[j-c-hewitt]

95th percentile of the Overwatch ladder is also not the same thing as 95th percentile of competitive tournament players. This entire article is just full of category fallacies to try to support a vague subjective assertion.

Gaming ladders with automated ELO systems are also not run like tournament ELO systems in more controlled environments like competitive chess. Games like Overwatch, WoW, Starcraft, Hearthstone, etc. will not dynamically update when the player is inactive in order to not discourage players. You have to lose games to lose your ELO category rank, although obviously you can go up and down the leaderboard without playing games. There are some gaming rank systems like CSGO that have some rank decay for inactivity but it is just at a flat rate.

So, "95th percentile" in these systems is not actually indicative of that unless it is based on the precise rank on the leaderboard. In many of these seasonal games rank inflation happens towards the end of the season because of this lack of passive decay. It means that at the beginning of the season, the top rank is very competitive, but as people become less active as the season goes on, it becomes easier to attain rank.

In a lot of domains, if you are 95th percentile, you are extremely competitive. You may be noncompetitive with the 99%ile cohort and the bottom of the 99%ile may be noncompetitive with the 0.1%ile, but to argue that that's not "very good" is just goofy perfectionism. The fact that the author is using goofy noncontrolled systems as an example to support his weakly-defined subjective argument only undermines his own case.

[cloverich]

Last I played, overwatch does indeed drop your elo once you are diamond and above (approx top 10%). Though I disagree with the author as one who climbed from bottom 25% to top 10% - it was quite hard and took months of deliberate, regular practice (~1000 matches). I found it nearly comparable to improving at medical school. I think the author underestimated the complexity of being good at overwatch.

[Madmallard]

It's all subjective based on how people vary in their natural competence at the skills required for the game.

Some people play Overwatch and in their first 1000 games they get to grandmaster. Others get to platinum.

People tend to assume it's easy to get to whatever level they got to, regardless of where they are on the skill curve.

[nebulous1]

> [Unlike chess] Games like Overwatch, WoW, Starcraft, Hearthstone, etc. will not dynamically update when the player is inactive in order to not discourage players

Elo (as used in chess) does not update if you aren't playing games. It's a common criticism of it.

[rjsw]

There was a recent example of one player at the top of one ELO system becoming the top ranked player of another [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen#Personal_life

[bigbadgoose]

Ranked and unranked already exist to address your insight