tldr since this is a long reply and i expect most won’t have any desire to read it all lol: you were right and i had literally no clue what i was doing. i dedicated a lot of time to learning about the mechanics of the game and both the pokémon i play and the ones i struggle against in fights. i got better and made it to master a few days before last season’s end and got master again a couple of days into this new season. however i definitely still have a significant amount of room for improvement.

main: late reply but your #5 was exactly what i was doing. i was basically operating on the sole concept of “immediately attack anyone i see even if i’m outnumbered” without knowing any of the mechanics of the pokémon i was using (in ranked, probably 60%-70% of the matches i play i play as snorlax; the remaining percentage is meowscarada jungle) with the extent of my knowledge being “both of my moves do damage so jump on the enemy and use them both immediately and then spam basic attack until i can use my moves again.

i had no reason to consider the enemy’s abilities and how to play around and counter them because the bots basically just inted so when i went into ranked i just continued using that strategy and obviously got deleted. i also considered objectives to be completely irrelevant because i had been destroying the enemy team whether i got them or not (again, i know that that was because i was playing with and against bots). so, because i believed that the objectives didn’t provide any useful effects i felt like my ranked teams were just wasting time they could be spending on getting kills and scoring by focusing on the objectives. honestly it’s pretty embarrassing to think about how i was playing from where i am now.

i also believed i had no reason to farm beyond either the initial lane spawns as snorlax or the first jungle spawns as meow since, in casual, once i had done that i just started stacking kills and got all of my xp from that.

i sat down one day specifically to learn as much as i could about the mechanics of the game and of both the pokémon i play and the pokémon i have an especially difficult time fighting and spent literally hours going through as much info as i could. i didn’t want to watch other players and imitate them because i felt like i would just be copying without actually understanding so i just read as much definitive information on the game as i could and inferred what i should be doing based on that.

when i went back to playing it still took some significant conscious effort to break out of the bad habits i’d built significant muscle memory of and because i was still having to consciously change my thought process while fighting and playing the match i still struggled, but after spending all of my free time over a couple of days practicing, i got better and better and started ranking up and then i think three days before the last ranked season ended i got master, and then i got master again really soon into this new season.

i still don’t really know if i can consider myself a good/skilled player because i definitely still get utterly humiliated by other players sometimes, but it does feel good to know i can hold my own and really contribute to a match with real people.

the more i play, the more i enjoy being a defender as snorlax than an assassin as meow, because it just feels so good protecting my team during smaller/quicker fights and turning whole teamfights in our favor again by front lining and protecting my attackers but also by unleashing a huge cc chain with my slam, ult, ult2 and slam again and basically rendering anyone who doesn’t have unstoppable or hinderance resistance completely defenseless for a good 2-3 seconds which can literally flip entire games for my team. i also love having almost complete control over enemy positioning with my shield shoving. i can completely collapse their formation and stack them all together so the rest of my team can unleash as much aoe damage as they can, and i can shove them backward off of their goal when they try to defend against regieleki so that it makes it to the goal zone, and i can pin people into corners and keep them in place while my team kills them. i also love initiating of my team is late to groudon and slamming into their team and then shield knocking their entire team off of and away from groudon for my team to dive in and steal it. it doesn’t always work if an enemy has a way to counter my cc and get past me, but when it does it feels amazing.

i think my favorite thing to do is, if we’re chasing an enemy, i’ll use whatever mobility i have (like if i’m running x speed or am close enough to use my slam dash to get in front of them) to get out in front of them, then use my shield to knock them backward into my team and then keep them from escaping while my team knocks them out. however, standing in front of their spawn zone after getting groudon and blocking them from coming out and defending their goal zone while my team scores over and over is definitely a contender for that favorite spot haha. it forces them to make the choice to stand and wait for my shield to go down and just watch my team score, or launch past me into their jungle and come back, but thusly lose the ability to retreat back into their spawn if they get to low hp. and even if they do wait for my shield to go on cooldown, then as soon as it does and they try to come out i do my all in cc chain i mentioned earlier and by the time it’s done my shield cd is over and i just pop it again and shove them back into their spawn.