Overwatch is a hero shooter where every player has a different role and different abilities. As an experiment maybe a year ago, I once asked the best monkey player I knew at the time (4200 elo on a 0-5000 scale) to 1v1 the worst Bastion player I knew (under 1000 elo). In the neutral, the Bastion player consistently won despite the yawning chasm between their ratings. This is because monkey is a tank designed to take space and counter snipers and isolate squishy targets from their healers, and is not a character designed to 1v1 a Bastion. If you are missing three people from your team, you are missing three of the six key roles. The best player of all time playing Reinhardt could still probably lose a 1v1 to a bronze Pharah.
Running 2-3 higher-skill players versus 4-6 lower-skill players in variety PUGs, I’ve generally found that the lower-skill players very consistently win unless we give the 3 higher-skilled players an additional advantage like extra HP or damage. But that’s with a ton of obvious confounding factors—my higher rated players might be more inclined to just play for fun, plus the lower-skill players in my community are still reasonably strategic from exposure to team environments.
The first result of my YouTube search is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfhdHUQbcNA which, as you predict, goes in favour of the GMs. But I think there’s very easy tweaks (such as to team composition) that would allow the bronze players to do better. You can see that the first round actually goes to overtime for quite a while, so on paper it’s pretty close. Not really analysing this in depth as it’s 8am.
Overwatch is a hero shooter where every player has a different role and different abilities. As an experiment maybe a year ago, I once asked the best monkey player I knew at the time (4200 elo on a 0-5000 scale) to 1v1 the worst Bastion player I knew (under 1000 elo). In the neutral, the Bastion player consistently won despite the yawning chasm between their ratings. This is because monkey is a tank designed to take space and counter snipers and isolate squishy targets from their healers, and is not a character designed to 1v1 a Bastion. If you are missing three people from your team, you are missing three of the six key roles. The best player of all time playing Reinhardt could still probably lose a 1v1 to a bronze Pharah.
Running 2-3 higher-skill players versus 4-6 lower-skill players in variety PUGs, I’ve generally found that the lower-skill players very consistently win unless we give the 3 higher-skilled players an additional advantage like extra HP or damage. But that’s with a ton of obvious confounding factors—my higher rated players might be more inclined to just play for fun, plus the lower-skill players in my community are still reasonably strategic from exposure to team environments.
The first result of my YouTube search is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfhdHUQbcNA which, as you predict, goes in favour of the GMs. But I think there’s very easy tweaks (such as to team composition) that would allow the bronze players to do better. You can see that the first round actually goes to overtime for quite a while, so on paper it’s pretty close. Not really analysing this in depth as it’s 8am.