The law of averages isn't a good rule when the sample size is so small. The pendulum might never swing back the other way.
My account is level 40. For the first time. I only log a few games a week, now that the initial new-release hype is over. My online time is precious to me, and it's not great to go on a week long losing streak because I'm only playing a few matches here and there. It's not great to be told that the only way to earn new shinies to to play competitive mode and then never earn any currency because you aren't getting wins.
Law of averages is great if you're playing thousands of games. But I'm not. But that doesn't mean I don't enjoy seeing forward progress when I do play.
It seems like there are a few things that might be bothering you:
1. Your win ratio is under 0.5. Thus you don't get competitive points as quickly.
2. Your rank is low. Thus you don't feel like you're making progress, and you don't think your ranking correctly reflects your skill.
The first two problems are contradictory. If you're not winning enough games, the solution for the system is to drop you brutally until you are. Higher variance in game outcomes actually helps with problem 1, because it smears performance over a larger set of ranks. You can only have one probability of winning games. If it's 50%, you're gonna win 50% of games. The farther it is from 50%, the more directly your personal skill is translating into game outcomes.
You feel unlucky. I have to admit, I do too. In fact, I guarantee if we polled single players at least 70% would say their "true" rank is higher than the one assigned because they get stuck with bad teams that they desperately try to carry. Overwatch by design presents you with a slew of positive metrics after every match specifically to sustain the belief that you are better than the game outcome suggests. But if it's really true in your case, congratulations! Starting now, your very next game, your expected win value is > 50%, because you are better than the mean at your ranking.
This is an excellent explanation right up until you run smack-bang into the solo/team dynamic at the end. No matter how good you are you're 1/6th of a team, and true 'carrying' is actually pretty rare (and often hero/map dependent).
If you're the best player in your rank, and you're in a game with players of your rank, your expected win percentage is greater than 50% by definition. If your expected win percentage is not > 50%, then you're not the best player in the match, and in fact you're not even above the mean. That's what player skill means in the context of Overwatch: how your presence affects the probability of your team winning.
Except, and to @Flippy_D 's point, this is only true if teamwork coordination is equal across both teams. The presence of teamwork trumps the presence of skill. And it's not even a close comparison. Teamwork and team/map coordination is significantly more important than individual skill. What this ALSO means, is that the lack of teamwork can completely torpedo a team, even if they're the 6 better individual players in the match.
The worst part of this is that, while the 1/6 is not going to be able to carry a team. A 1/6 can sink a team if he refuses to work with the team, or character switch to something map appropriate, etc. As a solo-queue player, you feel this SO heavily.
A priori, your team has exactly a 50% chance of being better coordinated than the other team. If that's not true, then it's because of a personal characteristic of you as a player.
Yeah, that speed boost is more useful on KOTH than anywhere else, due to the mutual rush to the point and the high death rate due to the cramped skirmishes.
Also, roughly half the KotH maps have spots you can boop someone off the map in or within feet of the point.
And he can stall a capture really well.
And because everyone is grouped up at the point you get maximum utility from your buffs and ultimate. He can shut down some really nasty plays by your opponent. Last night I negated a Zarya+Pharah ult combo that effectively ended the game.
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
Meanwhile over in Reddit.
Dude was wondering why their team's Tracer wouldn't switch when they were up against 6 Torbs. So he did some investigating:
Bonus screenshot of Tracer complaining.
How someone can play for so long without 1) at least trying different heroes and 2) not realizing that you need to switch heroes sometimes is beyond me.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
Okay, I get the utility of Lucio in KOTH, but I guess I'm asking for more of an overall strategy. Should my 2/3-man group always park on the point, assuming we have captured it? Or should we look towards sealing off approaches to the point at a distance?
Sev: Your gameplay is the most heavily yomi based around. Usually you look for characters that allow you to force guessing situations for big dmg. Even if the guess is mathematically nowhere near in your favor lol. You're happiest when you have either a 50/50, 33/33/33 or even a 75/25 situation to go crazy with. And you will take big risks to force those situations to come up.
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CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
Dude was wondering why their team's Tracer wouldn't switch when they were up against 6 Torbs. So he did some investigating:
Bonus screenshot of Tracer complaining.
How someone can play for so long without 1) at least trying different heroes and 2) not realizing that you need to switch heroes sometimes is beyond me.
There are certainly already methods to rank players/teams already that take into account more than just simple wins/losses, and I'm not just talking about relatively terrible "power rankings" that silly sports journalists do. I mean even hockey has a way give "loser points" when playing to overtime. I don't see why Blizzard can't implement one of these methods to make things not so black/white when it comes to giving out points. Even something as simple as regulation win-3, regulation loss-0, overtime win-2, overtime loss-1, would not incentivize playing to overtime, but still feel like you got some reward for playing a close game.
You can rank the whole team differently according to how much they won or lost by. But there's no way to rank individual player performance without introducing perverse incentives.
Sure there is. Statistics like WAR (wins above replacement) in baseball do exactly that. By comparing/weighing across how a particular player's team performs over multiple games, you can estimate the strength of a single player.
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The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
There are certainly already methods to rank players/teams already that take into account more than just simple wins/losses, and I'm not just talking about relatively terrible "power rankings" that silly sports journalists do. I mean even hockey has a way give "loser points" when playing to overtime. I don't see why Blizzard can't implement one of these methods to make things not so black/white when it comes to giving out points. Even something as simple as regulation win-3, regulation loss-0, overtime win-2, overtime loss-1, would not incentivize playing to overtime, but still feel like you got some reward for playing a close game.
You can rank the whole team differently according to how much they won or lost by. But there's no way to rank individual player performance without introducing perverse incentives.
Sure there is. Statistics like WAR (wins above replacement) in baseball do exactly that. By comparing/weighing across how a particular player's team performs over multiple games, you can estimate the strength of a single player.
By what metric do you judge a player's performance?
No I don't.
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Orphanerivers of redthat run to seaRegistered Userregular
Okay, I get the utility of Lucio in KOTH, but I guess I'm asking for more of an overall strategy. Should my 2/3-man group always park on the point, assuming we have captured it? Or should we look towards sealing off approaches to the point at a distance?
I would say that ideally one person should always be on the point to stop caps, one person should be hovering nearby but not necessarily on the point to watch approaches and to assist in point holding, and one person can range farther out to be a distraction/come around from enemies from behind. This can change dependin on your individual preferences and playstyles.
You don't want to all stack on the point as a team because then an ult or point clear will definitely lose you the point and it also allows the enemy team time to set up and approach from multiple directions, but you don't want to be so far out you can't quickly contest if something like that does happen. The important thing is to be flexible and to be able to adapt/react to enemy movement before they can get the ball rolling.
To be fair, that player's beta stats might have shown a more spread out time distribution. For comparison, Tracer, Zenyatta, and Bastion all have very little playtime on my live stats.
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Would you say that Roadhog or Reaper are good choices for sticking on the point after capture, due to their relative self-sufficiency and ability to swiftly delete people who try to close in?
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
edited July 2016
While I do feel like they should do something about close-defeats I honestly haven't a clue as to what they could do.
Being on a koth map where the game ends up in endless OT only to come out defeated and losing a ton of rank points fucking sucks. I know that much. Hell, I think situations like that knock the wind out of my sails more than a stomp.
But as I said I don't exactly know what, if anything, Blizzard can do about it.
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A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
There are certainly already methods to rank players/teams already that take into account more than just simple wins/losses, and I'm not just talking about relatively terrible "power rankings" that silly sports journalists do. I mean even hockey has a way give "loser points" when playing to overtime. I don't see why Blizzard can't implement one of these methods to make things not so black/white when it comes to giving out points. Even something as simple as regulation win-3, regulation loss-0, overtime win-2, overtime loss-1, would not incentivize playing to overtime, but still feel like you got some reward for playing a close game.
You can rank the whole team differently according to how much they won or lost by. But there's no way to rank individual player performance without introducing perverse incentives.
Sure there is. Statistics like WAR (wins above replacement) in baseball do exactly that. By comparing/weighing across how a particular player's team performs over multiple games, you can estimate the strength of a single player.
By what metric do you judge a player's performance?
Maybe medals? Since medals supposedly reward correct, objective play.
On a related note, not that I know anything about ratings in baseball or whatnot, but I do wonder if there would be support for a system that granted you + points vs your skill loss so that, in a perfect situation, you could rank up slightly or offset your lost skill rating to a certain extent.
Let's pretend that you are the mythical soloqueue hero, fighting a losing game. You get all gold medals. You switch heroes. You stay on the point. You heal when there is no healer. You have high impact ults. You basically play your heart out, but you still lose.
However, due to your valiant efforts, maybe you actually don't lose a ton of points, or you even maybe gain a tiny fraction of rank up because well, you carried as much as you possibly could.
Would this be acceptable to anyone? Just theoretically, is this fair? Is it better than the current system?
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Sev: Your gameplay is the most heavily yomi based around. Usually you look for characters that allow you to force guessing situations for big dmg. Even if the guess is mathematically nowhere near in your favor lol. You're happiest when you have either a 50/50, 33/33/33 or even a 75/25 situation to go crazy with. And you will take big risks to force those situations to come up.
There are certainly already methods to rank players/teams already that take into account more than just simple wins/losses, and I'm not just talking about relatively terrible "power rankings" that silly sports journalists do. I mean even hockey has a way give "loser points" when playing to overtime. I don't see why Blizzard can't implement one of these methods to make things not so black/white when it comes to giving out points. Even something as simple as regulation win-3, regulation loss-0, overtime win-2, overtime loss-1, would not incentivize playing to overtime, but still feel like you got some reward for playing a close game.
You can rank the whole team differently according to how much they won or lost by. But there's no way to rank individual player performance without introducing perverse incentives.
Sure there is. Statistics like WAR (wins above replacement) in baseball do exactly that. By comparing/weighing across how a particular player's team performs over multiple games, you can estimate the strength of a single player.
By what metric do you judge a player's performance?
I mean, this could probably be a paper/thesis in and of itself, but a naive (but straightforward) way to think about it is that a player i has strength x_i (which can and probably does change over time). When a team is made, the strength of the team is calculated by some function of each individual's strength (a sum or an average for example). This is compared against the opponent team's strength (again the exact function of how they are compared is not particularly important here). If they are close, then the teams are seen as relatively balanced, if not then relatively unbalanced. Then after the game is played, if the game was balanced, and if team A beat team B in a blowout (how a blowout is determined depends on the game type played) then you increase each player's strength on team A by a moderate amount, while similarly decreasing the strength of the players on team B. On the other hand, if the teams were unbalanced (say team A was much stronger than team , then if A crushes B, then the strengths don't change (or don't change much), while if B wins then the individual's on team B get a huge boost while team A would get a huge decrease. Thus you can rank each player by their individual skill.
I mean, usually WAR takes into account the player's position in baseball. And I could certainly see some kind of adaptation for the particular character, so that you could rank a player's Mercy play versus other Mercys.
I don't feel like this is a particularly novel idea. Perhaps I'm misuderstanding Death of Rats or zakkiel?
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
The best strategy I've found for KotH is once you cap it, get the hell off of it. You could leave one person on the point to contest caps but when I say get off the point I don't mean scatter to the four winds, just don't stand directly on it. Ideally you're near enough to contest if necessary but far enough that you're not immediately under fire any time an enemy enters the point. From there you work to stop the enemy before they even touch the point.
This strategy does require your whole team to be on the same page, though.
Well, if you're being toxic and rude to your teammates, there's a chance you're not working with them very well. You're a tank, you're not supposed to work alone. You're a distraction, a wall, something to grab focus away from your hanzo so he can build his ult and get the whole team down.
Jesus christ you people , I am not the one screaming at people all I fucking said was there are situations where the people screaming are 100% correct . And its true just cause they may be nice about it doesnt mean they are wrong.
I've played with numerous people who base everything on the medals, but aren't even trying to play as a team. The medals are meaningless for the most part, because the biggest skills this game requires are communication and cooperation.
If you lose, you lose as a team. And since the mode is based around putting you with people in the same rank range, if you can't handle losing because of the lack of skill of other players, I'd just not play in pub and always group.
No, no. The medals are a useful data point that can help you understand the game more and understand that match in particular. They are not the end all be all, but if I get gold for objective kills and objective time, and we still get stomped, I feel confident in saying that I was not the weak link there. The potato brain who tells me I was the reason we lost is most definitely wrong.
The best strategy I've found for KotH is once you cap it, get the hell off of it. You could leave one person on the point to contest caps but when I say get off the point I don't mean scatter to the four winds, just don't stand directly on it. Ideally you're near enough to contest if necessary but far enough that you're not immediately under fire any time an enemy enters the point. From there you work to stop the enemy before they even touch the point.
This strategy does require your whole team to be on the same page, though.
Exactly. Each KotH map has approach points. Your team spreads out to cover those points and then calls out the approach direction. That way, your tanks can hold the choke while flankers do what they do. Any back caps can be called out and dealt with easily (don't worry if you lose the point for like 2 seconds, it's far more worth it to slaughter their outnumbered team and then mop up).
Okay, I get the utility of Lucio in KOTH, but I guess I'm asking for more of an overall strategy. Should my 2/3-man group always park on the point, assuming we have captured it? Or should we look towards sealing off approaches to the point at a distance?
KotH doesn't work like that. Your positioning depends on the map, your team comp, and your enemies team comp. Some maps you don't want to be on the point because it's too easy to get hit with AOE dmg. Some point you have to stay on the point because it gives you the best chance to boop someone off the edge. I think the best place on most point are places that give you elevation advantage over the point.
Really KotH maps are about killing the enemy team as efficiently as possible. So always try to play characters that can knock people off the edge, counter the enemy team, or are really good at killing. I would say never play defensive heroes (Mercy, Reinhardt, Junkrat, symetra, and torb) unless they are the direct counter to the enemy team. Winston, Roadhog, Reaper, Zyra, Pharah, and Lucio always seem solid on KotH maps.
Time is a flat circle
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
On a completely fucking stupid note;
Last night myself and a couple of buddies were in a comp game on Lijaing Tower. We won the first round, lost the second, and won the third. At the start of the fourth round one of our teammates said, "Fuck this you guys suck." and left the game.
This left not just my team, but the enemy team completely fucking flabbergasted. Because of one person eleven others got screwed out of their potential rewards.
I'll never know what game that guy was playing to think his team sucked. It is my, "If it wasn't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college."
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
No, no. The medals are a useful data point that can help you understand the game more and understand that match in particular. They are not the end all be all, but if I get gold for objective kills and objective time, and we still get stomped, I feel confident in saying that I was not the weak link there. The potato brain who tells me I was the reason we lost is most definitely wrong.
Disagree, medals are worthless. Objective time and kills is worthless because most of the objectives are capped in big bursts. If you got gold in objective time and kills it could mean that you were standing on the point while the rest of your team was doing something else or that yes you used your ult on the point and got a bunch of kills but your team wasn't in a spot to capitalize.
This is a team game individual stats mean very little when you lose. You can't see anyone else's stats. Everyone on the losing team might be within one kill of the gold medal.
So, it's sudden death, my team is defending. The worst player on the team goes Bastion. There's about 15 seconds left before attack, and both he and S76 are just running around firing into the air. I ask them to get to high ground, so I can know their positions to heal them (I'm Mercy). He tells me to shut the fuck up.
Okay, I get the utility of Lucio in KOTH, but I guess I'm asking for more of an overall strategy. Should my 2/3-man group always park on the point, assuming we have captured it? Or should we look towards sealing off approaches to the point at a distance?
KotH doesn't work like that. Your positioning depends on the map, your team comp, and your enemies team comp. Some maps you don't want to be on the point because it's too easy to get hit with AOE dmg. Some point you have to stay on the point because it gives you the best chance to boop someone off the edge. I think the best place on most point are places that give you elevation advantage over the point.
Really KotH maps are about killing the enemy team as efficiently as possible. So always try to play characters that can knock people off the edge, counter the enemy team, or are really good at killing. I would say never play defensive heroes (Mercy, Reinhardt, Junkrat, symetra, and torb) unless they are the direct counter to the enemy team. Winston, Roadhog, Reaper, Zyra, Pharah, and Lucio always seem solid on KotH maps.
Symmetra's really good on KotH. Particularly if your team has Lucio to get her there fast at the start. The armor helps more than you think, and her beam is deadly in that up close and frantic playstyle that tends to happen in KotH. I often get gold or silver eliminations with her. If your team is getting super rolled over, she sucks, but otherwise she's great on most maps. Only time she's not good is if you can't even get to the point. Then you definitely need to switch.
That seems to be a tactic I'm seeing a lot more lately: D.Va ulting straight into the air.
I've only recently gotten okay at the meteor angle drop.
That's been a good way to use her ult done the beginning, yeah
I guess for me, considering D.Va is so weirdly squishy, running into the fray, ulting straight up, and running away makes less sense than staying far away, ulting at an angle, and being in relative safety the whole time/
That seems to be a tactic I'm seeing a lot more lately: D.Va ulting straight into the air.
I've only recently gotten okay at the meteor angle drop.
That's been a good way to use her ult done the beginning, yeah
I guess for me, considering D.Va is so weirdly squishy, running into the fray, ulting straight up, and running away makes less sense than staying far away, ulting at an angle, and being in relative safety the whole time/
Junkrat seems pretty good at KOTH? Maybe I'm just weak, but it seems like him constantly shelling the point or the hallways leading to it does pretty good work. Not to mention his conc mine blowing people off edges, or dropping a rip tire into the point.
Symmetra's really good on KotH. Particularly if your team has Lucio to get her there fast at the start. The armor helps more than you think, and her beam is deadly in that up close and frantic playstyle that tends to happen in KotH. I often get gold or silver eliminations with her. If your team is getting super rolled over, she sucks, but otherwise she's great on most maps. Only time she's not good is if you can't even get to the point. Then you definitely need to switch.
I guess I've never seen a Symmetra be successful on KotH. If I did I would just go Winston then she does not matter anymore.
Junkrat seems pretty good at KOTH? Maybe I'm just weak, but it seems like him constantly shelling the point or the hallways leading to it does pretty good work. Not to mention his conc mine blowing people off edges, or dropping a rip tire into the point.
I think Junkrat is also bad because he doesn't counter anyone that is played on KotH maps. I think Pharah does everything junkrat does but better KotH wise.
Just a bit about WAR and Baseball versus Overwatch - Reading a Baseball stat line tells you exactly how a game went. It's like reading a Chess log, in both of those cases you can completely rebuild the experience of the game without anything else other than the stat line. This simply isn't possible in Overwatch (nor the majority of games / sports / etc). As mentioned, medals in an Overwatch game can be incredibly good or completely inconsequential (and/or both) over the course of a game, with no way of telling how important that action was at the time of it's happening. It's straight up why the PotG system is completely pointless, as mathing out a live action variable needs more than just a stat line.
Steam: Litany || PSN: Litany- || Nintendo Network ID: Litany
No, no. The medals are a useful data point that can help you understand the game more and understand that match in particular. They are not the end all be all, but if I get gold for objective kills and objective time, and we still get stomped, I feel confident in saying that I was not the weak link there. The potato brain who tells me I was the reason we lost is most definitely wrong.
Disagree, medals are worthless. Objective time and kills is worthless because most of the objectives are capped in big bursts. If you got gold in objective time and kills it could mean that you were standing on the point while the rest of your team was doing something else or that yes you used your ult on the point and got a bunch of kills but your team wasn't in a spot to capitalize.
This is a team game individual stats mean very little when you lose. You can't see anyone else's stats. Everyone on the losing team might be within one kill of the gold medal.
[semantics tomfoolery]
"Worthless" is the part I'm contending. The scenario you describe is quite possible, in which case using medals to say I did well is less than worthless, it's making me a worse player by re-inforcing my bad play. I should say that people should look at their meddling in the context of that match to figure out what went right, what went wrong, and how they contributed either way. Ignoring medals outright is dismissing valuable info.
[/semantics tomfoolery]
On a different note, it feels like nearly all my comp games are decided by the enemy Pharah and whether or not my team shoots at her. At my level (low 40s), good snipers are rare, so Pharah is usually free to pelt me with rockets without a care in the world. Anyone else feel this, or am I imagining things?
On a different note, it feels like nearly all my comp games are decided by the enemy Pharah and whether or not my team shoots at her. At my level (low 40s), good snipers are rare, so Pharah is usually free to pelt me with rockets without a care in the world. Anyone else feel this, or am I imagining things?
Given how much of a living hell it can be as Pharah with a sharp McCree or 76 on the enemy team, I think your feelings have some merit.
Black lives matter.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
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On a different note, it feels like nearly all my comp games are decided by the enemy Pharah and whether or not my team shoots at her. At my level (low 40s), good snipers are rare, so Pharah is usually free to pelt me with rockets without a care in the world. Anyone else feel this, or am I imagining things?
I think Ana is gonna help with this somewhat as well. I can't wait to sleep dart Pharah ults all day.
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
When I killed a Pharah as Ana she said "Mother knows best."
Also I laughed when I was playing last night and some guy was like "They really need to cut down on Ana flirting with everybody"
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
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A priori, your team has exactly a 50% chance of being better coordinated than the other team. If that's not true, then it's because of a personal characteristic of you as a player.
Also, roughly half the KotH maps have spots you can boop someone off the map in or within feet of the point.
And he can stall a capture really well.
And because everyone is grouped up at the point you get maximum utility from your buffs and ultimate. He can shut down some really nasty plays by your opponent. Last night I negated a Zarya+Pharah ult combo that effectively ended the game.
Dude was wondering why their team's Tracer wouldn't switch when they were up against 6 Torbs. So he did some investigating:
Bonus screenshot of Tracer complaining.
How someone can play for so long without 1) at least trying different heroes and 2) not realizing that you need to switch heroes sometimes is beyond me.
It's called being selfish.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
Sure there is. Statistics like WAR (wins above replacement) in baseball do exactly that. By comparing/weighing across how a particular player's team performs over multiple games, you can estimate the strength of a single player.
By what metric do you judge a player's performance?
I would say that ideally one person should always be on the point to stop caps, one person should be hovering nearby but not necessarily on the point to watch approaches and to assist in point holding, and one person can range farther out to be a distraction/come around from enemies from behind. This can change dependin on your individual preferences and playstyles.
You don't want to all stack on the point as a team because then an ult or point clear will definitely lose you the point and it also allows the enemy team time to set up and approach from multiple directions, but you don't want to be so far out you can't quickly contest if something like that does happen. The important thing is to be flexible and to be able to adapt/react to enemy movement before they can get the ball rolling.
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Being on a koth map where the game ends up in endless OT only to come out defeated and losing a ton of rank points fucking sucks. I know that much. Hell, I think situations like that knock the wind out of my sails more than a stomp.
But as I said I don't exactly know what, if anything, Blizzard can do about it.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
Maybe medals? Since medals supposedly reward correct, objective play.
On a related note, not that I know anything about ratings in baseball or whatnot, but I do wonder if there would be support for a system that granted you + points vs your skill loss so that, in a perfect situation, you could rank up slightly or offset your lost skill rating to a certain extent.
Let's pretend that you are the mythical soloqueue hero, fighting a losing game. You get all gold medals. You switch heroes. You stay on the point. You heal when there is no healer. You have high impact ults. You basically play your heart out, but you still lose.
However, due to your valiant efforts, maybe you actually don't lose a ton of points, or you even maybe gain a tiny fraction of rank up because well, you carried as much as you possibly could.
Would this be acceptable to anyone? Just theoretically, is this fair? Is it better than the current system?
I mean, this could probably be a paper/thesis in and of itself, but a naive (but straightforward) way to think about it is that a player i has strength x_i (which can and probably does change over time). When a team is made, the strength of the team is calculated by some function of each individual's strength (a sum or an average for example). This is compared against the opponent team's strength (again the exact function of how they are compared is not particularly important here). If they are close, then the teams are seen as relatively balanced, if not then relatively unbalanced. Then after the game is played, if the game was balanced, and if team A beat team B in a blowout (how a blowout is determined depends on the game type played) then you increase each player's strength on team A by a moderate amount, while similarly decreasing the strength of the players on team B. On the other hand, if the teams were unbalanced (say team A was much stronger than team
I mean, usually WAR takes into account the player's position in baseball. And I could certainly see some kind of adaptation for the particular character, so that you could rank a player's Mercy play versus other Mercys.
I don't feel like this is a particularly novel idea. Perhaps I'm misuderstanding Death of Rats or zakkiel?
This strategy does require your whole team to be on the same page, though.
No, no. The medals are a useful data point that can help you understand the game more and understand that match in particular. They are not the end all be all, but if I get gold for objective kills and objective time, and we still get stomped, I feel confident in saying that I was not the weak link there. The potato brain who tells me I was the reason we lost is most definitely wrong.
Second part about comm and coop is very true.
Exactly. Each KotH map has approach points. Your team spreads out to cover those points and then calls out the approach direction. That way, your tanks can hold the choke while flankers do what they do. Any back caps can be called out and dealt with easily (don't worry if you lose the point for like 2 seconds, it's far more worth it to slaughter their outnumbered team and then mop up).
KotH doesn't work like that. Your positioning depends on the map, your team comp, and your enemies team comp. Some maps you don't want to be on the point because it's too easy to get hit with AOE dmg. Some point you have to stay on the point because it gives you the best chance to boop someone off the edge. I think the best place on most point are places that give you elevation advantage over the point.
Really KotH maps are about killing the enemy team as efficiently as possible. So always try to play characters that can knock people off the edge, counter the enemy team, or are really good at killing. I would say never play defensive heroes (Mercy, Reinhardt, Junkrat, symetra, and torb) unless they are the direct counter to the enemy team. Winston, Roadhog, Reaper, Zyra, Pharah, and Lucio always seem solid on KotH maps.
Last night myself and a couple of buddies were in a comp game on Lijaing Tower. We won the first round, lost the second, and won the third. At the start of the fourth round one of our teammates said, "Fuck this you guys suck." and left the game.
This left not just my team, but the enemy team completely fucking flabbergasted. Because of one person eleven others got screwed out of their potential rewards.
I'll never know what game that guy was playing to think his team sucked. It is my, "If it wasn't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college."
Disagree, medals are worthless. Objective time and kills is worthless because most of the objectives are capped in big bursts. If you got gold in objective time and kills it could mean that you were standing on the point while the rest of your team was doing something else or that yes you used your ult on the point and got a bunch of kills but your team wasn't in a spot to capitalize.
This is a team game individual stats mean very little when you lose. You can't see anyone else's stats. Everyone on the losing team might be within one kill of the gold medal.
I've only recently gotten okay at the meteor angle drop.
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Stay classy. And yes, I still healed him.
That's been a good way to use her ult done the beginning, yeah
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Symmetra's really good on KotH. Particularly if your team has Lucio to get her there fast at the start. The armor helps more than you think, and her beam is deadly in that up close and frantic playstyle that tends to happen in KotH. I often get gold or silver eliminations with her. If your team is getting super rolled over, she sucks, but otherwise she's great on most maps. Only time she's not good is if you can't even get to the point. Then you definitely need to switch.
I guess for me, considering D.Va is so weirdly squishy, running into the fray, ulting straight up, and running away makes less sense than staying far away, ulting at an angle, and being in relative safety the whole time/
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Also a good strategy
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I guess I've never seen a Symmetra be successful on KotH. If I did I would just go Winston then she does not matter anymore.
I think Junkrat is also bad because he doesn't counter anyone that is played on KotH maps. I think Pharah does everything junkrat does but better KotH wise.
[semantics tomfoolery]
"Worthless" is the part I'm contending. The scenario you describe is quite possible, in which case using medals to say I did well is less than worthless, it's making me a worse player by re-inforcing my bad play. I should say that people should look at their meddling in the context of that match to figure out what went right, what went wrong, and how they contributed either way. Ignoring medals outright is dismissing valuable info.
[/semantics tomfoolery]
Given how much of a living hell it can be as Pharah with a sharp McCree or 76 on the enemy team, I think your feelings have some merit.
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I think Ana is gonna help with this somewhat as well. I can't wait to sleep dart Pharah ults all day.
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Also I laughed when I was playing last night and some guy was like "They really need to cut down on Ana flirting with everybody"