[tomato-sauce]

The Overwatch example does not really make sense. The author assumes that if people are frustrated by frequently losing, it would be logical to put in effort to improve their skills. But their win rate should remain mostly constant as their skills improve since at the same time they would be moving up the ranking and would face better players. So there is not a strong incentive for the average player to put large effort into improving in the rankings.

In real world activities (eg programming) your skill level is often directly tied to strong incentives such as income. I don't think it is reasonable to think that it would be as easy to move up in the "rankings" all the way up to 95% percentile.

[wlesieutre]

This is why I miss games like Unreal Tournament where they had 8 bot difficulty levels. When you were in the mood for a challenge you could turn it up, and when you were in the mood for some easy blowing stuff up you could turn it down. Now everything's skill-based matchmaking and as much as it can manage you're always up against opponents who are equally good to you.

Or playing against people who are way better than you and sandbagged their rating. But you can't have an easy game unless you make a second smurf account and do the same. Which is a dick move because the people on the other end of it didn't sign up to play a much harder opponent.

[dmoy]

Competitive games is also a weird domain for measuring something like this. Optimal play can be both difficult to achieve, but have an incredible advantage. A 95th percentile player will lose to a 99th percentile player like 10 out of 10 times.

I mean shit, different blizzard game, but I was on a team that was somewhere around 99.9-99.99%, and if we went up against actual pro gamers (99.999%+), we'd lose 10 out of 10 times, and half the time we'd be unaware of why we lost (analogous to dan luu's "basic mistake", from the perspective of optimal play).

But on the flip side, we could literally play 2v3 and win 9.5 times out of 10 vs 97%-ile players. The advantage you get from seemingly small things in the game get amplified. For example if you just intuitively know when every ability comes off cooldown and becomes available again (both your own team and your opponents'), you can do things that seem otherwise impossible.

I don't think this translates all that well into a lot of other domains where it isn't a gamified hyper competitive / meta optimized scenario.