Overwatch, improving and learning in gaming

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@54674341 mrcool37 writes…
For a few short minutes you feel like part of a team and for someone in that team to bring you down makes me feel terrible, especially with the games mentioned where most of the time you can clearly see your own errors/misjudgements, which are then subconsciously ‘backed up’ by the incoming attacks.

I think you are wrong in the assessment. People do not learn like that.

Given the propensity of people to make errors/misjudgements this is not the case, and people simply do not learn or think about their gameplay beyond “I’m playing a game”. Players typically learn by doing things, making mistakes then correcting mistakes – however for the vast majority of gamers this is not a conscious process. Players need to do things many times incorrectly before it becomes an ingrained idea to not do this. When you add on the number of permutations of “bad things” you can do in a game like ow (in relation to yourself, your team mates, the enemy team, both teams comps, the map in relation to all of the following points) it becomes extremely hit and miss for players to actually improve. The same applies to improving:

This is further compounded by “how to learn”. Using ow as an example at lower tiers a mechanically gifted player can climb reasonbly well simply by aiming well. A player who placed silver after their initial 25 quickplay matches does not know how to play the game but their playstyle will be influenced by their ability to aim well. This will allow them to progress, lets say to mid-plat, relatively quickly because lets face it, the aim ability in this game is pretty garbage at lower levels. They can no longer progress, or they progress much more slowly than before, primarily when they have days where their aim is super on. Because of how they play they do not take notice, or are very slow to take notice, of why they die, how they die and what they are “doing wrong”.

They have had positive reinforcement of bad habits because of their aiming ability. This is also interesting because positive reinforcement probably “sinks in” faster than negative.

Lets have some more overwatch examples. We have a teammate playing s76:

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The enemy has a pharah who continually harasses the team from mid – long range.
1) Our teams 76 tries to shoot the pharah consistently but overall is ineffective. This is reasonable to a degree (maybe should swap off) but the player is making the judgement to do the correct thing.
2) Our teams 76 completely ignores the pharah the entire game.

No need to weigh in on the validity of 76 as a pharah counter, the point here is the 76 is ignoring a target they should at least be trying to shoot. Not trying to shoot it is detrimental to the team.

Our 76 player is getting ult nice and quick. Well played!
1) Decides to continually solo flank to use ult and gets wrecked every time
2) Stays with the team and ults at appropriate openings.

This example could be extended to non-ults as well and just attempted aggressive plays that result in 5v6 often.

Where the player is failing in both examples is not really related to aim/failing mechanically. They are simply not doing something, yet pointing out they should be, or pointing out the pharah is being a pain will result in butthurt from many 76 players. Both these examples are reasonable to point out.

There comes a point in a players progression where they can no longer play dps effectively. This will be where they cap out unless they look long and hard at how they are playing beyond aiming, which is the first place people will look when actively trying to improve.
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Taking this further from my experience – I played an off meta support character that was severely vulnerable to dive with unlimited weapon range. So genji/winston were a pain if they played correctly. However I climbed easily to masters+ in soloq and rarely ran into a genji or the like that even bothered to try to kill me. I am not overly mechanically gifted so this is not the case of me brute forcing their faces whenever they tried to jump me. They just did not. Sure this is a very narrow sample yet it once again highlights that players don’t actually know what they are doing.

Approaching any of this from a negative direction is not going to result in good outcomes (see:you feeling sad) and because of how ow skill rating works players should not really be throwing stones in glass houses.. but still. If you were to die out of position four times in a row how do you expect people to respond? First time, ok.. well he will learn. The fourth time? We have played most of this round 5v6 anon can you stop being a total retard.