you likely won't get any too good data off this as the vast majority of voters have not experienced all or even any of these. But from someone in a ton of different competitive games for a long time, one thing that is always true is, once you reach thr absolute highest ranks the difference in skill between every ranking of player starts to widen extremely (there is likely a bigger gap between top 1 and top 50 than top 10000 and top 20000)
i picked the last option because the difference between gm-cel is so small depending where you are in the rank. gm3-cel3 feel very much the same imo but celestial 1 feels noticeably more difficult. So id imagine the gap between OAA and eternity is probably alot.
I have peaked celestial and hit it every season and usually dont try for the rest of the season after that. The skill gap is pretty similar but i compare eternity to ooa to my days in overwatch. I hit 4400 Sr in overwatch which was top 500 at the time but the skill gap just from 4200 Sr to 4400 plus was insane. Like I was so garbage compared to everybody it felt like I was bad at the game. In the few eternity lobbies with ooa players I've played with it feels pretty similar to that ow feeling.
I think that Gold to GM is basically the same. Good Gold players and good GM players are fairly interchangeable, as are bad Gold players and bad Diamond players. The thing that changes is the ratio of good to bad players, which gradually rises.
Diamond is the worst rank by a mile because the percentage of bad players at this rank is around 10-15%. This is a critical threshold where it means there will usually be one per game, and whichever team has the bad player basically can't win, so it's almost a complete coin toss at this rank.
Anyway, the key is that the skill of players in each rank varies enormously, especially in the lower ranks. You can effectively climb to about Diamond 3 for free as you gain more points for winning than you do for losing. Diamond 3 is the first rank where you actually have to be somewhat competent at the game to continue climbing, as such you start seeing significant numbers of bad players getting filtered out here. However, there are still players with Silver-level skill at Diamond (and having one on your team nearly guarantees defeat), just not as many of them as in Gold.
I suppose if you were graphing average player skill it would consistently rise, but it doesn't really represent how the game really plays because there's so much luck of the draw as to whether or not your team is competent and whether or not they can work together to any degree.
It's definitely not that. I started this season in Silver and I'm currently in Diamond and the player skill has not risen much. We have certainly not gone from 5->45. Maybe more like 25->35 if we're being generous. There's still a ton of people who don't really understand the game at Diamond. I had many games in Gold where my team was superior to teams I've had in Diamond.
That said, I don't think it will ever rise exponentially the way the green graph shows. Even at Ignite there's a ton of mistakes from all but the very best teams. You still see people ult 1v6 at Ignite. YWL almost lost a full map due to having 2 people ult 1v6 back to back vs SEN.
I feel like it's as close as I can be to reality. The average player is around P3-D1 so I can see it making sense that everyone feels about the same at the rank.
Like I was saying, I think the problem is that it assumes player skill at the various ranks is relatively uniform, which it's absolutely not.
Like I would say that a player who is truly GM by skill probably has a skill rank of about 70 (in that sense I somewhat agree with your graph, though I think it's actually more linear than you show).
However, in Plat, you will see players who range all the way from skill rank 10-70. (10 is like high bronze / low silver).
GM probably sees a range of like 40-80. So yes it is better, but you can absolutely get a team that's barely any better than a team you got in Plat if you're unlucky.
"It's just based on the rank distribution on tracker. Since there are no bronze players it messes with the curve a bit."
You definitely can't rely on tracker's player numbers, because they only include anyone whose tracker profile has been looked up at least once.
Every time you look up a player and you see that "collecting data" screen or whatever, that means that player has never been searched for before and thus their numbers never included that player until now.
This is why bronze is super underrepresented there, because most bronze-level players don't use the site. By contrast the high ranks are significantly over-represented.
The best players are pretty similar. It's actually not uncommon at all to see GM-level players in Gold, and certainly in Plat. If you finish the season in GM, then lose a few games in Diamond for whatever reason, you're in Plat. If you finish in GM, then skip a season, you're in Plat. Of course, there's also smurfs, and I think most smurfs are around GM.
I suppose the big difference in GM is that you'll start seeing some Celestial players in there and that is somewhat more of a jump, but really, this is a game that is much more about who has the worst player than who has the best player.
4
u/Ok-Performance3326 13h ago
you likely won't get any too good data off this as the vast majority of voters have not experienced all or even any of these. But from someone in a ton of different competitive games for a long time, one thing that is always true is, once you reach thr absolute highest ranks the difference in skill between every ranking of player starts to widen extremely (there is likely a bigger gap between top 1 and top 50 than top 10000 and top 20000)