In Season 3 2017, I was at my highest, Diamond 3. I fell back to Diamond 5 by the end of that season.
I stopped playing around that time, and then come back to HOTS and play my placements, winning 2/3 of them. And then I find out that my new rank is Bronze 5?!
Was there no MMR reservation during this break I had? Was there a complete rank reset/wipe for everyone? If not, why was the drop so drastic? I would imagine dropping from Diamond 5 to somewhere in Platinum would suffice from 1 loss in ranked, maybe even somewhere in Gold. My skills would have dropped a bit from the break, but not anywhere near 4 whole divisions.
But nope, I have to climb out of the lowest bracket even though I’ve done it before? And from the sounds of posts, it’s going to take way longer than it did before.
Doesn’t seem like a game I’d want to come back to anymore.
Nah, it’s done. They have Aram now just go play that. Ranked is absolutely pointless
Here is what you are dealing with. https://imgur.com/a/zNWilhY
It’s nothing but boosted kids now and you have better games in bronze most of the time then you do in diamond anyway because in diamond there are kids that literally couldn’t solo queue out of bronze. It’s really, really busted.
That’s very unfortunate for the gold player, but it can be explained if a Diamond gets matched vs. a GM occasionally, which does happen because of fewer players in queue.
I just want to know what happened to my rank, why would it drop so significantly? Was there actually a rank reset? Because I see posts about people wanting a rank reset and apparently that happened to me. OR it was a bug, as I’ve seen someone post that their rank “fixed” after a day of it being bugged.
I wish I could say there was a difference between diamond and bronze. Players still act the same way due to how much smurfing and boosting exists in this game. Bronze and diamond are the same rank nowadays.
Unfortunate for the gold player? LOL. Dude, he queued with a bronze 5 party so he could obliterate low bronze kids. All he has to do is get on voice and make sure his team doesn’t feed and he wins 90% of the time. I don’t think you understand how this is working nowadays.
I don’t understand this game. Got back into it with my wife, we played three games of storm league. She’s a little better than me, but I can play some more diverse roles. We played the exact same three placement games but I got placed into Plat 2 and she went into Bronze 5. She made the board at the end more than me. Now we can’t play together since bronze and plat can’t queue into the same games. I think something is really wrong with the way the game assess ranking.
People will argue on this but the MMR before that is based on whatever game mode you play and some secret weird whatever system. This games ranking system is super bad and makes 0 sense.
The mmr used to be reset every time you skipped a season. They stopped doing that sometime around 2019. If you were inactive prior to that (from your post I assume you were), then your mmr was reset and now you started from scratch. If you also didn’t play any QM either to have at least some mmr to seed, you probably started at the very bottom. Either way, the max you could get from a fresh start is gold5 now (that with pretty high QM mmr seed and placement wins), so that’s really not that different from bronze5 anyway.
The MMR after inactivity/fresh start is also greatly loosened up. You should be getting ±500 points per game instead of the normal ±200. So, win and rise fast or lose and drop fast (bronze5 is not the bottom ;), you can still get below bronze5 and start getting ±5 points per game (unlike the visible rank, the true hidden mmr has no lower limit).
You can also loosen up your mmr again by running long win (or lose) streaks. For me it usually takes 10-15 wins/losses in a row to start seeing a divergence from 200 (it gets to 500 within 3-4 games then though). So if you improve your game too fast, you’ll eventually run into this too.
There’s still MMR decay for inactivity, but that stops at plat1 (no decay below). Generally high plat/low diamond has the wildest range of player skill due to this reason (genuine low diamond players mixed in with decayed low-activity masters/GM’s).
I could easily do a bronze5-P5 climb in under 200 games on a fresh account (done that a few times already). P5-master in maybe 200-1k, depending on my performance (I don’t do that on smurfs, as I can do that on my main). E.g., I’ve had only ~800 SL games last season and I went from plat1 to master2k and back down to plat3 (I like to fool around and test new stuff sometimes XD) in that time. I’m currently back to D3 with ~70 games this season.
As you have not played for quite some time, you might as well actually be bronze-skilled atm (bronze level has risen quite a lot since 2017, as even the worst players learn someting in 3 years of playing and we don’t have that many genuinely new players to seed the bottom skill bracket). Play some, get better and you will rise naturally.
If you really have not played for 3 years, you really don’t belong anywhere near diamond, so be glad for that reset and enjoy some easy(ish) games while you’re getting the rust off and warming up.
P.S. And don’t listen to any forum doomsayers here. The matchmaking and player mmr ratings are fine and the whole system works just fine. If they’re stuck in bronze - they 100% belong there (not being able to admit that and start fixing their mistakes is the only reason for that).
P.P.S. There are, however, a lot of smurfs out there, so don’t be too surprised if you run into some1 that completely destroys (pretty much wins on their own) a game or two for you. If you check them after game, they typically have low level account and something like 40-1 result in SL (I recently saw a d3 guy with this exact result (so he started the season somewhere in silver/gold), his duo partner had sth like 26-5). That won’t stop your progress though - sometimes you play with em, sometimes against em. Just keep that in mind and recognize when you’re playing against/with some1 seemingly too good for the rank and don’t blame yourself or your team for not being able to do much (getting frustrated and giving up is the worst you can do; adapt your playstyle instead). Take it as a free lesson for improvement (if they can do it - you can too).