I make new account every season to play with my friend who generally hovers in upper bronze/low silver.
After placements I can’t play with him anymore and I get that, but I used to be able to play with him during my placements and now it says that the SR gap is too big. How is the gap too big when the account has never done comp before?
Why you nerf my fun? Can’t play with my RL friends anymore at all :S
Probably because it detects that your a smurf grouping in a rank you don’t belong in.
My understanding is new accounts start with an invisible SR in the middle (so probably 2000 or so), and go up and down depending on your performance from match to match.
I was in a similar situation, in that a friend of my who was genuinely new to the game could group with me, but not with a friend who was a few hundred SR lower than me (but just with in range of me).
Personally I have given up on comp as a “play with friends” mode.
Most of my friends are around the 1000-1200 range, a few higher, but none as high as gold.
I was up around the 2700 mark (so average-ish). I got sucked back in to WoW for a while, and so the only time I ever played was to help friends do placements, the few that were high enough. Because of the SR decay each season (unless you get much better, which obviously was not the case for me barely playing), my score started dropping like a stone.
By the time I came back seriously, I placed just slightly above 2000.
At first I thought this was great, because most of my friends were in the 1000-1200 range.
But it is just a mess. The skill gradient is too high. Every match is a stomping… in one direction or the other. There are no fair matches.
So I just play quick play with my mates now. Which isn’t great, but at least feels a bit more balanced.
Since always it’ll take for the first placements your QP statistics into consideration. This account was matched against masters/ gms in QP (I was from the getgo gm on my main) and after my first placements I started off in 3.6k