I honestly think there's even SBMM in the rank lobbies. You cant tell me on the NY server i should be replaying the same people over and over. I truly believe that a diamond/master/pred will suffer the same issue as pubs solo queuing... the expectation that you'll carry your team to victory. I find myself against a lot of 3 stack diamond+ teams climbing or hard core smurfing. Very rarely is it a legit random and or 3 stack team that will be hard stuck at the current rank. I really think sbmm lives inside rank making the experience for solo queing past diamond3 so hard.
I've continued to play Ranked Arenas just to see. Once I got 1 win away from Gold 3 I started getting brand new players. Like real BRAND NEW PLAYERS on my team. Again we all start somewhere and I get that! But I was not getting this until I was at that RANK. I lost then, over and over and over until I was 2 more losses away from SILVER 2. That's when I stopped getting all the brand new APEX players on my team. I was still getting a few, but not like I was on the way back down the ranks. I managed to finally get back to GOLD 4. And my very first game in GOLD 4 I got yet again, 2 BRAND NEW PLAYERS. a level 16 and a level 19! Both on real accounts. Not smurf accounts. I lost about 4 games and was now back in Silver 4 for the 3rd time. After I lost these games, I started to get a few more experienced players again. I have managed to make it back into GOLD 4 and NOW, I'm getting a mix of both new players and a somewhat experienced player! Every game is a struggle though, for GOLD 4! That's crazy to me. As I stated before, It's nearly impossible to rank up without a pre made team, if you are forced to play with MUCH LESS experienced players once you hit GOLD 4! That's the issue with this way of whatever MMR! There are tiers that will always be locked into being TEAMED with players that just don't have the GAME EXPERIENCE! So unless one is good enough to carry the teams long enough to get past this tier, sadly one will find themselves stuck at this rank for a long time while there (WHATEVER MMR) just bounces around. If this MMR is based off other factors like (GAMES PLAYED) or an AVERAGE of ANYTHING, imagine how long it would take to work yourself out of this (TIER). I would say, MONTHS. Only then to have it all reset while you try to do it again!
I guess what I'm trying to say is, for all random team placement type games, there almost needs to be some sort of secondary MMR factored in. Something that takes into consideration, ALTUAL time played. This secondary type MMR would not have to last forever. It would only have to last until a certain time so to say. This would stop the MORE EXPERIENCED player from being TEAMED UP with PLAYERS that have only played for a few weeks or so. If there is not some way of sorting that out, then solo q'ing will always be way more difficult than it really is.
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