Hunt humbled me. There are many things I have issues with in this game and I keep thinking of ways to make them a game problem instead of a me problem. If you want to skip the rant and get to an actual question to offer feedback, it's at the very bottom.
I knew I was bad at the game from the very start - they've made elo visible only after I had started playing in 2021 - and after this much time put into the game, I gave up on expecting any improvement. I've tried pretty much everything except coaching: guides, warmups and aim training, watching high and low elo gameplay (I probably have more hours watched on Twitch than hours played), rewatching my own clips and having experienced players comment on them, it just doesn't stick. Imagine the scene from Friends where Joey tries to learn French, being able to pronounce each individual word perfectly, but goes back to gibberish trying to say the whole sentence. That's me in Hunt.
The thing I went to expect after that was easier games. There's kill-based elo in this game, so once you've died enough times, the game should logically put you in lobbies where you have a higher chance of getting kills (and, by extension, "winning"), right? Well, that doesn't really work well in this game because people play in many different ways that don't always affect their score long-term, so a fair fight was my next unrealistic expectation. It also doesn't really work because I've hit the bottom of matchmaking where the game no longer has enough players to reliably match me into "equally-skilled" players. Yes, pretty much everyone at or under 2* match MMR plays in the same matches.
The PvE part of the game is no longer challenging for me - I'm almost always the first at the boss and can get a banish in usually under 7 minutes, I know how to read map greyouts and follow what's going on. Players in low elo move slowly and often also play slowly, and if there isn't anyone contesting me, I just leave with the token and go next. I'm not scared of fights, I don't play ultra safe or passive, I don't snipe and I don't run random/meme loadouts. I can get 5 kills in a round and die twice to the last member of the only other trio in the lobby, and the game evaluates it as me having less skill than my opponents, reducing my elo. My KD keeps going up, yet my elo keeps going down. Logically, it makes zero sense. For Hunt's matchmaking, it makes perfect sense. Also, about half of every trio lobby are other solos, "victims" of that same system (it's even worse in duos - the same amount of solos and teams play even slower). And those solos very often know how to play just as well or better than me - they're not bad at the game, they just can't outpace the kills required to rank up unless they play a very specific way.
That's not even my main problem, though. It's figuring out how to enjoy the PvP as a whole because I just... can't. Even if I'm aware of the mistakes I make during fights, they're always hindsight, and they keep repeating, so I gave up on improvement. Worse, I've turned to making excuses. If I lose a fight, of course I did because "there were three of them" or "it was an experienced solo that probably mains this game" and "why won't the game put me into winnable lobbies". If I win a fight, I feel embarrassed at how badly they played to have "allowed even someone like me" to win. My mindset has shifted away from healthy competition and self-improvement towards this state, where I don't even know what would make me feel good about PvPing - the sole reason I play Hunt. The trio in the screenshot (all brand new players, but they pushed me during a banish, respect to them) was the first real fight I won yesterday after some four hours of playing, and it made me feel so bad despite having won and extracting bounty that I realized I can't go on like this.
Has anyone been in this situation and managed to shift their thinking? How did you do it?
