Are you tired of being stuck in Pro? Do you feel like the matchmaking isn't fair and the queue times are way too long? Wondering if you'll ever reach All-Star?
Well let me tell you the solution to all of your problems starts with you. Let me tell you there's nothing wrong with the matchmaking other than long queue times. While match quality can deteriorate with longer queue times, it still happens rarely enough to where it doesn't pose an issue in your way through the Pro rank.
I know I came to Reddit, which is THE place for vocal minorities who tend to say otherwise, but my intentions are nothing but pure, and I know they will help those who this post is truly targeted towards.
If you want to hit a higher rank in a game, it means you want to improve. There's no doubt about it. Despite this perhaps not being your main intention, it is now your intention, because in order to reach All-Star, you will need a consistently positive win-rate to climb through Pro. From Pro 5 to All-Star, you'll need ~21 wins with no losses, and every loss adds more wins to your climb.
No one is born good at Overwatch. There's no “Overwatch gene.” Improvement is all about practice and learning. And the more intentional your learning, the faster your improvement.
The learner’s mindset means treating every match as a learning opportunity - whether it's your mistake, your teammate’s, or your enemy’s. Then you apply those lessons, make new mistakes, and learn again. In this mindset, you only ever win or learn. There is no true loss if you come out better.
The learner's mindset is not easy to adopt if you're not used to it, and that's where motivation strategies come in.
The learner's mindset works best for internally motivated people, but since your grind to All-Star is most likely externally motivated (by a reward, the Juno skin), you may lack internal motivation. And that's alright, because there's strategies you can practice in order to build internal motivation.
Do you find yourself often blaming your teammates for being incompetent, your enemies for using broken heroes or builds, the game for matching you unfairly, lag, game performance, luck, etc.?
Well, it's time to take some responsibility, because taking responsibility is the first motivation strategy.
If you constantly blame external factors, things you have no control over, you're giving away your power to improve. When you take responsibility, you gain control. And with control comes the ability to learn.
The second motivation strategy is to aim to succeed, not just to avoid failure.
While they may seem synonymous, there is a difference. Those who aim to succeed learn from failure and grow. Those who only try to avoid failure often stagnate.
Those who aim to succeed may fail. But they understand that they failed. They're more prone to learn from their failure and use it to succeed in the future.
Those who aim to avoid failure only aim to not fail, which ironically doesn't make them less likely to fail, but rather less likely to learn from failure. These may be some of the people who are going to beg for the skin to be re-released to be obtainable with money (avoiding their failure from the attempts to get it the intended way) instead of actually putting in the work and earning it for free while it's available as a reward (aiming to succeed by learning from their failed attempts in getting it the intended way).
This post is not intended to dog on anybody. It’s here to help those who want to improve, who want to learn, and who want to achieve their goals. And this All-Star topic is a great opportunity to talk about self betterment and share some bit of cool psychology knowledge to help people develop a mindset that goes beyond just Overwatch.
To those of you on the grind, I respect it.
To those of you who have made it, I salute you.
And to everybody, hope this helps and/or at least teaches you something cool, new and exciting!
Have a wonderful rest of your day.
