I don’t understand why they needed to remove it in the first place. I just keep getting matches with teammates that haven’t even played the game in last couple of seasons and are obviously playing bad. The decay system was there to keep players from ranks that they don’t belong to. But now I can get the most avg casual gamer whose rank got boosted to a rank that they don’t belong to back in season three and pretty much have to play 4v5 for the game.
I didn’t think this was that big of a problem at first, but now at the start of season seven it’s constant and disruptive to someone who is trying to climb the ladder and can make you fell so frustrated. I think Blizzard should add it back. I hope that Blizzard will take a note of this problem when reworking the ranked system in the future to improve and make competitive feel like competitive.
Edit: Forgot that decay doesn’t lower your mmr. So my intention with returning rank decay was that that it would also lower your mmr.
There is 0 point in rank decay if you rank decays, but you mmr doesn’t decay… Only way decay would be feasible in comp is if your rank was your mmr, but it isn’t… so you would just be gm in plat lobbies, or plat in gold lobbies… It was dumb when they did it, it would be dumb if they brought it back…
MMR decay still exists. This is why you have posts like “I went 5-0 and deranked”. Morgan Maddren, the main blizzard dev responsible for matchmaking, has confirmed this multiple times on twitter.
What we had before was artificial rank decay that didn’t actually change who you were matched with. If you played on a GM1 MMR account that decayed to M3 at the start of the season you would still be matched with other GM1 players.
By the time of writing this I forgot that your mmr wasn’t affected by rank decay. But yes my point was that it should also decay your mmr not only your visible rank.
I would like it to be honest. After taking long breaks it makes sense to start at lower rank. It needs some reasonable limit of course, GM players shouldn’t derank to diamond or lower. But after couple months starting in masters makes sense imo
Difficult one to get right. How quickly would a player get back in the swing of things that any significant drop of rank is just penalising players who genuinely are of that rank because there’s a higher skill player skewing their games?
And regardless however you do it, whether you get ‘unluckly’ that an out of practice player is in your team is random, and will balance out over time. But I’d argue high skill players being in lower skill games does more harm than a very temporarily underperforming high skill player while they get back in the groove.