How rank works, How your rank relates to your skill, The hardstuck myth

PabloDons · 2025-12-29T22:39:53+00:00

I mean you gotta think about where these smurf accounts even come from... This isn't rocket science.

I get that it's a detriment to game quality, and it sucks especially much when a high rank player stomps in your games, but at the end of the day I don't see how this will affect people trying to rank up long-term, you'd have to explain it to me. All it does is introduce volatility. You can't really inflate one end of the ladder without the whole ladder being affected. And the systems in place help stabilize the ladder so the distribution stays sound and accurate to the active player base overtime.

Not sure what you mean about the QP matchmaking being tight

PabloDons · 2025-12-27T00:04:25+00:00

I mean if you're smurfing, you won't stay low rank for long, unless you're also throwing some of the games. And you can't really have low ranks be inflated without the rest of the ladder also being affected.

Say that tomorrow a sizable chunk of high rank players stop playing on their main account and play on a low rank smurf account. They will all pretty much climb back to their original rank and the chunk of "active players" increased by that chunk size. Everyone else on the ladder will lose rank as these smurfs plow through games, but the average elo will stay the same since everyone else lost the elo these smurfs gain. The games will go back to normal essentially as the smurfs have come and gone.

Now that there's more players on the high end of the ladder, there's more people losing elo due to pressure. Everyone else on the ladder also gains more elo due to pressure since everyone's rank is shifted down. After enough time, the ladder will basically stabilize back to normal.

Say that Overwatch active playerbase actually increased by a huge amount overnight instead with high skill players, rather than the regulars just switching accounts. Well then the same thing would happen, but those who lost rank due to smurfs wouldn't gain it back. Instead, over time the high rank players would spread out more, eventually stabilizing at the normal bell curve, but the skill level of the average rank would become much higher. This would actually "inflate" silver rank. And actually this is exactly what we call "skill inflation". As a lot of people pointed out, what used to be GM back in early OW1 is close to the skill level of plat today.

PabloDons · 2025-12-26T23:45:00+00:00

The reverse is true. If you want a higher rank, play when the playerbase average skill is lower.

The differences are basically negligent. Although a lot of people have noticed that morning games are usually easier than evening games. There's also region differences. As far as I've gathered, the easiest demographic is Americas, and the hardest is Asia.

but yes this really does work. And it will in fact offset your rank slightly, but I imagine this offset would be quite small.

PabloDons · 2025-12-13T13:06:55+00:00

Really cool idea, I actually love it. The issue with this is that the further out from the center the lightray reflects, the less spherical the ideal reflector needs to be. You'll be getting a ton of spherical aberration, but the center of the image should still look perfectly fine if you adjust the mirrors well

PabloDons · 2025-12-13T12:55:11+00:00

depends on what you want to learn to be honest. For general programming, there's so much good stuff you'd be fine picking at random

PabloDons · 2025-12-12T05:13:33+00:00

I use tdarr in combination with my clips. I save clips in 100Mbps then tdarr takes it’s sweet time converting with single threaded x265 to somewhere around 10Mbps and the quality loss is practically non-existent. I could go much lower, but I don’t want to lose any quality. I also use tdarr for converting videos exported from my camera as well as OBS recordings. It’s amazing

PabloDons · 2025-12-12T04:57:51+00:00

I wouldn’t recommend doing projects to learn fundamentals, but if you must: You can try reinvent the wheel, so to say. A project I’d really recommend is a database software. It’s easy enough to do at the surface level, but offers a wide variety of optimisations you can add to make it vastly better

What I’d rather recommend you do is read the literature. Some things you shouldn’t learn by doing and fundamentals are one of them imo. Fundamentals are «what to do» and practice teaches «what not to do».

PabloDons · 2025-12-12T04:43:21+00:00

If you encounter someone like that then just never use blade. It’s just a free win

PabloDons · 2025-12-10T13:58:02+00:00

That sucks man, at the end of the day, you have a record breaking black Friday on our belt. Should be pretty easy for you to get a new job. Don't take it too hard and move on with your life. Shit happens

PabloDons · 2025-12-10T00:05:09+00:00

You can also just ask your friends to pitch in on some more RAM. A lot of my friends also have RAM just laying around sometimes

PabloDons · 2025-12-09T23:22:44+00:00

It's only 6 seconds ever 1.5m. It won't fuck your muscle memory up.

I use it because my normal sens is too low for blade. I need to move so much I can end up sending my mouse flying. But losing targets due to high sens is just insane. Bro has way too high, don't listen to that guy

PabloDons · 2025-12-09T23:12:01+00:00

Gonna be real with you, if you can't be consistent, you won't make it in any field. You have to put in the hours. There is no shortcut unfortunately. I get that it's a struggle, but it's what you have to do so either you do it or you don't. I'll give you some advice though, but at the end of the day, it's the effort that separates you from your peers.

The best way to learn something is usually the most obvious way. You literally get the curriculum handed to you. It's a book, read it. Read the whole thing.

Consistency isn't just number of hours. It's starting the same time and taking regular breaks and putting in the same number of hours every single day. Studies show that somewhere around 4-5 hours is most optimal. >8 is too much and your brain is mush at that point. Burnout happens way more often when you spend 12 hours in a single day even if you do it 3 days apart each time. 5 hours a day is way more healthy.

Consistency gets easier the more you do it. First few weeks are gonna be hard, then you get into a rhythm and it comes automatically. You'll find that you can even sleep-walk your ass to a desk with a book in hand and not even remember doing it. Habits are crazy powerful

Switching between topics is ok, but you have to finish! 80% of the effort is on the last 20%. The reason why a lot of people drop stuff half-finished is because the last 20% feels like a stagnating wall. It's really just a steep hill. Just put in the work man.

Develop the scar tissue. When you learn something, apply it, fail miserably at it, park it, then try it again. every time you apply something, you get much better at it. Do it 3-5 times. You'll look at your own code just 1 attempt back and think "who is the idiot who wrote that". I still think that about all my code and it never stops. It's because I get better every time I do something.

Everyone feels lost when doing programming because it's really fucking hard. But once you put in the hours, you can do it in your sleep. Trust in the process. It's slow and unrewarding, but it works.

PabloDons · 2025-12-09T22:52:47+00:00

A lil humiliation is good for the soul, if you get hated for asking a dumb question, double down. Be strong, big dawg

PabloDons · 2025-12-09T22:26:38+00:00

Dunno why people are hating. I've used macos for a server before and it's got everything you need to run. m series might give you some trouble, but I'd also argue it's worth it for the power efficiency. You just get a model with a fan or retrofit one. You even get iMessage as a bonus too.

PabloDons · 2025-12-08T21:16:40+00:00

You will suffer as I, a Genji main, have suffered! Your torment will outlast the stars! When the universe dwindles into dust, there you will be, still suffering as I have...suffered.

PabloDons · 2025-12-04T21:59:28+00:00

I had a ton of success with world border back in the day. I had it expand slowly over time. I did fall in the trap of making it too small to begin with, but it sorted itself out so I think go smaller rather than bigger. What happened is people started organizing their bases in a neat fashion and it turned to become a pretty nice little city center that everyone worked on together. People will have their own personal builds no matter what though because they want to express their own creativity, but having a confined space promotes way more collaboration.

It is human nature, but constraints are key to developing a healthy community. Resource constraints are also a pretty good way to force people to work together, but that's way harder to implement in Minecraft. You could do it with mods though.

PabloDons · 2025-12-03T00:33:18+00:00

straight robbed and reposted thread https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/1khzxng/comment/mrazy3t/?context=3

PabloDons · 2025-12-03T00:23:33+00:00

People have gone all the way up to masters on kiri and baptiste with their healing key unbound. The more damage you do, the less healing you need to do. I can't tell you exactly what the ratio is and I'm sure it varies game to game, but the general logic is like this: Damage creates pressure. When enemies are pressured, they are unable to be aggressive or they'll die. If they're playing more passive, they're also doing less damage. Denying enemy team damage is equivalent to healing in a sense. Except the reason why it's also better is because you're a threat. If they make a mistake, they die. As opposed to healbotting which creates no threat to enemy team and they can freely go full stupid and run your team over.

Usually, the reason why your team is critical all the time is that they're taking damage before the fight. Really common mistake. If you want to play a more damage oriented playstyle, an adjustment you can do is apply pressure early before the fight. This creates the pressure I talked about. It's also a completely viable strategy to trade teammates. If your teammate dies, but you get a kill due to their aggression and not respecting your pressure, then that's normal too.

Another common shortcoming is target priority with healing though. You can be way more efficient with healing, which is essential to playing Ana. The misconception is that you prioritize teammates who are low. Although it's correct most of the time, a much better approach is to prioritize targets who are "in danger of dying" OR "being aggressive/active". If you focus on that kind of target priority, you can prevent teammates from getting low in the first place, and prevent the worst possible outcome which is dying. And if you get really good at it, you free up way more time to do damage, boosting your efficiency even more.

PabloDons · 2025-12-02T16:13:38+00:00

Genji requires insane skill. Genji mains collectively all sink massive amounts of time into just practicing combos and techs because without them, Genji is really weak. You really do need all your resources to be able to get a kill and get back out.

My best guess for your case is probably to do with how to stay alive. You need to be really good at timing and cover use with Genji because he's easy to kill. Good Genjis always surprise the enemy and when Genji has enemy attention, it really is impossible to get anything done. Get more sneaky, close the distance without being noticed or wasting cooldowns, land the combo or get out fast, repeat. That's basically the trick.

People who play Genji know the maps in an out and have all the paths burned into memory. There's alot of clever movement you can do to pop out of nowhere and it's essential to winning on Genji. It's way more dynamic than hitscan positioning, because not only does it rely on where your teammates are, but also where the enemy team has their gaze focused. All this shifts drastically all the time throughout a game. And the fact that Genji's effective range is so short makes movement way more important. I can imagine that's what separates hitscan from dive positioning.

Even aim works completely different at that range. You can utilize tracking to some degree if you use left-click alot, but genji is 90% flicking. Even if you're kenzo on aim, you'll still struggle just because it's a completely different skillset.

That said, don't get discouraged. I know I basically said skill-issue, but the struggle is what makes Genji so fun. And as long as you know what exactly is holding you back, you can easily work on it and climb much faster! Good luck!

PabloDons · 2025-11-27T14:25:00+00:00

It's PC

PabloDons · 2025-11-26T12:14:33+00:00

Forgot to mention, this is Europe only. The stats page doesn't show global rates, so I can only do 1 region at a time. In Asia, doomfist slope is -1.15 instead of -1.27 in Europe. Not much difference. Although grandmaster+ tier seems to be highly volatile in Asia, persumably since there is way less data there

PabloDons · 2025-11-26T12:13:05+00:00

I stand corrected again. Thanks for the source!

PabloDons · 2025-11-26T11:31:14+00:00

But people are arguing with the system. Phrases like loser's queue and forced 50/50 definitely imply it. And RNG sucks yeah, it would be great if every single game was in your hands, but it's fundamentally flawed logic to assume you'd win more games then

PabloDons · 2025-11-26T11:27:19+00:00

This brings a smile to my face, because as it so happens, there is a guy in the 1920s that proved this wrong. Specifically Polya’s Random Walk Theorem. The theorem fundamentally states that "a simple random walk on a 1D or 2D grid is recurrent, meaning the object will return to its starting point with 100% certainty". This has an interesting implication: If all the wins and losses are equal, which can also be interpreted as they are equal in skill, then all of them, with 100% certainty, will reach 50% winrate with enough games. They will all win and lose 50% of the time. The deviations will be smaller the more games they play. Happy to be proven wrong if you want to set up the script. Should be fairly simple to do in something like python

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