CSR plateaus in team playlists seem to stem more from Lady Luck than skill. In order to move beyond these plateaus, it appears you have to either a) have a streak of good luck in the players you’re matched with or b) develop skill far beyond your current rank to get you through the more prevalent streaks of bad luck.
For example, I quickly rose to platinum after placing gold this season and have spent many hours striving for diamond. I endured many wins and losses before getting more and more top gun medals until I was eventually able to help my random, ranked teammates win games during streaks of bad luck (i.e. being matched against highly-skilled players that are in the process of ranking and/or matched alongside barely-skilled players in the process of ranking… quitters and afk’s notwithstanding) until I finally reached Plat 6.
During the match I needed to win for Diamond, however, I noticed one of my teammates staring at the cieling, spinning in circles, and shooting at the corpses of dead teammates. I was too focused on winning to let it bother me then, the other teammates and I were in the lead for much of the game until the enemy gained a good upper hand in the end and won, their final kill being that unranked, hapless player after he’d been walking into a wall for a solid minute with 0 kills to his name.
Afterwards, I slowly plummeted down to 4 (partly because I quit that game; it was the only game I ever rage quit, and though I didn’t do it until the very end I was still brought down to 5 and banned for 45 min). I’ve been striving for another chance at diamond ever since but I haven’t been on my a-game enough to circumvent the streaks of bad luck.
So, unless I hit a streak of good luck, I believe that I will have to keep improving until I obtain Onyx-like skill to increase my odds of beating those highly-skilled players that are ranking and/or carry the barely-skilled players that are ranking --even the ones that lick windows while their teammates are giving it their all-- in order to reach Diamond.
So, although I’m hypocritical to the extent that I have no complaints when this works in my favor, I’d gladly relinquish those instances if it would end the frustrations when it works against me.
What do you think? Is this muse on or off base?