We're keeping an eye on it, but beyond the confusion associated with mixing Master/GM players at the D3 cap at the start of the season, haven't seen major issues. There's a lot of "I belong here and they don't" sentiment that floats around, but that's true of every rank and doesn't appear to be any more accurate here than the "I'm in Silver but belong in Platinum" ones. There are edge cases, but they're rare.

A couple points worth mentioning:

1) Matchmaking is based on MMR primarily rather than rank. Even though Master/GM tier players cap at D3, they'll be matched with/against other Master/GM tier players rather than "true" D3 players as long as those players are available. There are considerations to keep visible rank close in matches because it feels bad/weird when you see people of significantly different rank in your matches even if they're actually the same skill, but it's a secondary concern.

2) We've done research into how quickly skills decay for people who don't play for a while and the effect is small. The longer they're gone, the bigger the impact, but folks pick things up again quickly. Even at the extremes where someone is gone for months, win rates normalize in less games than placements.

That all said...we're always looking into ways to improve things and have been discussing changing or removing the cap. If we did it, it'd probably be linked to some other changes, like delaying GMs until a couple weeks into the season so it's not possible to place directly into GM at the start of a season and adding rank point decay for Master tier so you can't just sit at Master season after season by just playing placements.

There's a bunch of things that happen at the start of a season that make it feel more chaotic. For example...

• Uncertainty loosens up at the start of the season, allowing your MMR to move more rapidly than it does normally. The effect is relatively small (if you were to win/lose every placement game, you'd move about 2x as far as you would normally), but it can shuffle things a bit in both directions.

• Placements "reset" your rank to where it should be based on your MMR. At the end of the previous season, if you had been on a winning or losing streak, your rank will have diverged from your MMR but at the end of placements, you're placed back to where your MMR is. Keep in mind that this is combined with the effect of the above.

• New seasons always see a spike in players checking out ranked.

We prefer to seed from Unranked Draft, but QM works if that's not viable due to a lack of games.

Seeding is simply a baseline. The player has history with the game, so the system has a rough understanding of their skill, even if it's not a perfect map to a ranked environment. That's a better starting point than picking some arbitrary point for all players.

FWIW, the seed point is capped to roughly the equivalent of Plat 3. It's possible to reach Diamond after placements coming in from a QM/UD seed, but you have to do really well in those placements.

Definitely. We've talked about this in the past and it's something we've been investigating internally. It shows a lot of promise, but it's also very complex and you have to be really careful not to create conditions that can be exploited to artificially boost MMR.

I'm hoping it pans out, though, as the potential to more quickly get at an individual's MMR is very exciting.

Your Rating is updated every game based on the players in that game, it's not looking at your game history directly. However, since it's been updated for every game in your history, from a certain point of view it does include information from every game you've ever played. The more recent the game, the more substantial its effect has been on your current rating. (This is different from things like chess's FIDE rating system, which is updated monthly, taking the games played in the previous month to perform aggregate updates). You don't need to worry about the game you played against Cloud 9 in 2015.

You don't need to worry about the AFK in AI affecting ratings. Each Game Mode has its own separate rating in your profile, and they're only updated when you play that game mode, or when we seed your rating from another queue to give it a better starting point to learn your skill.

Take it with a little grain of salt. The max extents will vary a bit depending where you are on the curve, but in general it about doubles the max your MMR can move during placements relative to 10 games played with minimum uncertainty.

Uncertainty decreases with each game played, so the effect is strongest in the earliest games.

I mentioned this in another part of the thread, but seeds from QM/UD are capped at an MMR that's roughly around Plat 3. It's possible to get into Diamond after placements with that seed, but you'd have to do really well.

You have to be really careful anytime you are artificially skewing MMR. The goal of MMR is to accurately measure skill so it can be used to make good matches. It's perfectly possible for someone with 200 games under their belt to be just as skilled as someone with 5000 games under their belt, especially if that newer player has a lot of experience in similar games and just has to pick up the intricacies of Heroes.

If the system were to artificially suppress them, it would be putting them in a spot that isn't indicative of their skill which means worse matches for them and everyone they are matched with and against.

The better path is to continue improving the ability of the system to accurately get at a player's true skill.

Yep, it's a concern and something we're working to address. The drift over the course of a 3 month season is small enough that it doesn't have a big impact, particularly because it mainly impacts the very top and bottom of the curve, but it's not ideal and we'd prefer to not have to do normalization at all.