About a third of the players on the top 200 rankings don’t even have their placements done and have no incentive to ever finish them.
This promotes playing as few games as possible to get to your desired rank then quitting to play a smurf.
With 30k players+ in each region, and a high degree of variance in the matchmaking system, there is a mathematical certainty that some of these players will have an inflated MMR due to a good run of variance because there isn’t a large enough sample size required to retain your MMR rankings. This is basic statistics.
This is especially impactful on a brand new region where everyone starts at the same MMR,. The first few days will have an extremely inflated degree of variance due to players with years of experience starting with a deflated MMR, while at the same time sub-par players that begin with a good run of matchmaking variance will have an inflated MMR. Until players have played enough games to accurately sort them into their correct MMR, the matchmaking algorithm will treat players with massive skill gaps as the same skill level when matching.
Two very easy changes that would fix this issue
- A player should not be given a leaderboard ranking until they finish their 100 placement games
- The ranked decay needs to be significantly higher than just 1 game every 2 weeks, that is a total of 12 games in a season to avoid decay.