Can we see what percentage of the community is what competitive rank?

I want to know how I actually stand against the playerbase. I have been diamond a few seasons in a row now, and want to know if I have actually improved or if the playerbase has just shifted. I remeber hearing diamond being top 10% around season 10-12 I think, but what has that number changed to? 15%? 20%? Did it get lower?

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Diamond and above is a very small number of people

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I know, this is almost 2 years old, I want a more updated statistic.

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It’s a bell curve. The population distribution (percentage wise) doesn’t change, people just shift where they, personally, are on it.

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I don’t see how that is possible, people inevitably will improve and climb, especially if they are already diamond+

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Because it’s a bell curve.

If I improve and move into, say, diamond, my place in the lower rank is taken up by whatever players I’ve improved over. They are now worse than me, and I am better than them. They don’t just disappear and leave the spot in lower rank a void.

Let me put it this way. Let’s say you are at 3200 SR. I am at 3199. As soon as I hit 3201, I am now ahead of you on the bell curve, and you are behind me. My spot is filled by you, your spot is filled by me. Neither spot is left empty.

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Your SR is still gauged against others…so if everyone is improving then “3000 SR” changes along with it

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But it doesn’t work like that because we have millions of players and players can be the same exact SR. If i am in silver for example and move to gold, nobody in gold is placed to silver to fill my spot. someone in bronze has to move up to silver and fill the spot.

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People fall from gold to silver literally all the time lol.

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But people don’t just “unimprove”, the climb back up shortly after.

The rough percentages remain the same with only small deviations from it.
Bronze: ±8%
silver: ± 21%
gold: ± 32%
plat: ± 25%
diamond: ± 10%
master: ± 3%
GM: ± 1%

You have to understand that ranks are relative. Having a certain rank says nothing about how good your are at the game in a vacuum, only how good you are compared to the rest of the playerbase. However, the playerbase as a whole also improves over time, so a gold player now is much better at the game than a gold player back in 2017 for example.

Here a thought experiment: Imagine that all players below master would suddenly stop playing comp. That doesn’t mean that bronze-diamond will remain empty. Instead as a result, the remaining master and GM players would get spread out over all the other ranks until the rough distribution as given before is reached again.

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That makes a ton more sense, haha thank you!

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it’s exceptionally hard for people to improve their ‘‘skill’’ in the games bell curve based system because you have to compete with all the people above you and the time and effort needed increases exponetially because by definition the top ranks can only be small and by definition most will be average.

that is why ow competative is dumb because they make the point of comp ‘‘ranking up’’ by increasing skill which by definition only an minority of players will be capable of. the point of comp should be how many wins can you get within your skill bracket.

imagine if the point of a highschool sport was only to perform as good as a pro. that is basically what ow comp is.

That is… literally… what I said.