Where are you getting this idea?!
The percentage breakdown of the player base was provided by Jeff Kaplan and the dev team…
I don’t think there’s a “room capacity” rule for Overwatch ranks. But this is something I used to wonder (when I was a hard stuck plat player).
For this concept to be possible, that would mean there was a “limited” amount of SR available to all of the player base. The idea that, winning SR, takes SR from someone, and losing SR, gives SR to someone else.
Which seems reasonable considering when you win, you go up, when you lose you go down.
The problem is, when you see smurfs gaining 50-70 SR per win on aged accounts (silver/gold/platinum bordered accounts), this would imply that they’re taking all the SR available for a game that was VERY decisively one sided…
My experience from smurfing was, if I got 50 SR in a game, the other DPS would still get between 20-30 SR, with the Tanks and Supports also getting approximately 20-30 SR. HOWEVER!! There is always one person in those games who does only gain like 15-20 SR. But that still isn’t enough of a balance to shift their 10 to 15 SR to make up for the extra 20-25 SR that I would get when smurfing…
Paragraphs are generally a polite way of helping your readers fully digest information btw…
Again… This is a question I used to think about as well. But on the other side of the coin, think about all the high ranked players who have left Overwatch all together… A lot of them have moved onto Valorant and other games.
The argument can be made that, because the better players are no longer present (or the presence of better players is diminished), this opens up the idea that people who HAVE climbed in rank probably don’t actually belong there because they have less “serious” competition to contend with…
So I think it goes both way.
You’re completely assuming that high elo players are the only ones who continue to play this game.
Judging by the gameplay I experience when I smurf in Gold and Plat, I can tell you, that’s not the case…
There are plenty of hard stuck players who make new accounts thinking they can outsmart the system. After hundreds of games, they eventually drift back down into the rank they belong in. Maybe a little higher or lower depending on how consistently they perform.
I think you’re making a very heavy stretch that High Elo players are the only ones who continue to play the game.
Lets assume that for a second.
With you only gaining 20-30 SR per game and them gaining 50-100 (new account or just out performing for the rank), pretty much every single one of them will out-pace your climb and you’ll settle with the player base you still belong to. There aren’t consistently enough (ONLY) smurfs playing Overwatch or queue times would be infinity…