Welcome to the second content episode of my Road to Pred series! This series follows me as I attempt to reach the rank of Apex Predator the top 750 players in the world and document the journey. This week, I will be discussing my experience climbing from Platinum 4 into Platinum 2 over the last few days.
Difficulty
Over this first episode of my experience in the Platinum ranks, I started at Platinum 4 with 4800 RP and finished in Platinum 2 6000 RP. This climb from P4 to P2 took roughly 2 days of play, in which I was able to climb at a pretty impressive rate for my standards of skill level. Through my journey, I only lost the max RP of 36 roughly, 5 times while I won 6 games and finished in the top 5, 4 times. My experience climbing out of Gold during the first week of the split was in many regards was a harder experience even with the lower RP entrance fee at that level. At this level, I still feel very confident in my ability to climb higher and I’m expecting to reach diamond over the next few days, as the difficulty is still very low besides when the skill-based match-making algorithm movies pits me against diamonds, masters, and Apex Predators while giving me two Gold or Platinum players.
Skills and Demands
In the lower echelon of the Platinum ranks, the skills required to stand a chance of climbing have remained relatively unchanged since my last blog post, but the dependence on having competent teammates has risen. In the lower ranks, if your skill was unmatched, in many cases you could be able to win solo while also getting yourself max kill participation, however in Platinum, your chances of winning and gaining max KP, reduces significantly, due to Platinum and Gold, being the largest pool of players, each encounter can be very different due to the large pool of skill levels. Therefore, what I have noticed is that communication skills have started to develop in importance’ as you start to run into premade parties. Cognitive skills and general game sense are both very crucial aspects of climbing in this rank, which goes along with having good teammates, if you have good teammates but your are not performing yourself, then you are becoming a weak link and hurting your chances of climbing.
Enjoyment
Overall, so far I’m still really enjoying the challenge of climbing the Apex Legends Ranked ladder for the second time, I did take a break between blog episodes due to lockdown being removed and the release of other games. However, with the rise in the entry fee for each rank match, I find myself getting more frustrated when a game ends in the first five minutes due to either my own or teammates error. So It will be interesting to see how my levels of enjoyment adjust as I rank up, I would really like to find a group to play with as it would most likely ease a bit of the frustration, and boredom that comes with solo queueing when you are at the mercy of Apex Legends – Skill based match-making.
Platinum Part 1: Thoughts
Currently, I am sitting at 6018 RP, just at the start of Platinum 2, I’m looking at getting around one to two more episodes of this series, being a Part 2 of my Platinum climb, than a final episode in which I show off my progress at the end of the series, and redoing my benchmark tests and seeing how I have improved over the progress of my blog series. Therefore, It’s going to be important to continue to record my matches and make sure I review them to understand my mistakes and post them to YouTube to accompany this blog series, as I look at the experience and process of climbing the Apex Legends ranked ladder!
Hopefully, you enjoyed this first of hopefully a five-part series as I climb into Apex Predator. If you have any questions or feedback on this series please leave it below, on my Youtube Channel or Twitter. Thanks again for reading and I will see you out there on King’s Canyon.
Jacob Suter 
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