Problem with Rank Decay

Recently, I realized that there is a problem with rank decay. Let’s say I have multiple master accounts and I have them periodically drop to d5. This means that at least 5000 points have disappeared from the “Ranking Points Pool”. Since I can climb back to master, it means that overall, some unlucky guy will lose 5000 points to me. That’s enough to drop anyone from d5 to p5, p5 to g5, and so on.

it’s almost like the capacity for a single person to have multiple accounts frustrates systems based on Elo’s theories. But since people want to concern themselves of having matches of ‘equal skill’ but don’t actually care what that entails, all the ‘feel-good’ band-aid fixes to match-automation just leaves things to fall to the wayside :fireworks:

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It is more nuanced than that, because when you reactivate a decayed d5 account you gain ~600 points per win for your next 10 games. But the opponent you beat only loses ~200 if they are playing on an established account.

So in a way, depending on how you look at it, the system creates those 400 points from thin air (or restores them for you since they vanished when you stopped playing for 30+ days).

Rank decay doesn’t really destroy the points you had, it just makes sure you can’t resume playing in Master or GM after a really long break, you have to work a bit to regain the rank.

Say for example a Master 3400 points is gone for half a year or more.
It isn’t fair for other mid masters to have that teammate on their side. It is fair to make that person climb a bit from D5 and prove they are still good at the game. If they can’t, they can stay at low-mid diamond until they regain skill.

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And you don’t play against the same player all your way back to master.

According to you, if these accounts win 2 of 3 out of 12 (over 60% win rate is good enough to climb to master), I’m assuming about 600 points per win or loss, then the rank point boost would only provide about about 1800 points. And a Master 3400 point account is 8400 points of d5. This means that the entire ranking system somehow lost about 6600 points. Repeat this process if we have hundreds of master accounts. In a year, that’s enough to get almost all low-diamond players down to platinum. Of course, I’m not sure if people would lose points if they were b5 0 point.

They do lose MMR even when they go below 0 points, there is an entire hidden league under it which has no visible ranking system.

(Heroesprofile jokingly calls this MMR range ‘Wood’ in the filters section - in League of Legends the similar phenomena forced them to create an Iron league under Bronze)

As for the 60% WR, that’s true, it would provide a 1800 pt boost to the average player returning from d5 (from Master). Enough to put them very close to diamond 3.