Here is my take on the situation.
First of all, we need to define what "noob" means. Usually noob = a person who is inexperienced in a particular sphere or activity. Thus given this definition I doubt we can talk about noobs in Platinum in general, even if they are carried they can at least keep up which in turn does require some skill.
Continuing the thought - in Apex you have basically two skill sets: 1) mechanics = point and shoot 2) game awareness = positioning, rotations, movement, knowing when to push and when to retreat, etc.
Which leads to my definition of "noob" = player who lacks game awareness, one or multiple aspects of it. Ones that can't win their 1v1 due to mechanical skills are just less skilled but in my opinion, you can't call a person who can't shoot all bullets on target a noob, similarly then you should call all who ran 100m under 9.58s slow noobs.
Are Platinum lobbies full of noobs - I would say yes. Yet those noobs do frequently kill me, because they are in many cases more superior in shooting than me. An example of that was a dude I played with - he was amazing in pushes and he won 6-8 out of 10 1v1 vs me in training, he also got usually more points, damage than me in games. Yet when I erupted on him about his decision making, how tired am I to pick him up = respawn or rat maps because he died and put our team at disadvantage when there were still 15+ squads alive he agreed that when he plays he is 100% focused only on the enemy he is shooting, he is nothing thinking about anything else - where are enemie's teammates, where 3rd party can come from, how much time do we have to rotate and where will we go, he said that he expected me to do the thinking because I was better at it.
Yesterday he hit 10k Master level for the first time, I am at hardstuck D4 for 2+ weeks.
Does the scoring system force people to do that...kinda, an especially the latest change which clearly shifted focus towards killing not "camping/hiding" call it whatever.
Is it only thing that pushes people to play like they play = crash hotdrops, pushes, kill kill kill? No, clearly on the forums you see that most people just enjoy that type of play, plus in example above you can see that some people are just wired like that and they can't play any other way.
Why they accel and in many cases are even higher ranked?
First of all same example as with the player, I played with - in many occasions he initiated the push, killed/knocked multiple enemies, got his points and then was waiting for me to clean up the mess and/or pick him up. He gets out of the fight with damage and KP, I get out of the fight barely alive, running around the map looking where to respawn (time I am not doing any damage or getting any KP) just to respawn him and do it all over again.
Second - in my opinion, it is much easier to get initial KP vs cleaning up the fight and more importantly do it kinds of solo style:
a) initial damage comes as surprise to an enemy more often than not
b) enemies panic for a moment - easier damage, kills
c) 3rd party can arrive shortly after a fight and clean your knocks while you are knocked/being picked up = you still get KP
d) you are coordinating the fight as you are leading it, making decisions based on what is more advantageous to you, not necessarily your team e.g. you do initial damage, then flank enemies while they focus on your trailing teammates and again you get free damage from the flank before enemies redirect focus to you
All of just listed maybe can't be already borderline between noob and not noob yet it is in my opinion 100% unfair towards your teammates, thus many people don't like sticking around the player who usually gets 50%+ of all KP, RP, damage, rarely rats for the team. Vice versa does happen more often = those fraggers as I call them usually look for support players and gladly stick around with them.
Finally thanks to comments in this thread I also noticed a trend that people in P4, D4 and even Masters are clearly boosted - the ratio between total players in rank vs these levels. Actually, season 11 explains a lot about D4 and my situation being hardstuck and adding people to my blocklist more than in season 10 - when I started Apex I guess Diamond stats were like 5-8%, now it is 10+... quite a jump and as we can see mainly thanks to D4 ppl. Point is - if the community would actually not be boosted stats would be more like G and S levels because many people would go from D4 to higher level instead getting stuck or stop playing after reaching it.
From there I would agree that P4 hardstucks are one of the worse randoms because margin for error is already small and they do influence a lot, yet I would say that D4 hardstucks are the worst because at that level 2v3 is pretty much impossible yet that's what they bring to the game most of the time.
*note - by hardstuck I mean people who really are noob + can't get out of D4 even if they try not the ones who are unlucky with teammates, opt for playing soloq and taking basically a given risk of losing.
To sum up: clear noobs are B4, boosted noobs are P4, D4 and 10k Masters (hardstuck and lacking of game awereness skills), the rest are just wired differently and have support squad with them or not noobs.
A proof
@CocoaHyena @You are relatively correct and absolutely wrong. Mathematically absolute 🙂
You mat think they are bad but you are saying better than average and good players are bad.
If you represent a large minority of the player group, which is what you are if you get Plat III or higher, then you are very good or better, Plat Iv players are good just not as good as you and they are much better than the average or below.
Sorry 🙂
Community Manager
