I personally think decay ruins the game for a large part of the community. For example, I was gm then didn’t have the time to play for a long time. So long story short I’m a diamond but I should be able to just win right back up right? It’s not that simple. As a DPS player without a rolequeue it’s too unstructured(thank god it’s coming) therefore we have 4 DPS a game not counting me I can’t exactly just carry my way out. so I lose the 3-5 game buffer where I get extra sr and now I’m stuck partially because of the inconsistency of matches and because of the low gains. Now on the contrary when I get onto ptr I place 3200 then immediately climb to near gm where I decayed from. I get that we don’t want people camping top 500 spots so it should stay for the top 500 where it matters but everywhere else it just causes problems that don’t need to occur. Let me know what you think about it hopefully I can get the devs attention.
Agreed. Luckily it’s removed for the time being when role queue comes, so hopefully changes are in the works.
At the very least you should only decay to the beginning of whatever rank you’re in (3000, 3500, 4000).
That’s actually not bad idea feedback only the bottom of the tier that you are in great input thanks for the feedback. I forgot to mention if what happened to me happened for example to a 4400 player it would completely ruin all of the games when he/she makes their way back up the ranks. but if they only decayed to 4k then it would totally fix the whole issue and fix all of the games and overall have a positive impact on the game.
Decaying doesn’t change your MMR, which means you’re still queueing at the same rank you were before you decayed.
my point was that if you for example lose that buffer to luck / too many of one role it can make problems
There is no buffer of a set number of games. It will change sr gains and losses untill your MMR and SR converge.
Edit: I do agree that its pointless below t500 :]
my point exactly the MMR adjusts way too quickly and doesn’t take performance into account with decay and lucky losses. for me, it was 5 games from gm to 3200 before I was only gaining 30sr and then only 5 more games before I was gaining only 24. most of my games had 4+ DPS making it very hard to just win based on skill. thank you for the input too cash 
There is some weird stuff with decay losses and placements, though. I had one account that decayed to 3000 from 3600, then I went on a 5 loss streak and it dropped down to about 2960. The next season it placed 3050 after going 6-4, even though 5 losses affecting MMR should have only taken it down to 3450 ish.
Idk how it happened, but it did, and I suspect it’s due to decay.
Yea I do agree that it can all feel a little wonky - Ive always felt that the match quality on a 1000sr decayed account was a lot worse than on a normal account in that Sr range. Might have just been confirmation bias tho.
All in all its confusing and should just be removed tbh.
Decay is absolutely pointless. I never liked it to begin with and all it does is to force me to either do my placements early in the season in order for it to drop to smooth 3000 or last week of the season.
As it doesn’t affect your mmr, there is absolutely no point behind it, it’s all cosmetic, so the idea they might have had behind it aka. filtering people who don’t have the skill anymore etc. because of a too long break is for naught.
Wish granted - SR Decay is gone with role queue (as was mentioned)
Also, Jeff says that they’ll be looking at the situation on the leaderboards to see if they need to do anything about someone playing the minimum number of games to qualify, getting a lucky or hot streak, and then just sitting on their spot.
Since the top 500 leader board was the primary justification for decay, I would agree that it should only happen to top 500 people. Or maybe just find another way to compensate for leaderboard squatters. I’m NEVER going to be in the top 500, so I hope decay never impacts me.
Decay was put in for a reason. I do agree you shouldnt have to play every week. But you shouldn’t be able to just play 1 week never play again and squat your rating for 7 weeks
Ladder sitting killed wow arenas cause people would jjust play 1 week cheese and higher rating since everyone and their mother qued early and there was no way to catch up with them.
What would make you want to play more?
Blizzard need the players in higher tiers and indeed bronze to play more games due to the limited number of players in those elos.
Decay is their way to force you to play more regularly.