Gain More SR Than You Lose — A Guide To Setting Personal Performance Goals In Competitive Overwatch

A common complaint about Overwatch's Skill Rating (SR) system is the seemingly arbitrary way it assigns SR gains and losses. The lack of transparency over how personal performance is measured is a cause of constant angst on the official Overwatch forums due to differing gains amongst team mates in the same match.

Blizzard has stated that it will not release how SR is calculated due to the potential for abuse. However, sites like MasterOverwatch offer interesting macro views of competitive player data that can give a good idea of why you might be gaining the SR you are in games.

In our post on how competitive ranking works in Overwatch, we cover the major factors that go into calculating your SR gain after a match:

1) Win/Loss

2) Individual Performance

3) Streaks

The first thing that decides whether you gain or lose SR is whether your team won or lost the match. Where SR gains diverge within the team is when it considers your personal performance, and whether you personally were on a winning or losing streak.

How You Are Measured

Start by throwing out the idea that medals mean something to the system. Getting medals in Overwatch is purely cosmetic, and serve little purpose other than to indicate how you did relative to your team mates.

But that's not how your SR is calculated. The system calculates your SR based on your performance on the character you played compared to the global average for the character on the same map, in your ranking tier. 

So let's say you're a Platinum rank player and you play Genji on Gibraltar. You get 40 eliminations, deflect 700 damage a minute and get 2.5 dragonblade kills per minute, with a K/D of 4. That number is compared against the global average for other Platinum rank Genjis playing on Gibraltar. Since this performance is more typical of a player at Master rank, the game will reward you with higher SR than normal. If you lose the game despite that performance, the game will minimize your SR loss.

Setting Your Performance Goals

So how would you know what metrics you'll have to track and what are the numbers you'll need to surpass to optimize your SR gain? Again, use the data on MasterOverwatch.

Start by checking the percentile at which your rank belongs. 

Mouse over the percentile number and the site will tell you that you are "Top X %", where X is the percentage of players who are better than you.

What this number means is that when you play competitive, your performance will need to be such that the metrics for your character approximate those of players in the same percentile.

The metrics for each character are unique to the hero. In addition to traditional metrics like eliminations and healing, characters like Lucio will be scored on Offensive and Defensive Assists. Reinhardt players will be scored on Fire Strike, Earthshatter and Charge kills.

Below is a screenshot of a Gold Reinhardt player's stats. This player has been receiving 40 to 50 SR a match for non-streak wins and less than 20 SR for losses:

Mouse over each metric to check where you stand on it percentile-wise:

As you can see, the Reinhardt player has made enough Fire Strike kills a match to put them in the top two per cent of players for the ability use. Combined with their top 10 per cent performance on Eliminations, K/D, Block, Earthshatter and Charge kills, this probably signaled to the game that the player may belong at a higher skill level, and their SR is adjusted accordingly.

As long as your character's metrics are at a percentile that is similar to your rank percentile, you are likely to gain the "average" of 20 to 30 SR a match. A better performance will see you gain 40 to 50 SR on a non-streak win.

If you are trying to reach the next rank tier, set a performance goal based on the metrics that players at that tier are expected to average. For example, if you would like to rank up to Platinum try to aim to be top 40 per cent on all your stats. You may need to find a few examples of players at that level to get a sense of how they are performing, then try to match that.

For a quick reference, here are some stats for games in which I gained a lot of SR, normal SR and lost a lot of SR:

Average stats per game for Platinum tier Lucio players:

Eliminations: 17
K/D: 1.96
Objective Time: 11.44 seconds/min (approx 02:56 in a 15 minute match)
Healing/min: 1142
Damage Done: 5210
Offensive Assists: 3
Defensive Assists: 15
Sound Barriers: 19

Stats for a match in which I gained 78 SR as Lucio:

Eliminations: 18
K/D: 2.25
Objective Time: 4:12
Healing/min: 1028
Damage Done: 4838
Offensive Assists: 5
Defensive Assists: 26
Sound Barriers: 37

Stats for a match in which I gained 27 SR as Lucio:

Eliminations: 18
K/D: 1.29
Objective Time: 02:04
Healing/min: 1023
Damage Done: 5692
Offensive Assists: 2
Defensive Assists: 27
Sound Barriers: 31

Stats for a match in which I lost 40 SR as Lucio:

Eliminations: 4
K/D: 0.36
Objective Time: 01:19
Healing/min: 790
Damage Done: 3646
Offensive Assists: 0
Defensive Assists: 4
Sound Barriers: 12

As you can see, the pattern is such that any time my performance registered as above average, the game rewards me with more SR. If I lost with very bad stats, I lost a lot of SR.

Trying to achieve the right stats doesn't always mean you're doing what's best for the team. However, if you can improve on your play so you can achieve those stats while helping your team to victory, you should be in good standing to climb the competitive ranks in Overwatch.