Reaching 95%-ile isn’t very impressive because it’s not that hard to do…most people can become (relatively) good at most things…Personally, in every activity I’ve participated in where it’s possible to get a rough percentile ranking, people who are 95%-ile constantly make mistakes that seem like they should be easy to observe and correct. “Real world” activities typically can’t be reduced to a percentile rating, but achieving what appears to be a similar level of proficiency seems similarly easy. We’ll start by looking at Overwatch (a video game) in detail because it’s an activity I’m familiar with where it’s easy to get ranking information and observe what’s happening, and then we’ll look at some “real world” examples where we can observe the same phenomena, although we won’t be able to get ranking information for real world examples¹.

Overwatch: At 90%-ile and 95%-ile ranks in Overwatch, the vast majority of players will pretty much constantly make basic game losing mistakes. These are simple mistakes like standing next to the objective instead of on top of the objective while the match timer runs out, turning a probable victory into a certain defeat. See the attached footnote if you want enough detail about specific mistakes that you can decide for yourself if a mistake is “basic” or not…When I first started playing Overwatch (which is when I did that experiment), I ended up getting rated slightly above 50%-ile…Some things you’ll regularly see at slightly above 50%-ile are:

Supports (healers) will heal someone who’s at full health (which does nothing) while a teammate who’s next to them is dying and then dies
Players will not notice someone who walks directly behind the team and kills people one at a time until the entire team is killed
Players will shoot an enemy until only one more shot is required to kill the enemy and then switch to a different target, letting the 1-health enemy heal back to full health before shooting at that enemy again
After dying, players will not wait for their team to respawn and will, instead, run directly into the enemy team to fight them 1v6. This will repeat for the entire game (the game is designed to be 6v6, but in ranks below 95%-ile, it’s rare to see a 6v6 engagement after one person on one team dies)
Players will clearly have no idea what character abilities do, including for the character they’re playing
Players go for very high risk but low reward plays (for Overwatch players, a classic example of this is Rein going for a meme pin when the game opens on 2CP defense, very common at 50%-ile, rare at 95%-ile since players who think this move is a good idea tend to have generally poor decision making).
People will have terrible aim and will miss four or five shots in a row when all they need to do is hit someone once to kill them
If a single flanking enemy threatens a healer who can’t escape plus a non-healer with an escape ability, the non-healer will probably use their ability to run away, leaving the healer to die, even though they could easily kill the flanker and save their healer if they just attacked while being healed.

Having just one aspect of your gameplay be merely bad instead of atrocious is enough to get to 50%-ile…Another basic situation that the vast majority of 90%-ile to 95%-ile players will get wrong is when you’re on offense, waiting for your team to respawn so you can attack as a group. Even at 90%-ile, maybe 1⁄4 to 1⁄3 of players won’t do this and will just run directly at the enemy team…For anyone who isn’t well into the 99%-ile, reviewing recorded games will reveal game-losing mistakes all the time. For myself, usually ranked 90%-ile or so, watching a recorded game will reveal tens of game losing mistakes in a close game (which is maybe 30% of losses, the other 70% are blowouts where there isn’t a single simple mistake that decides the game).

It’s generally not too hard to fix these since the mistakes are like the example above: simple enough that once you see that you’re making the mistake, the fix is straightforward because the mistake is straightforward…if you look at the median time played at 50%-ile, people who are stably ranked there have put in hundreds of hours (and the median time played at higher ranks is higher). Given how simple the mistakes we’re discussing are, not having put in enough time cannot be the case for most players. A common complaint among low-ranked Overwatch players in Overwatch forums is that they’re just not talented and can never get better. Most people probably don’t have the talent to play in a professional league regardless of their practice regimen, but when you can get to 95%-ile by fixing mistakes like “not realizing that you should stand on the objective”, you don’t really need a lot of talent to get to 95%-ile.

…One thing that’s curious about this is that Overwatch makes it easy to spot basic mistakes (compared to most other activities). After you’re killed, the game shows you how you died from the viewpoint of the player who killed you, allowing you to see what led to your death. Overwatch also records the entire game and lets you watch a replay of the game, allowing you to figure out what happened and why the game was won or lost. In many other games, you’d have to set up recording software to be able to view a replay. If you read Overwatch forums, you’ll see a regular stream of posts that are basically “I’m SOOOOOO FRUSTRATED! I’ve played this game for 1200 hours and I’m still ranked 10%-ile, [some Overwatch specific stuff that will vary from player to player]”. Another user will inevitably respond with something like “we can’t tell what’s wrong from your text, please post a video of your gameplay”. In the cases where the original poster responds with a recording of their play, people will post helpful feedback that will immediately make the player much better if they take it seriously. If you follow these people who ask for help, you’ll often see them ask for feedback at a much higher rank (eg. moving from 10%-ile to 40%-ile) shortly afterwards. It’s nice to see that the advice works, but it’s unfortunate that so many players don’t realize that watching their own recordings or posting recordings for feedback could have saved 1198 hours of frustration.

It appears to be common for Overwatch players (well into 95%-ile and above) to:

Overwatch provides the tools to make it relatively easy to get feedback, but people who very strongly express a desire to improve don’t avail themselves of these tools.