Unless I’m being absolutely stupid and missing something obvious, where does the SR for GM+ come from?
Hear me out…
The only way to gain SR is for someone else to lose.
In diamond, there are people above you and below you, so the pool of available SR is vast. You can move up through diamond to masters and in doing so, other people will drop. The key point here is that there is always players above you at this rank, there is always SR available to take.
The only way that more SR is made available within the “pool” is by new accounts being placed into a rank, this creates new SR from nothing (nobody had to lose SR for this SR to be generated).
Even top500 players when they create new accounts, most of the time it’ll get placed high diamond / low masters, so the injection of new SR is only at those ranks.
Whilst it’s theoretically possible for a new account to be placed into GM, I’ve certainly never heard or seen it happen.
So at GM there is never this injection of new SR into the available pool.
By the very definition of this, it means that give or take, the potential maximum SR at GM level is essentially fixed.
This means that for anyone trying to get out of masters to GM, they need to take SR from that pool and ultimately means players will likely drop out of GM.
There is nobody above GM, therefore GM players cannot take SR from anyone above them to move up. They essentially need to just fight within GM for the available SR.
With this in mind, doesn’t that mean that the number of people that can be within GM is fixed?
There is nothing anyone can do to get into GM without someone else being moved out.
It also means that the higher those very very players get (4.6k+) that the less SR is available lower in GM and the population shrinks as a result.
Three scenarios:
-
A GM player wishes to take a break or quit, their account will decay.
– This means the SR their account consumed from the GM SR pool is effectively removed by the system.
– Nothing can ever replace that SR, it’s gone forever.
– If that GM player ever comes back to Overwatch and wants to get back to their previous rank, they still get matched with GM’s (as matchmaking is based on MMR and not SR), so again they’re consuming even more SR from the available pool.
– In other words, they’re “double dipping” into the GM SR pool and taking SR twice. Again this shrinks the GM population over time. -
Alt accounts in GM
– Very similar to decay, but in this instance one person is taking multiple players spots within GM, the available SR pool is being used by few actual people and the GM population again shrinks -
Accounts being banned
– again, exactly the same problem. The SR pool is fixed at GM, no new SR is ever created at this level.
– So when an account is banned, that SR is taken with it and never replaced, the population shrinks etc.
Now consider that this has been going on since Season 2 when the system was changed, 9 seasons later, the SR pool has been depleted significantly and the population has shrunk massively.
No new players can get into GM within taking the spot of someone else.
Am I the only person to realise this is an issue and will continue to get worse?
I’d really love to hear the opinion from a developer on this, as I’m sure they must have talked about this very issue before.
Sooner or later, they will have to do a complete SR system reset and redistribute players.
![:sweat_smile:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/sweat_smile.png?v=5" ":sweat_smile:")
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