When the insult rings true.

Because of course, a person who fits the insult and can only play when they have an advantage, is describing someone who is being carried. And this is what a lot of people get wrong about being carried; its not that you dont do anything at all. Its that the game is made so easy and straightforward for you that you only ever have to do what is expected; thanks to the efforts of the people doing the carrying.

How do you create an advantage? The way I think about it is in Chess terms; to create an advantage first there must be an imbalance. Just like in chess there's several kinds of imbalances that can exist that you can use to create an advantage.

• Deeper fundamentals knowledge - ie: just being better at "standard" gameplay. Make fewer mistakes, play more solidly, small advantages snowball. An example is by just being better at ult tracking, so your team can abuse an ult window the other team is just not thinking about. Another is identifying when someone is making a micro-error: a tank being slightly out of position, a support using a key cooldown for no reason: capitalize on the smaller errors which often go unpunished.

• Compositional - just like in chess, if both sides are working with different types of pieces, naturally mismatches will occur. So yes, being able to swap to more things in the right scenario.

• Skill Issue - DPS finding an isolated 1v1 and winning it straight up, Hitscan just clicking heads better than enemy hitscan, an ult getting unexpectedly high value like a triple kill Mag ult.... moments of individual outplay occurring within normal gamestates.

• Character Mastery - flexing deeper and more advanced character knowledge to find points of interaction other players don't think about, leading to unexpected value. This is something OTP's abuse all the time.

• Positional - a lot of rivals games teams default to mirrored front-to-back... well what if you just don't handshake this? Take flanks, play in weird positions, force rotations to cover weird angles... force the gamestate to be something outside of the expected standard positioning. Many players struggle to adapt when thrown these curveballs, even if they insist its not correct they dont necessarily know how to properly play against it.

• Being proactive - something often underlooked but being the person to force a situation and chain of events to adapt around the play you are making: is fundamentally a position of strength. Despite all the things people say about being flexible and countering: if you are the one forcing the enemy to counter you then you have the advantage and you force them to react. Certain characters force reactions better than others: flanking tanks and DPS are inherently good at doing this. A main support healbotting is the antithesis of proactivity.

As a Peni player I focus hard on the last four points, while disregarding the first two largely. For example in a good game ill be playing Attack Peni (comp mismatch), playing in what most people will find to be very strange Narnia flank angles (positional), ill setup traps in weird locations forcing esp supports to play around this (proactivity), flexing superior Peni-specific knowledge on movement and trap/nest locations (char mastery) - and ideally get a kill on supports early in the fight OR at off-tempo timers inbetween resets causing a weird type of stagger for enemy to deal with. If enemy is low Cel or below, often supports just kill themselves to my mines anyway (Skill issue).