Disclaimer, I know diamond isn't super high elo or anything, but I'm a 31 year old that isn't very good at shooters so hitting diamond for me was actually an insane accomplishment. I come from RTS, MOBA, and MMO games. So in the last 2 months before dragonflight comes out for WoW I made a goal to hit diamond and here are my thoughts. Also I know that diamond players still do these things, these are mostly just my biggest takeaways after being in the different ELOs

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1) Peeking when you don't need to.

Gold and Platinum players are so fucking bad at just ego peeking angles. It'll be an unlosable round and people will just ego peek ops and take duels they have no business taking and throw rounds for free. It's a pretty common principle to understand, when you have numbers advantage you hold cross fires and play together so you can trade, when you are outnumbered you need to isolate 1v1 duels. It's just a super basic idea that a lot of the gold/plat players just don't care about, they just constantly ego peek and die when they don't need to, they lose rounds and dunk their economy to the ground which can spiral winnable games into a loss.

2) Understanding how to work a map.

I'll use Fracture for example. On attack people don't understand how that map works in gold/plat lobbies. People will literally just 5 man rush a site from one direction every round and lose and not understand what's happening. You have to learn how to default, you have to learn how to lurk and work that map. For example if you push A main and have 1 lurk B arcade, the player that is lurking can hear people rotating off B, give that info and sneak into the enemy spawn, or in a corner and he's good for 1/2 kills there. Sometimes obviously rushing a site can be super strong but it's important to keep the opponent guessing, you don't want to lurk the same spot every round you gotta mix it up.

Another example that annoys me is Bind. When you attack A on bind if you do not have a sage wall you pretty much have to have 2 people go showers to clear it or you aren't getting the bomb down. People do not understand this and just 5 man push short, try to plant default, and get headshot through smoke, die, and complain they have no team.

3) Adapt to what the other team is doing.

Sort of like in #3 working a map, adapting to how the enemy team plays, exploiting their tendencies is actually really important to winning rounds and it goes hand in hand with understanding how to work a map. If you notice they are flanking a lot, just make noise one site and have 2 people hold where that guy pushes out of, free kill, and the whole map gets opened up. If they tend to rotate fast if you hit a site throw in fakes and keep them guessing. When you are on attack you have to try to make sure you are utilizing your man advantage where the defenders have to split up and guess where you are attacking. It's a pretty simple concept but it's often forgot, people will see everyone rotate to a site and attackers will handshake a 5v5 when they could easily just rotate to another site and take it for free.

4) Bad attitude, blaming team

Hey. If you're gold, silver, bronze, plat, whatever. You are there because you are lacking the necessary skills to get to the next level, plain and simple. Gold player lobbies actually have some of the worst attitudes Ive seen where they make literally the worst possible plays every round and blame their team. Winning rounds is the most important part of the game, not kills.

Just because you lurked as Reyna and got 3 kills after the whole team was dead and you are top frag because of it, it doesn't mean you played better than the phoenix that is entrying every round, getting his team on site and creating a bunch of space for his team.

You'll have duelists that just bait their team, top frag, and then blame their team for being shit, it's really silly. When you play other roles you really understand how important it is to have a duelist on your team that understands what their role is, it makes the game so much easier.

5) Aim, (obviously) more importantly, having the game sense necessary to understand where your crosshair needs to be clearing and having it headshot level. This game is like 95% crosshair placement and reaction time. I don't care how god tier your aim is when you do gridshot on aimlabs, if you have dogshit crosshair placement you are going to bottom frag. Run DMs and practice your crosshair placement.

Gold/plat players tend to have some decent aim but usually their crosshair placement is very hit or miss (aiming at the ground, or their movement is ahead of their aim) and they tend to go into crouch spray wars when they panic. I've seen some gold deathmatch player aim that has been insane where they are counter strafe burst shooting like gods but in a real match they just handshake 50/50 duels by couch spraying. Learning how to accurately strafe shoot is very strong in game and you need to practice it, and build it into your muscle memory where when you panic your instinct is to strafe shoot.

Personally, I've always had very bad aim so I would do lot's of Kovaaks aim training and deathmatches with guardians to practice my accuracy. My aim is still dogshit but I did notice a huge increase in my aim over the course of a few months where I was starting to be able to connect shots I never would be able to without it. I would essentially use Kovaaks to warm up my raw aiming and then would run 2-3 DMs practicing crosshair placement and counter strafing.

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Hope that helps some of you nerds climbing! I'll see you in Diamond.