Every day there are posts about these topics:

• “forced 50/50”
• how are these people in X rank
• my games all have throwers
• matchmaker is garbage
• why am I not climbing
• etc

The fact is, almost no one is taking this game as seriously as the folks posting here about it. Your average overwatch player is queuing for ranked and just . . . playing the game to have fun with some light element of competition. This is not unique to overwatch. The same thing is happening over in CS, Apex, Valorant, et al.

Let me head off the “that’s what quickplay is for” with we all know quickplay is a dumpster fire. Competitive is the normal game mode. Heck, they still don’t even let you play both sides of a payload or hybrid map in quickplay.

So yeah, most of your teammates and opponents in competitive are not taking the game very seriously. That doesn’t mean they aren’t trying to win, but it does mean that they will:

• play drunk / tired / high / sick
• have game sounds low or off because they’re listening to music (how did you not hear reaper!!!???)
• play a character they have very few hours on or are bad at because they feel like it
• queue into your game, play for 5 minutes and realize they weren’t really feeling it today and just play out the match, likely resulting in a loss
• have an off day where they’re playing well below their current rank but keep queuing because that’s the time they have to play the game for the week
• any number of other things that make it so a player of X rating is not performing at rating

All of this is to say that ranked in this game is not a rigorous competitive environment . . . it’s honestly less competitive than your town recreational sports leagues. Y’all are playing pickup games of basketball and expecting the match integrity of professional sports.

Can it be better? Of course. Things can always improve.

But next time you’re raging in ranked and posting here about how unfair everything is, remember your teammates mostly don’t care what the game says their rank is. It’s just a curiosity. We like the competitive points for gold guns, and playing both sides of a map, and bastion turret goes brrrr.