Since player activity has dropped significantly, cr above the rank 1 cutoff has been exponentially harder to get. Over 95% of toons above 2.9kcr on the ladder have been sitting rating and haven’t played in months. When you q up with rating over 2.9k you will almost certainly lose rating even going 60/40.
What does this mean for the rest of ladder? Well these players now make alts and play them instead, doing carries, boosts and generally playing at lower mmr. This hurts the lower brackets as now you have people in 2400/2600 playing against players who should be at 3k this late in the season. This trickles down as the 2400 players now get pushed to 2200, 2200’s get pushed to 2k and so forth. Many players who are trying to achieve gladiator or duelist or rival now suffer the consequences of having to face players who are more skilled AND more geared. On top of this you get players at 1700 getting rolled my multiglad/r1’s doing boosts because there’s no point in quing mains. Then you see these players coming to the forums and complaining about these issues.
There are two solutions: aggressive MMR inflation or CR decay
aggressive MMR inflation would mean that all players go up, giving glads and rank ones more incentives to play their toons. Whether it be for the 2.7 achieve or hitting the illustrious 3.5k rating. This would cause less people getting rolled at 2.2k vs a rank one doing a boost or vs an alt as people would be playing their mains.
CR decay:
LoL had this problem, CSgo had this problem, and many other competitive games decided to deal with it in the same fashion. CR decay. CR decay above 2800 would solve many of those issues. This would make players continue to play their main chars instead of terrorizing the lower brackets through boosts/alts. This would also allow current players striving for a r1 spot to be able to compete and keep playing instead of facing exclusively awc players at 2.5/2.6cr.
Please change this system that rewards people for sitting rating for months because they played when player activity was high. This hurts the entire ladder, not only the 1% because the effects trickle down. 1700 players don’t deserve to get farmed by bored glads/r1s and players trying to get glad don’t deserve such a steep hill ahead of them.
Its not a participation trophy. Players trying to get glad now have a way harder time than players who got it in February. The difficulty of an achievement should not scale based on the time the player chooses to play the game. There’s no reason a player trying to grind out his glad wins should be facing 2700+ players at 2450cr.
Yeah, fairly spot on.
The nerfed mmr by about 400 points mid-season in 9.0.5, and the 5-10 inflation they have/wk (don’t remember which they said it is) wasn’t enough to compensate. So we’re stuck waiting for next season which hopefully won’t have a mid-ssn mmr change again and they’ll let rating inflate to historic highs because of season length/how much more people are playing than before.
Im not saying playing alts is a bad thing, but when you sit mains and ALL you do is play alts/do boosts it really becomes a bad thing. There’s a reason why every major competitive game has some form of cr decay. LoL even has a smurf q where they matchup smurfs with each other. This is so that regular players don’t get bullied.
I meant it more to highlight the disparity in the difficulty of getting glad now vs in February. Players shouldn’t have a harder time getting glad because they que’d two months later into a season. Though I do agree that glad shouldn’t be welfare and should probably be pushed to 2700+
Glads always fought r1’s to get glad so its nothing new. I have no pity for someone struggling to get welfare garbage maybe they can have a small slice of what it was to get before.
I mean, it’s a hard question. What should blizz have done/do?
Glad/gear is based on cutoff, not % players, which rating decay is better for, but is understandably not fun for anyone (inflation feels way better).
They made all pve players pvp for gear, which is what it is (tradeoff between exposing people to new content and making them do content they know and don’t like as much), causing the top players to get to 3.4k a month into the season which was unheard of, which made it even easier for people to get gear through pvp.
How do they justify when an account is a smurf account?
If it’s by household IP, what if you have more then one person in that household?
Like if a family member/roommate is really good but you suck, the worse player just suffers now because you share the same IP?
The number being larger is legit, though right?
It was too easy to gear through pvp. So they nerfed mmr.
I was way ahead on gear than everyone else in my raid group and parsed a top 10 world on H Denathrius in a very mediocre guild (lot of stars aligned, but that’s not the point).
Well, you sort of should be surprised, since mmr is coded (inflation) so that ratings have an upward trajectory, yet R1 cutoff is going down
Genuinely believe that the mmr issue has much less (if anything) to do with ladder participation, and more about what blizzard did to “artificially” nerf mmr.
Even with less people playing, mmr on average should still be going up. The only difference is that you might see larger +/- gains per match