Any chance of having the GM leaderboards be ordered by MMR and not ranked points?
They largely are currently. For any rank, we want a combination of skill and games played in the season to determine that season's rank. MMR is a static value that doesn't decay so isn't a great fit. If it were just ranking by MMR, you'd have people who aren't actively playing being ranked according to whereever they were when they last played. That may be cool as an all time greats list, but for seasonal play, we feel it should be the current best players in the season.
There's a bunch of ways to go about that: require a minimum number of games in the season to be ranked, minimum number over time to stay ranked, etc. Rank points are our current answer.
We do want the top GMs to also be the most skilled, active players and have been keeping a close eye on that. At the start of the season, GM was largely filled based on whoever raced to get in first, as you'd expect. They were all top percentile players, but before the leaderboards filled up, it was easier to get in and GM ranks were more heavily weighted towards the volume of games played. As more games were played by everyone and the season went on, the GM rankings have generally sorted themselves by MMR. Top ranked GMs are higher MMR than lower ranked ones. Its not a perfect distribution, but thats expected. MMR changes slowly where players go on hot and cold streaks and GM represents the best players in the league right now.
There are a few players who landed on the GM boards and then went afk for extended periods and have maintained their rank and we are considering rank point decay for Master/GM to address that. If you aren't actively defending your rank, should you maintain it? It'd be great to get the community's thoughts there.
I know there's also a concern that duo queue players have an advantage. That's also something we've been watching. Matchmaking already takes the party into account when finding opponents and we haven't seen a statistical difference in win rates between solo queue and duo queue players at any rank, including GM. We'll be continuing to monitor that.
BlizzTravis
They largely are currently. For any rank, we want a combination of skill and games played in the season to determine that season's rank. MMR is a static value that doesn't decay so isn't a great fit. If it were just ranking by MMR, you'd have people who aren't actively playing being ranked according to whereever they were when they last played. That may be cool as an all time greats list, but for seasonal play, we feel it should be the current best players in the season.
There's a bunch of ways to go about that: require a minimum number of games in the season to be ranked, minimum number over time to stay ranked, etc. Rank points are our current answer.
We do want the top GMs to also be the most skilled, active players and have been keeping a close eye on that. At the start of the season, GM was largely filled based on whoever raced to get in first, as you'd expect. They were all top percentile players, but before the leaderboards filled up, it was easier to get in and GM ranks were more heavily weighted towards the volume of games played. As more games were played by everyone and the season went on, the GM rankings have generally sorted themselves by MMR. Top ranked GMs are higher MMR than lower ranked ones. Its not a perfect distribution, but thats expected. MMR changes slowly where players go on hot and cold streaks and GM represents the best players in the league right now.
There are a few players who landed on the GM boards and then went afk for extended periods and have maintained their rank and we are considering rank point decay for Master/GM to address that. If you aren't actively defending your rank, should you maintain it? It'd be great to get the community's thoughts there.
I know there's also a concern that duo queue players have an advantage. That's also something we've been watching. Matchmaking already takes the party into account when finding opponents and we haven't seen a statistical difference in win rates between solo queue and duo queue players at any rank, including GM. We'll be continuing to monitor that.