Sadly, we have to draw the line somewhere and there will always be someone on the other side of it. :(

That said, the difference between Gold 3 and Silver 2 isn't enough to trigger re-seeding anyway. Particularly if you only played 16 games, your MMR wouldn't have changed that much. You're likely getting positive personal adjustments right now. Placements in the new season are done based on your MMR, not your previous rank, which I'd guess is somewhere around Gold 4/5.

I know folks like to chase high MMR, but an inflated MMR is just as bad as a deflated one. MMR is purely about making entertaining, fair matches and the closer MMR is to actual skill, the more likely that is to occur. If your MMR is inflated beyond your skill, you're going to end up in a situation where you're losing the majority of your games and dragging down your team in the process. It'll correct itself over time, but it's bad for everyone involved while that's happening.

The goal here is to use the most accurate, up-to-date data possible.

That all said, given that the change primarily applies to people who played rank previously, haven't played it to any significant degree in a while, but play extensively in other modes, and it only kicks in when there's a significant MMR difference, the re-seeding will usually be in a positive direction. People don't tend to go down in skill as they play more games.

We'll see how it goes. If it's an overall positive, we'll likely repeat it in the future.

It's easy to judge the math and model the problem scenarios in advance and see that its good. It's much harder to judge how players will react to it until its in your hands.

That's actually tricky to answer since the MMR you see on hotslogs isn't the same system we use internally. Also, since its based on MMR, the rank difference changes depending on where you are in the league, but for where most players are, it's about a 7 division difference before re-seeding would kick in if you played less than 15 games in the previous season.

HL uses the same criteria as TL. If you played less than 15 matches in HL last season, we'll be evaluating your situation. If your MMR is very different in HL than Unranked Draft (or Quick Match if you haven't played much Unranked Draft), then we'll use that as the seed for your placement in HL next season.

The goal is just to make sure your ranked league MMR is up to date. We've seen a few problems where people played ranked a long time ago, got good in other modes, and then came back to ranked and are significantly under placed based on their actual skill. This should help address that.

We're actually going to make it less than 15 games played rather than just placements. There's a large number of players in TL who just do their placements for the mount and we want to make sure we're including them in the evaluation.

I'll get the patch notes updated.