After playing 40+ hours with midlevel, I can confidently say it was the most miserable experience I’ve had playing this game mostly because I skipped this part of the scene back in S2 and didn’t realize how bad it could actually be. It’s not miserable because of overall skill level, because yeah everything is gonna feel worse outside of top level after being in it for long. The biggest thing hurting this part of the scene is ego. I had over 60 tryouts, and almost all of them said it’s hard for them to even get four people to try out with. That genuinely confused me, because for the most part everyone I played with felt extremely similar in skill, and I could easily see these players scrimming each other regularly and figuring out how to mesh over time. This explains a lot of why midlevel feels weaker as a whole. A lot of these players simply don’t get enough meaningful playtime outside of rare pickups or X Rank, so they’re missing the constant feedback loop that actually drives improvement. Playing against people at a similar level forces you to recognize patterns, and improve through adaptions. Over time, that raises the average skill for everyone involved. There were so many situations in games where I had to explain why we were losing or what we needed to change to win and I honestly think most of these players would’ve figured it out themselves eventually if they were consistently playing each other instead of isolating themselves or waiting for “better” lobbies. when players actually PLAY THE GAME, the average skill level naturally rises. This isn't entirely mid levels fault though, I think top level players can do a better job at providing knowledge to mid level players to improve but better questions need to be asked to top players too, all the time I see questions like oh what special is best or how do i play "insert weapon here" these are terrible questions and we need to move on to better questions like "what should i have done in this scenario here" because thats all this game is. it's a bunch of scenarios that sometimes you might play right the first time or play wrong and if you play it wrong you go back and look ok how could I have reacted instead of was it even ok for me to be in this scenario in the first place. The game is so fast and a bigger part of improving is just putting yourself in different scenarios each game and testing what feels strong and what doesn't feel strong and you can discuss it with a teammates and then you can all evolve your playstyle each and every game. Maybe i'll get into the coaching side of things and try my best to fix the problems from the inside but idk it's alot of work and i genuinely felt like I was in a psychosis the past 2 weekends with tryouts the mindset change from top to midlevel is just so insane.