I hear you. As it pertains to the baseball example, all of those examples involve players in an organized league, who all consciously made the decision to play in a “totally fair competitive, tournament like” situation.
I guess we’re really talking about skill disparity and assessing the likelihood that any one person/team has in winning, in any given situation. I think about situations in which the worst team in the MLB has to play the best team— the lesser team isn’t allowed to say “this isn’t fair, we have a very small chance of winning!”. They play the game and they establish the outcome. A hierarchy is established.
Again, I will state that comparing “non-ranked pvp” and organized sports is not the best analogy. However, it is TOTALLY fair to compare organized sport to “ranked video game experiences”.
Ranked needs to do a better job at ensuring the experience is curated to meet the “true skill” of the current players. I think that Split De-Ranks work in opposition to this. Deranks allow for more skilled players to intentionally abuse the system and bully lesser skilled players— this is much different than allowing these players to meet by chance through a more random matchmaking.
Finally, I would like to state that I do NOT want the removal of SBMM. New players, and players with disabilities should have their own space to play and learn. But after a certain experience level, the non-ranked mode of any pvp game should big a mixed bag (so long as there is a ranked/sbmm mode simultaneously available for people who only want to play people in their exact skill range).
