I’m not even talking about what ranks the alts are at. I’m treating them as clones. The impact is by count alone, not rank dist. I’m talking about the collisions an alt imparts on it’s neighbourhood, and how those perturbations are attenuated and absorbed by the ladder population.
Every alt is initialized with ~7200sr to dispose of. That has to be absorbed by the ladder population. That’s a lot of constant-sum inflation. It’s potential energy that gets converted into kinetic (zero-sum) events as you win/loss. So it has to dissipate into the bath.
The issue is the scaling. Every alt can basically tax ~O(k(k-1)/2) neighbours with extra work, who in turn adjust their neighbours with O(ln(k)) less but still extra work. It doesn’t equalize, it amortizes. It raises the temperature of the bath - which is small, sparse, and lowpop during offhours. So now you have no-alt main accounts having to compensate for these repeat entrants into the system. The rank metrics and percolation through them is disrupted.
tldr; It’s more work - i.e. games played. You’re not getting a natural amount of games played for your deserved mobility/progression. And this holds independent of rank, and even if 100% of alts are “minimally disruptive” i.e. perfect clones of their mains.