver.
I just learned that Southern New Hampshire University, where I work, has an eSports league, serious enough that they offer scholarships, and they just got a grant to build a whole new facility for it. A guy I work with is their Overwatch coach, and I’m told their biggest rivalry right now is with Northeastern University. I will continue to follow this as it develops.
When I’m trying to climb games (have not been playing Overwatch in a while, but in general), even if I’m feeling good I try to take a break after a loss or two. There might be something off about your gameplay or just people you happen to be running into at that time of day and getting a reset in before joining again usually at least felt like it gave me better results.
Damn… I wish overwatch (as an esports team) had existed in college. I would have joined a team and maybe also not gotten addicted to wow.
After a week of up and down play, I’ve had a really great day today and climbed from like 2011SR to 2198SR at the highest point, going like 8-3 today. Unfortunate that in the last game we got cheesed out by a pirate ship.
Now that the new rules have been in place for a while, it’s funny to see how deep the “I only play DPS” queue is. Typical wait times are <2 minutes for Tank and Support, but 9+ for DPS.
What’s interesting now is that I find I’m almost always paired with a great fellow tank who’s about my skill level. But, the DPS is still wildly all over the place.
I’m curious to see how it settles. I get the impression that a lot of bad DPS are starting to get ranked lower and lower in DPS now that they can’t bolster their ranks by playing other roles.
This reminds me of SWTOR and how they implemented a matchmaker for Ops and Flashpoints. You set yourself to Tank, Healer, or Damage and the server matched you up. Sometimes getting a tank or a healer took extra time when I queued as DPS. However queuing as a Tank or Healer got me right in.
I mean, it’s pretty much the same in any MMO. I’ve had the DPS queue on FFXIV hit 30-60+ minutes in Duty Finder. It’s one of the main reasons I bitch about Bard being called a DPS in that game, rather than a support like it should be.
So give Dancers and Bards instant queue by fucking over all the other dps players? Sure, fine, as a tank main I don’t really care too much. Although that would also affect tank queues, maybe even significantly, so please no.
There’s no real elegant solution, I agree, but having classes that are far more focused on support than DPS in the same queue does kinda unbalance things.
I feel like the honest answer is that that game doesn’t need 370 DPS classes, four healers, and two viable tanks.
It all comes down to most people just wanna be in ur base killin ur d00dz and don’t want to think much past that. And hey that is a valid desire, it’s why I play Apex or UT or whatever but it also means the majority people want to play the role that kills d00dz because its coolest and simplest.
All tanks are viable. But also most importantly, kinda like panfriedmarmot said, problem is people not the system. Even if there was one job of each role, the queues would be similarly lopsided.
That’s one of those things where I can’t see easy answers. For FFXIV or Overwatch or anything else already exsisting that has established roles there is no way to help people wanting to be the deeps. Were I building team based game from scratch, I’d maybe try leaving out any kind of pure-dps role.
This! Though sadly a lot of players just wanna do all the damage and not do any teamplay focused moves/abilities.
The DPS problem isn’t that there are too many people who want to play DPS. It’s that there are too many people who are horrible at DPS who want to play DPS. So they’re all vying for the same low-silver match placement.
But whatever. I’m a rockin’ tank and a solid support, so I can insta-match any time I want.
Did support queue for an hour and a half last night. Only lost one game. For high silver/low gold, at least, everyone seems mostly on a similar level.
Had one guy, though, who was REALLY interested in being a parody of “step-sibling porn”. Stuff like “I’m going in for you, step-bruh!” Weird game.
No GeekNights tonight while Scott finishes moving.
Should I stream some overwatch? 
Political Book club: Give us the ballot, I’m sure we all remember this book 2 years later :-p
So there is a huge rebalancing change on the PTR, largely around tanks. Orisa and Sigma both got nerfs to their shield deploymnet, and Sigma can no longer block Roadhog’s hook or Brig’s whipshot with Kinetic grasp. Why that ability ever did that is beyond me. Hog also got a 6th shot in his gun, D.Va. got a faster regenerating defense matrix, and Winston’s bubble received an additional 100 health.
Reinhard on the other hand got passively buffed, simply because they buffed Lucio back to before his previous nerf, giving him a better speed boost. Meanwhile Moira’s self-healing was reduced, Symmetra got nerfed in her barrier and sentry damage (and her main beam is now louder, thus alerting the people she is attacking more) and Doomfist takes longer to charge up and gets fewer shields.
Overall these changes are all very welcome to me, and should shake up the meta quite a bit.
Maybe I can play D.Va again. I’ve been rotating through Rein > Orisa > Roadhog > Zarya based on a simple set of heuristics.
Role lock continues to make everyone pretty chill and friendly, and the games are a lot more consistent. Though we did lose a game to a “silver” Genji who played like a Diamond.
Literally, he’d kill our whole team. We couldn’t make any progress. He was always there and no one could kill him. The rest of their team did nothing of note.
I switched to hog and started hooking him. Every time I hooked/killed him, we’d cut through the other team like butter and were unstoppable. Then he’d spawn again and we’d come to a dead stop.
So a single Diamond-tier Genji can indeed completely own an entire team of high silver and low golds single-handedly.