How to grind to Diamond?

[WryOmnivore]

How do you grind to diamond? What is scored or how many games does it take? What is the basis for scoring to reah the upper echlon of the game? I have searched and came up with is get the MVP Medal, TIA

[AIR_IK_BREATHES]

I found this for you. It’s a lot to read though. And good luck out there.

[Main] Ranking System Discussion, and Feedback

I’ve actually changed my mind about the ranking system. Unlike most others in this thread, I actually think the ranking system works mostly well, with a few small issues. But it’s not nearly transparent enough. I’ll explain (verbosely, sorry). Getting stuck is our own fault, not the ranking system’s After reading how it works and having it explained several times by the devs, I get why people become stuck and I agree with it. I remember trying to get D5 in TDM at the end of S3. I was stuck at…

[R_SW1PE]

Simple…be “consistently effective”.

1. Effective - get points on the board, get kills, get assists. Help control the map/weapons, be a good teammate and cover each other.

2. Consistent - Perform well individually game after game. Not MVP one game then 4th on your team the game after.

Common mnisconceptions. Here’s what you DON’T need to do:

1. win every match
2. be scared of using any other weapon than the Gnasher
3. learn crackpot movement

[AIR_IK_BREATHES]

What the heck is the crackpot movement? I never, ever heard of that funny name of movement. And I’ve been playing Gears of War since 06.

[R_SW1PE]

I meant wallbouncing. Some people think that you need to be great at it to get diamond. You don’t.

[WryOmnivore]

reading

I think the reference is wall bouncing. The best 2 tricks I heard. Aim to the center and the head. So far that is all I hope someone will explain it further.

[AIR_IK_BREATHES]

Try messing with your controller settings and or layout scheme. BTW I’m not diamond and use an elite controller.

[III_EnVii_III]

All about kills & winning rounds/matches

Get the kills & win most games, get the Diamond

[Qs_iFroosty_v]

Its simple, get a team with 5 guys, do not play alone cuz is hard to lvl up alone, just get lancer and take the control of the maps, like Mercy or Reclaimed, focus on powerful weapons: Dropshot, boomshot or sniper, in 2 days i’m diamond1 with 84%, good luck. (bad english iknowsorry)

P.s: Don’t die to much 6kills - 3 Deaths its good you dont need the mvp in every match to lvl up your rank, just get positive KDA👍

[WryOmnivore]

Thanks, still trying and will go for the power wepons.

[mike_yaworski]

It goes without saying that you need good movement, accuracy and general positioning for fights. You need to be a good player. But there are other important things to keep in mind on the grind to Diamond. Here’s my best attempt to recall the things I’ve learned.

Also keep in mind that you can only rank up on a win and down on a loss. The match win/loss itself and each round win/loss affect your rank (losing zero rounds is better than losing a few). And most importantly for this discussion, your individual performance affects your rank.

Play with a team

First and foremost, I recommend playing with a team. It’s not necessary, but it’s extremely helpful. Teammates absolutely affect your individual performance as well.

Icy, who was formerly on Optic (the team that wins every single event), said it well:

Everything is a lot easier on Optic. Everyone who plays on Optic is gonna always play their best just because that team makes rounds easy for them. If [Xplosive] is shooting people in the forehead for me, all I have to do is hit one shot instead of two shots, and that’s the difference.

If somebody’s 60% hurt and I just have to hit one shot, it makes the the whole game 20x easier.

Source: https://clips.twitch.tv/OilyDignifiedElkPipeHype

The same logic goes for playing with your friends vs randoms. If you play with friends, you can shoot for each other and generally have help in fights that you otherwise wouldn’t with randoms. It makes staying alive easier and allows you to just easily kill enemies pushing hills hopelessly trying to get a break. You’ll perform much better individually if you have teammates with you.

Winning is also easier with teammates instead of quitters or randoms who play completely by themselves in a team game. Obviously you can only rank up on wins. Even if you don’t go down on losses, losing will make it take much longer to get to rank up because you just wasted all that time playing a lost game.

Do well on losses AND wins

Although you want to win preferably 9/10 games at least, you will inevitably lose. Obviously you need to play well on those losses to reduce the negative impact to your rank. However, what people don’t realize is that it’s less about the game you actually lose and more about all the games leading up to your loss.

You also need to do well on your wins. By that, I mean you can’t just get “carried” on your wins. If you have scores like 4-5 or 7-6 in TDM during your wins prior to losing, then on your next loss, you’re going to lose a lot of percentage. That’s because doing poorly on wins will lower your background MMR and it’ll catch up with you on your next loss. Remember that your percentage will go up or remain the same on wins, and will go down or remain the same on losses. So if you’re not performing well on the wins, even though you won’t go down immediately, the ranking system is going to punish you much harder on the next losses.

If you do well on wins and then lose badly for whatever reason, you likely won’t even go down at all. I never do. Same goes for a lot of people in high ranks. Doing well on wins is how you efficiently grind to Diamond because it mitigates the losses and you can just keep trucking after that. It’s much quicker and less stressful that way.

Check this Tweet out for confirmation of what I’m saying. It’s from a dev who works on the Halo ranking system (Gears uses the same one).

Josh Menke (joshua_menke)

()

Play to win and as a genuine teammate

I’ll talk about the stats that matter below, but a general rule of mine is to always play to win. Play as a teammate, not an individual.

If you see a teammate (even a random) in a fight that’s far outside shotgun range, instead of taking out your shotgun and trying to thirst the kill by sprinting over there, just shoot for him with a Lancer. Get assist points and let your teammate win the fight, which ultimately helps you win the game.

If you’re playing KOTH or Escalation, don’t try and get the hill cap when there are already two people capping the hill just for the points. I mean, obviously that’s fine if you have nothing better to do (you’re already in a great setup or whatever). But if you have something better to do, such as getting a power weapon, setting up in a better spot to Lancer enemies running to the hill, etc. then just do that. Don’t try and micromanage cap points and all that. Keep it simple and just play for the win.

If you’re playing Escalation, don’t try to cap your home hill on the initial if a teammate is already doing it. Go be useful elsewhere. For one, you’re leaving the rest of your team fighting for the neutral hill with less help. The enemy team will likely win the actual fight on the map because they have numbers. And second, the points you get for the cap don’t help your rank anyway. Thirsting that home hill cap for points is a very nooby mistake. It’s going to make you lose the round and the points are useless anyway.

Basically just don’t be thirsty. Don’t worry about getting every hill cap unless it’s not hurting anything. Try to boost up your teammates so they win their fights too. It’ll work better in the long run. The most important thing is to keep your enemies’ scores down, which is a result of helping your teammates win their fights too. Winning easily is also a result of that.

Hog the secondary weapons

Pick up the Hammerburst, Retro, Marzka and Boltok whenever you get a chance. Especially the Retro if you are a console player. Those are going to boost your stats a lot.

The stats that matter

For ring modes, caps/breaks really don’t matter. Breaks > Caps if anything, but both are still unimportant. If you have to pick between killing an enemy or capping the hill before your teammates, take the kill instead. Kills > Breaks > Caps

Regardless of the mode, maximizing score/kills/downs and minimizing deaths is the most important thing. Don’t freak out if your kills are stolen because your score and downs are still going up, which is good enough. If you go 0-5 but have 25 downs, that’s basically the same as going 25-5. It’s all good.

In general, try and not die if you can avoid it. I’d say going 10-2 is better than 15-15 or 12-8. The degree to which it’s better depends on the mode. The system gives more weight to the stats which historically result in wins for a team. So if most teams that win in TDM are from extremely positive KDs, then that is what will help you rank up best. If most teams that win in KOTH are from super high kills and potentially a lot of deaths too, then deaths are going to mean less in terms of ranking up. Obviously low deaths is going to correlate to dominating games, so reducing deaths will always help. But it’s less important in KOTH than TDM, for example.

It’s very important to maximize assists and downs though. Even if you’re not going to get the kills, getting assist points or downs to boost that score is going to help you rank up. In TDM, 8-6 with 0 downs and only 1200 points is not really a good score. 6-5 with 8 downs and 2000 score is much preferred.

Caps boost your score too, but X points in caps is much less valuable than X points in assists. So capping home hill every round in Escalation is going to do nothing for you. Trust me, I’ve seen people go nowhere with their rank even by getting MVP every game due to having 25 caps and only like 6-10 kills. Thirsting home hill caps is a horrible idea.

You can’t cheese the system that way. It knows what stats line up with good players. Your stats should reflect the stats of a good player. There is nothing skillful about capping every hill you can. You can tell a bronze player to run around looking for hill caps in KOTH/Escalation and you’re still going to lose if they have 20-30 caps. It’s not useful because only 1 person needs to cap and killing enemies approaching the hill is the part that matters.

Of course someone needs to cap the hill, and that will obviously be you at some points in the game. Definitely cap the hill when it’s the correct thing to do for winning (e.g. you’re the home hill player on Esc or you’re the one holding the hill down at that moment in KOTH/Esc). Just don’t prioritize it over winning strategies. Prioritize positional advantages and team support if someone else has the hill or if it’s out of your way. This goes back to my “play to win” points.

Ending the game with 25 caps is totally acceptable if you were the player getting dirty in the hill all the time. Ending the game with 2 caps is also totally acceptable if you were the player constantly crossing and killing enemies around the hill before they get to the hill. Both are going to rank you up because both are winning strategies.

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Also random link if you want more or different advice (especially for how to get Diamond playing solo): https://www.reddit.com/r/GearsOfWar/comments/6q06yf/solo_escalation_from_unranked_to_diamond_in_44/

This was a Reddit thread I ready a long time ago, The links are almost all expired at this point, but what he writes is generally good advice. And he wrote it from the perspective of playing solo, so that’ll be more relevant to some people.

[AliceInChainsaw]

Follow @API’s advice. I haven’t pinned down how to play the best in other modes as they have different objectives(or lack there of) but what he says is spot on for Koth.

I’ve played for 2 seasons and never saw Diamond. This season I’m already D3 in Koth. This is through about 50/50 solo queue and team play. I play with many different groups of people. Sometimes I just play by myself.

I’ve never gone down % for the few losses I’ve had. Even when murdered. Last night, for example, my game crashed halfway through, came back in to my keybinds being messed up. I was bottom of the barrel and we lost on top of it to an under ranked team.

84% D3 and didn’t go down for it.

If you perform well consistently it doesn’t penalize you much for the few times you don’t.

Editing with update to add to how this works:
For an example, let’s say I have a score of 4/6 on the performance scale ‘credit’ line. 6/6 and you start jumping high on your wins and 0/6 you start bombing down on your losses.

Tonight I won 3 games but was 2nd, 3rd, 4th place. I didn’t do as well as the game was expecting me to, even though we won - so I dropped down to about 3/6 on my personal performance.

Minimal rank change - up to 92% D3

Then I lost a game and also was not MVP, I was also not in first place on my own team. I was in second place. This knocked me down to 2/6.

No rank change.

I won another game but was not MVP and was only 2nd or 3rd on my team. My performance has consistently been below average to what it normally is. I’ve dropped to 1/6.

No rank change

I lose another game. I’m not MVP and I’m in second place on my team and well below the scores of the enemy team.

It’s time to pay the debt. I move from 92% to 36%.

I lose another but this time I’m MVP. I drop to 24%. Why? Because so what if I did real good this one round - I have no performance ‘credit’ left because I’ve consistently sucked tonight.

I win the next match, just shy of MVP as well. No movement.
1/6

Repeated win, MVP. 2/6
Rank moves up to 33%.

Repeated win. MVP.
3/6
Rank moves up to 37%.

My performance rating is probably like a 3/6 or so right now, which means I’m on the cusp. I have to keep performing at a high level or near it in order to either stay neutral or move up the ‘credit’ scale.

Tip the scale too much in one direction on the back-end over a period of games and you will feel it. Positively or negatively.

[WryOmnivore]

Thanks, still I play and contytoplay on. Whatkillsmeis I don’t advance. Does accepting Bronze stop you from rising) is that the end.?