I’m not gonna write a big huge melodramatic post about how bad this game is, I just need to vent and maybe advice on how to both get better and have a better time doing it.
What I will say is I’ve played a long time, I mostly play comp and I try to win to the best of my ability. I will say that I am a mid silver to low gold player, and that I’m fine with that. I feel myself improving and every season I get a little higher.
What’s more frustrating than losing in this game–which is itself a fairly frustrating experience generally-- is how rapidly team communications can break down into petty fights. Often we lose a single team fight and that’s enough for people to start hurling blame and insults at each other. I am not immune to this. I try to focus on myself and keep suggestions light-handed and non-hostile but sometimes the situation gets the better of me and I engage in this kind of behavior myself. I don’t like who I become in this game sometimes.
The moment this kind of stuff starts, it feels like the match is over. Often the match isn’t even going very bad at all. Sometimes we’ll have a great first push on the payload, then the enemy team breaks that momentum and suddenly morale drops even though it’d be a reach to say we’re even losing. But when people are calling each other trash, accusing each other of throwing at even the slightest misplay (and we’re in a low ELO so we all make misplays, I still make them all the time) there’s no room for call-outs or strategizing or honest appraisals of the situation.
One thing people say is that I should play with friends and I reply that I do! I used LFG early on after its release, it helped sometimes and I made friends that way. But a lot of the same problems persist since picking a group of strangers isn’t much better than RNG assigning you strangers. Now I play with a group of friends, we have our own discord and play fairly regularly (though none of them play as much as I do at this point; they share a lot of my frustrations). Either way though, playing in a stack tends to match you up with other, better stacks. Often smurfs boosting other people (smurfs are another absolute -SCOURGE- on this game). Either way, there’s a lot of miscommunication, even if it’s very slightly less toxic.
In any case, I always have more success solo queuing, that’s how I do most of my climbing and where I feel I have the most opportunity to learn and improve. I suppose there’s not much I or anyone else can do about this but I long for the days where this game wasn’t filled with fragile egos and squabbling. Past balance issues and issues with the way the game is designed in general, that’s my main problem. Thanks for reading.