Why are there 53 players in GM that have a lower MMR than me but I’m still stuck in M1? This is so confusing.
because you need 30 games to get into gm contender, the gm contender is the top 200 players who have more than 30 games.
so for a short period i actually could have gotten gm a few weeks ago despite having sub gm mmr.
I have played 31 games.
ok well you need to stay in the contender until the next reranking.
I was in contender for the last reranking.
lol idk then. thats how i thought it worked.
Yeah, this is why I’m confused too. It’s not as if I’d be scraping by to get into GM now either; there’s a lot of people in it that have a lower MMR than me.
I suspect they’ve changed the algorithm recently. The ladder behaves very differently than it has in the past. At one point, it wouldn’t even consider a promotion to GM until 5.4-5.5k mmr. Right now it’s letting in people with 5.0k mmr. So either they changed the algorithm to cut back on smurfs in gm, or something like that, or the ladder has very little activity and players aren’t playing much (bad news).
I’ve been noticing a very steep decline in the talent of the ladder for awhile now. The game is hitting all-time lows in terms of number of players. Nowadays they allow cross-region play and smurfing is out the wazoo. So there are a lot of duplicate accounts. People are counted 2 or 3 times just for cross-region play (and not counting smurfing). Despite this, the number of active accounts has plummeted in recent months. This is during a time when unprecedented numbers of kids are staying inside and playing video games. It’s bad news for the game.
https://www.rankedftw.com/stats/population/1v1/#v=2&r=-2&sy=c&sx=sl
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And despite all this, we still have some fools that cite the grandmaster ladder as an accurate reflection of the state of balance in this game 
Oh, so that’s why I’m not GM. I’m Terran. What a weak race, even when you break GM MMR you still can’t be promoted.
Having an IQ below 50 should be a crime
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Honestly between the offrace accounts, the smurf accounts, and the start of season (which heavily affects ranked numbers as well), I’m not sure the current amount of 1v1 account to be that interpretable. 
Personally, to assess the players population, I’d go for the amount of games played instead :
And from that perspective, on the contrary, it seems to have increased since F2P. 
However, if significant amounts of high league players kept on deciding to smurf the lower leagues instead of playing theirs, that would logically decrease the amount of available players pool in high league. Possibly explaining your impressions in this area of the ladder. 
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What are you talking about? 
Yeah meanwhile those entitled protis snipers just hog all the gm spots
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Protoss is so broken you can get GM with 4.9k MMR. Joke race.
Its 30 games in 3 weeks, if you have not played that much in that time period you will not see yourself in contender. With that being said. usually 10-15 people are demoted and then the top 10-15 in contender will be promoted.
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Oh, so I have to be top 10-15 in contender. So funny that’s harder to do than be in the top 150 of GM.
The people who got in had higher mmr than you but then it dropped below yours. Most likely what happened.
I think the requirements to break GM were just really low since no decent players were active. GM doesn’t cycle players out quickly so there’s a lot of low MMR players in GM.
GM is always like this at the beginning of the season. In the next couple of weeks the lower mmr players won’t be there anymore.