Overwatch Gain Skill Rating Guide

Overwatch Gain Skill Rating Guide by B1GW1LLY

The first KEY to climbing SR:

Consistently winning more and losing less is the only thing that matters.

• It doesn’t matter how well you played. It doesn’t matter if the enemy team didn’t deserve to win and they just got lucky. The only thing that matters when it comes to gaining SR is TO CONSISTENTLY WIN MORE THAN YOU LOSE
• Some games are out of your control. Some games you can’t win. Ignore these games. Pretend that they never happened.
• If you have a trend of winning less and losing more, something isn’t working and that needs to be changed.
• Do what it takes to win. Don’t be stubborn and fall into habits of playing the same hero over and over. Stack the odds unfairly in your advantage by guiding your team into a good team composition. If the enemy says something like “This game is so unfair!” or “God that hero is OP” you’re doing something RIGHT.

The second key to climbing SR:

Become a more effective player

• This means picking the “Overpowered” heroes. This means working with your team and not against your team. This means playing smart and not playing “flashy” (high risk, high reward plays that look better than they actually are). This means to consistently do the correct play over and over again and also to consistently reduce the amount of mistakes you make.
• A win or a loss can be decided sometimes by one single mistake.
• Winning games usually boils down to just making a few right plays and almost no wrong plays.
• This means that the best way to be an effective player is to pick heroes that work, make plays that work and make less mistakes. PLAY SMART.
• Let the opponents make the mistakes while you make the right decisions.
• If you can play reasonably solid and never make a huge mistake you will win A LOT of matches. A risky, flashy play wins 1/10 games. A boring but effective play wins 9/10 games.
• By making less mistakes and playing safer you put the pressure of fucking up on the opponent. By consistently choosing the smart option you stay out of harm’s way while the opponent puts himself at risk of making a mistake and losing the game. This does not mean to play passive. This means to play calculated; to play aggressive when the time is right but also to play defensive when the time is right.
• Punish mistakes while making very few mistakes yourself. Make the enemy overextend and then attack when he’s off balance and he’s in too deep.

The third key to climbing SR:

• Only play when you are having fun. The moment you stop having fun you need to go do something else. Go play LoL or watch youtube or get some exercise. WHEN YOU ARE NOT HAVING FUN YOU ARE PLAYING AT 50% POWER LEVEL. IT IS AN UNNECESSARY DISADVANTAGE THAT ONLY OCCURS WHEN YOU CAN’T LET GO OF YOUR EGO. INSTEAD OF DOUBLING DOWN ON A BET WITH LOW ODDS, REMOVE YOURSELF FROM THE TABLE COMPLETELY AND COME BACK WHEN THE ODDS ARE GOOD (AKA YOU’RE HAVING FUN AND NOT PLAYING FOR EGO).
• Fun is truly the thing that drives success. By having fun you enjoy each frag, each flashbang, each dragonblade. You are fully focused on each play which means you are making less mistakes and more calculated plays. The focus to do these things comes from the amount of fun you are having while playing.
• Less fun = less skill. More fun = more skill.

The Golden Rule of simplified success:

DIE LESS

• Stay alive at all costs. The most important factor that determines how effective you are in a match is the uptime of your actions. For example if you are a DPS you cannot deal damage from the grave. This holds true for any hero you play and their own roles. YOU HAVE 0% EFFECTIVENESS WHEN YOU ARE DEAD.
• To drill this in your head it is wise to go into a couple of games with the sole focus of having the lowest death count possible at the end of the game.
• By dying less and playing safe you become effective in a way that you have more total uptime and that you are slippery as fuck. People will hate that you are so hard to kill You can stall point for longer, evade attacks better and eventually bait the enemy into making mistakes while you recharge your abilities or wait for reinforcements.
• Example: Zarya. By accumulating charge you now charge ulti faster and deal more damage. But if you die while getting charge, the charge you just acquired is now negligible and you can no longer bubble your allies, cast ulti or tickle people with your low energy beam. THE 10% EFFECTIVENESS YOU HAVE BY PLAYING SAFE IS STILL MORE THAN THE 0% EFFECTIVENESS YOU HAVE WHEN YOU ARE DEAD. In other words, it is more effective to deal 1 minute of low energy damage than it is to deal 10 seconds of high energy damage. Your presence on the battlefield is actually worth a lot and is worth more than just raw damage output alone. When the enemy knows a Tracer is lurking in the shadows they have to completely change their positioning and will be constantly on alert. This is much more effective than getting 1 kill and then dying (especially in a mercy meta).

The ultimate golden rule is that you must STAY ALIVE AT ALL COSTS.

You not dying is more important than saving someone’s life, getting one kill or stalling point for 10% (without the need for overtime). In matchmaking YOU are the most important player on the team AT ALL TIMES. The only times you die willingly are the times when the game will literally be lost if you don’t (e.g 99% overtime). Make sure that it is absolutely necessary that you die before you throw your valuable life away.

Unless it is a scenario where you lose if you don’t die you will follow this rule:

I will always TRY MY ABSOLUTE HARDEST TO STAY ALIVE. I will always die fighting by taking as many enemies down with me as possible. I will not go gently into that goodnight I will make the cost of my death a pricey payment for the enemy so that they would rather avoid me instead of fight me. I will make it feel like the enemy need a 6 to 1 advantage in their favour to take me down. I will make it such a costly inconvenience to kill me that the enemy would rather just pretend I don’t exist instead of attacking me. The enemy is Tom and I am Jerry except I also have a shotgun.

The moment people find you extremely hard to kill is the moment people realize how good you are. The psychological influence you create from being hard to kill sticks in their head like super-glue and they will begin to dread seeing your name on the opposite team. Just seeing your name will spike their cortisol and make them lose focus. “Fuck this Tracer just never fucking dies”.

A summary of how to gain SR:

• Stay alive at all costs; A quick fix in any match is to just focus on dying less.
• Pick the overpowered heroes. Stack the odds unfairly in your favour.
• Win more than you lose. Winning is the only thing that truly matters. How you achieved victory doesn’t matter. The victory screen at the end of the game matters.
• Make as few mistakes as possible. Let the enemy make mistakes. Let the enemy overextend themselves and then ruthlessly punish them for their foolishness.
  THE GOLDEN RULE IS LAW. THE GOLDEN RULE IS THE MOST
  IMPORTANT RULE AND IF YOU ARE GOING TO CHOOSE ONE THING
  TO BE GOOD AT; BE GOOD AT NOT DYING.
• Have fun. The second you aren’t having fun, stop playing. fun =focus = skill

General tips:

• Mechanical skill comes through time and experience with a degree of genetics. Don’t worry about this part; it’s partly out of your control and mostly takes time.
• Having a solid, well-known name makes your team naturally feel at-ease and confident while also making the enemy team feel unsettled and nervous. Having a good reputation attached to your BattleTag is a great asset. If you need to rename or restart on a smurf then do it. You will make much more ground on a fresh account then you will on an old account with a bad reputation. Putting your team in a good mood is very valuable. If everyone’s having fun and laughing, winning is effortless.
• It’s generally better to pick 2-4 heroes and stick with them. If you can be a god at every hero, good for you. If you can’t, pick 2-4 heroes and master them.

IN RELATION TO TOXICITY AND THROWERS

The harsh reality is that yes, people throw and yes, people are toxic. This is simply out of your control and you need to pretend that it never, ever happens. Throwers and toxic players exist to garner attention and to get a reaction. The best thing you can do to counter these unavoidable players is to completely ignore their existence. By ignoring them you are depriving them of the thing they crave most; attention and reactions. This will starve them out and eventually cause the player to become bored with what they are doing, since being toxic or throwing is never as much fun as winning. An additional benefit to ignoring them is that you don’t give them any reason to single you out and slap you on an “INT List”, where they hold a grudge for months because you called them an idiot. Unfortunately, this is the only thing you can do since Blizzard seems to be useless with their report systems or at best they are very slow.

So to simplify;

• Mute all chat unless you want to say *gg wp or *gl hf.
• Only read team chat when people ask a legitimate question.
• Mute and block players that are toxic/throwing. To give them any form of attention whatsoever is to give them a target to attack. Give them nothing.
• Only use voice chat to make callouts or to politely request a certain hero. Do not actively try to aggravate your teammates.
• If you’re going to say anything to your team ensure that it is positive. An air of cocky confidence can go a long way – e.g “/ never lose” “This game is too ez”. The key is to keep things light-hearted and fun.

Emotions, people & those JUICY SR gains:

Emotions play a big part in any long term goal which is why you absolutely cannot acknowledge any form of negativity. Let’s just take a step back from Overwatch and competitive gaming in general for a moment; at the end of the day, all anyone really wants is to just have fun. Whether people get their fun from 6k Genji blades, from climbing a lot of SR or from messing around with friends, the core of why we’re playing a video game in the first place is simply to have fun. If you seriously ask yourself one day “am I even having fun?”and your answer is an honest “No”then maybe it’s time to take a break. Go play WoW or walk your dog because life’s too quick to be getting stressed out over a game. The reason the level of fun matters is because I’ve noticed that people, including myself, always play better when there’s a real sense of fun and enjoyment. The ability to bring your own mood up and other players moods up is an underrated factor when climbing SR and also just enjoying the game in general. Don’t be bad of course. At the same time; stop trying so hard. LET GO.