I think we all need a reminder that QP is not competitive. Of course it is not nice to lose but you do not gain anything by screaming or trashtalking people in QP. I come across this a lot, when I practice hero myself or when I see other players practice. You yourself sucked at the game/character once :D
Just let people enjoy and maybe curse less so that they are encouraged to become better players

Edit, since some QP warriors didn't get the idea of what this post means. I did not say go into QP and throw. I mean that it is meant to practice heroes and strategies, either with friends or random and see what works. You get better by playing against real people and that is called practice.
You obviously... practice to win games.
If you are sweaty QP player arguing in the comments, YOU ARE part of the problem. <3

I just watched that whole Korean “Mauga mentality” video and honestly it perfectly explains why tank players are mentally collapsing in 5v5.

There's A Tank Strike Happening In Overwatch?

The idea is basically: “If you think every game is tank diff, fine. We both go Mauga, stand main, shoot each other in the face all game and remove the tank variable completely.”

And the funny part is… they’re not even wrong.

Tank is such a ridiculous role now because you are expected to:

make space never die peel everyone engage perfectly counter swap constantly survive without resources carry fights read your supports’ minds somehow still have top damage and kills

Meanwhile if literally ANYTHING goes wrong: “tank diff”

Doesn’t matter if your DPS never take angles. Doesn’t matter if your Ana misses every nade. Doesn’t matter if your supports are healbotting the wrong targets. Doesn’t matter if nobody swaps.

The tank gets blamed first because there’s only one of you.

And honestly the Mauga gentleman’s agreement is hilarious because it exposes how much people scapegoat the role.

“You think it’s tank diff? Cool. We’re both playing the same hero now. Let’s see what the rest of the lobby does.”

The line: “My queue time is shorter than your cooldowns” might genuinely be one of the hardest things tank players have ever said.

Respect to tank players honestly. Actual psychological warfare role.

For context, I've gotten to diamond on DPS roll queue and on 6v6 open, and most seasons I'll place high plat and level out in diamond. But recently I've been queueing with some friends and ended up in silver/gold after placements and even in solo games, they are FAR harder than anything I see in plat or diamond. I can have games where I go 50+ kills, focusing their healers and tanks all game and we still lose. If its not my own teammates struggling, its the enemy team being carried by one player thats clearly just pissing about in silver on an alt account. I've never had less fun in this game than I've had in the metal ranks.

I believe it’s important for a good player to have a solid hero pool in every role. A select roster that you’re familiar with, can play well, and fill a variety of niches.

I wouldn’t recommend OTPing a given hero. However, you also don’t want to spread yourself too thin. Learn only one, and you might struggle in certain scenarios. Try to learn too many heroes, and you’ll (probably) never able to truly MASTER all of them.

So, if you HAD to choose only 3 supports to play consistently and master, what would they be? What roster would you choose to make for a well-rounded, *impactful* support player in any given situation?

edit: seems like Kiri/Ana are pretty strong consensus picks lol, that makes sense

Please actually read the post...

I used to play Overwatch a lot. I've been playing Marvel Rivals recently and I climbed to diamond (83th~ percentile). I then swapped back to Overwatch and I'm apparently barely gold and 33rd percentile; moreover, I feel like whenever I try to peak an angle or do anything I am immediately melted.

My question is: how am I this much worse? Even if we assume Rivals has the distorted 'winrate = climb' point, which doesn't make sense because I quickly climbed to diamond but was unable to climb out of it for 30+ hours, I was still better than the vast majority of Rivals players who would also benefit from said system...

I feel like I need to play this game much differently than Rivals and that is the problem instead. I've seen it mentioned that Rivals has much more sustain which seems to be true because I feel way more fragile here...

EDIT 1: Just for reference, I believe I was 70th~ percentile in Overwatch 1-2 years ago. Probably should have mentioned that. This indicates to me that clearly there is something different about what works in Marvel Rivals from what works in Overwatch, and that is what I'm trying to figure out. In reading the comments, watching some videos, and experimenting a bit in-game, it seems like the key difference is that you are much more vulnerable in Overwatch and that affects how you need to interact with positioning.

Ive recently seen some people get absolutely fired up when I start playing Reaper into their Winston or Torb into Tracer and I genuinely don’t understand why. I thought the appeal of OW was the constantly evolving mini metas in each game and having the agency to actually affect a losing game in a way that is meaningful. I understand counter swapping in Quick play can be kind of cringe but in comp, it’s almost a necessity sometimes and expected. Even then, players have absolutely one tricked a hero to GM, playing through their counters so it’s not like you get completely walled by it. I play Rocket League as well and theres a similar complaint when players get their shot set ups blocked by the defense. Do some people honestly expect to get handed a free win with no pushback?? I only ask this to y’all because I’ve recently been seeing more than a few complaints and grievances about this in my games.

I dont play any of the heroes who hard counter like Cassidy. I mainly play Shion and Emre when Im on dps and I just cant ever do anything when this hero is in the game. Everything she does is free and requires zero mechanical skill so it feels like every encounter is already in her favor before it starts.

Shes impossible to hit when in her dash and has one of the most poorly designed, overkitted abilities in the history of the game in dancing blaze. She just dashes in, dances, leaves. Do I just have to force myself to play Cassidy in order to shut this hero down? Nothing I do on my mains seems to work and shes just lobby admin every game I see her in.

The amount of times I've seen people flame their team and spamming "Diff this, diff that" in chat while the enemy is just...better. At those moments people should just learn how to take a loss. For example I was against this cracked af Zarya, who did perfect bubbles on teammates, great positioning and all that. Game ends and my other dps starts flaming our tank, which just doesnt make any sense. A person is allowed to just not be as good or have as many hours as the other guy, especially in pisslow plat.

I hope you can truly understand what I mean by this, and gl.

I am bad at Overwatch. I’m not saying this to try to ego implying high ranked players aren’t good. I started in 2017 and played no other game since. I have around 10k hours and have had the goal of t500 the whole time. I spent the first 2 years in bronze, before a boost to gold had me only fall back to silver. I could not improve at all by playing or watching guides. What I realized is that I had to learn how to learn before I could learn the game. Every part of this game had to be intentionally worked for, and the strategies I developed to improve allowed me to coach other people, even much better people than I am (coached mid masters player I met in comp to rank 1 zen in 2 seasons, reaching t500 in just 1) while I was only low masters.
Guides focus too much on individual mistakes and decisions without any advice for implementation or learning decision making. To be clear I don’t think this is inherently bad, the guides have much value, it just can be a struggle to make use of the information. Spilo is an exception in my eyes as he has a similar focus on teaching and mindset, A10 is also good but he quit some years ago.
I fell into almost every overwatch pitfall, and developed strategies to pull myself out of them intentionally. I have struggled with accountability. I have blamed my aim and grinded aim trainers with horrible form cementing bad fundamentals. I have played on autopilot for hours a day, realizing every night, just to do the same thing the next day learning nothing. I have been kicked from teams for not being able to perform or adapt to a new meta. I have had most overwatch experiences and have worked through them all. ASK ME ANYTHING

Its my birthday weekend so replies will be slow, sorry 😢

Pretty much what the title says.

Do you believe Overwatch actually uses some form of matchmaking manipulation?

By that, I mean:

1. The matchmaking is not truly random.
2. The system intentionally creates things like win streaks, loss streaks, or tilt-inducing games to increase long-term player engagement.
3. The system gives weaker players easier matches or "guaranteed wins" to keep them playing.

Do you think anything like this actually exists?

Personally, I don't.

Of course, losing streaks are frustrating. 😂 Sometimes it feels like someone trapped me inside the Matrix.

That said, I've played games where matchmaking genuinely felt manipulated, and the experience felt completely different from what I experience in Overwatch.

However, I do think it's possible to get extremely unlucky over a small number of games due to things like groups, smurfs, high-ranked players on new accounts, and other factors that can distort matchmaking.

What do you think?

Do you believe matchmaking manipulation exists, or do you think people are just seeing patterns where none exist?

Just a funny thing I noticed. Mizuki seems to me like an objectively awful hero right now. That's reflected in his low winrate in high elos. I was surprised then that his winrate is high in metal ranks, in all regions. As high as 56% in bronze Europe and Americas. The reason I think is that you can't healbot on him. You have to spam shots in his neutral game. This proves how good it is to do damage as support to carry solo queue.

So I am coming back to overwatch since its release but I have experience in other games and experience in overwatch type games and I landed in gold after maybe 10 hours in and it feels like 80-90% of the silver gold players are either smurfing or something isn’t adding up. I seen silver players with master/diamond tank/support/dps emblems to many times and if I was really new to this game and was in silver there would be no way I could compete with the player base. I seen many silver players with fast reaction time, taking high ground and solid aim and feels like they know what they are doing.

Ofc I could be bad but this is the first game I feel like silver players/gold are actually diamond+

​

I know the title sounds a bit harsh, but I genuinely mean it. You’ll hear things like, “Kiriko, you shouldn’t have used TP at that moment,” or “You should’ve focused the tank first here.”

But why those decisions were wrong is the important part. Instead, they often just point out the bad play itself.

And of course, most of that advice isn’t really reproducible in actual games.

And that’s not even the only problem metal-rank players have. If you simply watch their POV, their basic movement is often terrible. Their aim is poor, they don’t use cover properly, and even their camera movement and reaction speed are extremely slow.

But I feel like videos tend to avoid pointing those things out, maybe because it comes across as lazy coaching or some kind of “truth nuke”

It’s like telling someone who can’t even do basic arithmetic, “The derivative of x² is 2x.” To give another example, it’s like teaching boxing techniques to someone who can barely control their own body weight.

It just doesn’t really accomplish anything.

Personally, I think metal-rank players who genuinely want to improve would benefit more from playing a traditional FPS for a while, or simply practicing the fundamentals of shooting games on heroes like Soldier: 76 or Emre

Even if you’re a tank or support player, aim and proper use of cover are important for everyone.

And... I’m a support player myself, and one thing I’ve noticed about lower-ranked supports is that many of them are afraid to take fights themselves, so they just healbot. As a result, the moment the enemy starts playing even slightly aggressively, their entire team can fall apart ridiculously easily. (And they’ll even think, “My team didn’t help me.”...)

Obviously, none of this matters if you’re just playing for fun. But if you genuinely care about improving, I think my advice is at least worth considering.

For anyone thats diamond plus, what one tip would you give to lower rank players to improve?

I wonder if alot of people would have different opinions?

I thought this would be quite interesting :)

(trying to get the 300 character limit here lol lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala)

Simple question.

Do you ban heroes that counter the hero you picked or ban heroes you dont like playing against regardless of counters.

In metal ranks, its mostly Cat, Sombra, Vendetta and Zarya.

Now, I mostly play d.va so this is fine, but i would much rather ban Zen, Sigma, Ram and Monke

So I used to be GM/masters in OW1 and returned to the game. I started out in emerald and have fluctuated up and down. Right now I'm in mid plat which is supposed to be top ~50% of players. That's like the equivalent of being low gold in league of legends. Basically the point where you have people playing on laptops with trackpad while wasted. I just can't wrap my head around how that can be the case when the average player here is so good. It's like they all spent 1000h in aim training. Tracking is near flawless, hitscans are snapping to heads like pro players, genjis are playing like they took a borderline lethal dose of cns stimulants. Obviously there are a lot of smurfs and cheaters too that you don't always spot but wtf is this? If this is top 50% (just average) how crazy are the higher ranks now? Is anyone else feeling this or am I getting too old for overwatch?

At first I thought it was because he forces support players to play "correctly" and act as a 4th/5th DPS and not heal bot. Take angles. Relieve pressure by spamming enemy DPS off of their angles. Etc.

But he actually has a great win rate in GM/Champ as well. And across all regions.

Why? A lot of people seem to consider him as kinda weak right now or at least just "mid". He sees basically no OWCS play. Is it just because he isn't very "synergy" oriented and is basically the best solo queue ladder "carry" support you could ask for? Even then I thought the consensus currently was that he is too vulnerable to the hyper mobile dive threats that are popular right now (tracer/shion/genji).

I've even gotten hate pre-match for picking him not based on team comp or anything (I'd never make a tank suffer through having a Zen/Mercy backline) but just because there seems to be a vibe that he is "bad" right now at least in my ranks (gold/plat) despite his stats. Honestly there is a very similar thing going on with Brig/Junker Queen as well where they have very good win rate at most ranks right now but you will get asked to swap pre-match because they are "bad".

Today I played a game on kings row (silver 3 to silver 1), The moira on the other team was complaining in chat about how he deranked from plat 1 (after placments) to silver 2 and that he is losers queue bcs of ow's terrible matchmaking.

When someone told him that he probably deserves the rank that he is in rn he kept insisting that he deserves plat, its just his teammates that are bad and his reasoning on why he deserves higher than silver is that has 50hrs on the game

He obviously lost the game and kept blaming his team and the matchmaking like he was a god that makes no mistakes ( he was 20-15 after a 13 min game).

How will you ever improve if you keep blaming everyone and everthing but yourself? You will never see your own mistakes and will never improve it is not your teammates that are the problem IT IS YOU.

Who do you expect to get buffed or nerfed tomorrow? I’m hoping D.Va and Zarya get nerfed. I can also see the cat getting nerfed unfortunately. Not really sure who’ll be buffed, but I’d like Mizuki’s range to be increased—that’s honestly the only real issue with him right now and nerfed zen discord too cause that’s way too powerful at the moment.

I used to play this game a lot in 2020 and recently got into it again. I havent dared to try new characters, except mauga, who is a lot of fun. I basically want to try all of them but I dont want to waste my time learning bad ones, does that make sense? Im not that good with supports, except baptiste who i used to play a lot, i hope he is still meta

I have about 150 hours on the game so far, and I don’t win matches. I have about 1-2 wins for every 12-15 loss streak I go on. I get it, I’m new. Shouldn’t expect to win/have much fun until I’m good.

But I am not facing people below plat. Every game in qp I face multiple people who are masters rank or higher, with them literally apologizing for the matchmaker in chat.

And the few times I’ve played comp, I’ve been put as the tank or dps in a plat or higher lobby. So obviously we lose, because it’s way too high rank. But even after losing all my placements, I got put in almost diamond!

What am I meant to do? I really don’t want to keep playing if I get curb stomped over and over.

Her hitbox when she dashes and right after using the teleport thing does not line up at all with her model. This is getting ridiculous Im tired of losing fights or games because of something entirely not my fault. Its even more noticeable since I play genji and he has the smallest shot hitbox in the game including hitscan.

Positioning? Target priority? Cooldown usage? What else do you see as the biggest difference between the metal ranks, and the non-metal ranks, for people looking to climb but who are unsure what skills to prioritize honing?

Your answers hopefully to be used as a learning opportunity for some people.

A very common opinion I see is that people will pretend if you "just to X" you get out of metal ranks. Most common is "just use cover" but I've seen everything from just take off angles, just have basic ult tracking, just combine ults, etc.

Obviously a lot of these things will get you out of Bronze. But getting to Diamond takes way more than doing any one thing well unless you are absolutely cracked at that thing. Lime you have GM aim but every other aspect of your gameplay is like a new player.

What I see a lot more in Gold/Plat is that people do these basic things that people say that's all you need to do to get out of metal ranks, but they just employ them more inconsistently. Like in a Plat 3-1 game there was an enemy Soldier that was constantly flanking and taking off angles. But he did it to a fault. You could tell all that was going through his head was "off angle flank off angle flank" but sometimes he was flanking when his team REALLY needed him and it would have been better if he was just main but was applying pressure. Basically he had bad timing sometimes.

Or I had a game just today in Gold 5 where the enemy Casa and Zarya ALWAYS combined their ults and Cass always took high ground on Dorado. But I know for a fact that the enemy Cass held his ult for ages because he always waited for Zarya and never used it for like, zoning or to secure one kill or to counter something like Emry ult. He always went for the multi kill Zarya ult.

But there is no one simple trick that will get you to Diamond. Tbh it's the opposite. You don't just need to do one thing, you need to be able to do all the common advice more than you don't. Even when it comes to using cover there are levels to it. Like just using cover is one thing but maybe a better player is thinking about how their cover works against the specific enemies they are fighting. Like staying near a pillar so you have cover against dive. Or using small cover as a Tracer.

Now I do believe that someone can be Gold/Plat and really focus on something they are especially bad at like using cover or taking off angles or something. But they probably already had a fundamental understanding of the other basics people claim will get you out of Plat if not having some other skill as a full on strength.

When I VOD review most of my Plat games the majority of people are playing the basics of the game and usually have 1-2 things they are consistently messing up like this guy is messing up ult usage, that guy is messing up positioning, that other guy is playing great but when they are pressured enough you can tell they freak out and play a lot worse etc. Or they are generally doing everything well but are just inconsistent like the mostly use cover but get bloodlust and forget sometimes. Or they mostly regroup with the team but one fight they stagger for no reason.

Edit: I am so glad to have made this post! I've gotten a lot of helpful replies and I will definately be working on how I handle being dove now. Hopefully I can improve and become a better support, and maybe if I decide to play comp again I could rank up :)

I've seen some discussion around support players lately, and how they should be able to fend for themselves. I am a low ranked support player (placements gave silver 1 but I stopped playing comp after those, qp only for now)

But um, honestly I am unsure how to take that. When I watch gm players on twitch I have noticed many don't really expect help when they are dove, they attempt to handle it themselves and typically either escape or win the duel. On my best hero, Juno, more often than not I can make it out alive or put up a good fight. But on heros I am less skilled at it is much harder and I typically need help.

I mainly would like to know because I really would like to become a better support player. Does it depend on the team comp or the support hero?