What prompted me to ask questions about MMR tanking was the following resurrected thread, which is locked now. In that thread, a player claimed to concede about 50 games in a row after reaching legend rank, and he said that he then found himself facing bronze and silver players. If this was true, and it was still possible to this, then a player could theoretically intentionally tank their MMR to make next season’s climb quick and easy.
I am not really a fan of players, who like to punch down, but if it’s possible for them to figure out a way to do so, some will do it. Imagine a player that managed to get to high legend deciding they never want to climb that high again and they just wanted to tank their MMR so they could once again have easy climbs to legend each month.
With the following recent change to matchmaking on Ladder, I was wondering if more players might experiment with tanking their MMR:
“ Matchmaking Update
Previously, matchmaking on the ranked ladder was based on your internal rating (commonly called “MMR”) while you had bonus stars and based on ladder rank after you ran out of bonus stars. Now, matchmaking will continue to be based on your internal rating even after you run out of bonus stars. This change should reduce matchmaking complexity and result in more consistent and fairer matches throughout the ladder.”
Also consider this change:
“Passive XP Grant Adjustment
In our continued efforts to combat bots and exploitive play patterns, extended periods of inactivity will now reward less XP. This change will not impact players taking normal game actions on their turns, such as playing cards, making attacks, or even just hitting the end turn button, so most players won’t see change in their XP earned—just fewer bots wasting their time.”
This ^ change is not to combat active bots, because these bots perform actions, but this change will impact passive bots and player who go afk during matches.
I think there has been a bit of a backlash for banning players for botting, who were not actually botting. This issue may only escalate as the devs continue their efforts to crackdown bots.