SBMM is SO broken

Look carefully at the rank distribution in your next match. Pay particular attention to the white line that forms the curve. If you look to the right side of the curve you'll notice how quickly it drops low and stays that way as it moves all the way to the right. These are your top tier players and what the graph is telling you is that there are very few of them. In order for them to get into any game at all the matchmaking algorithm is going to have to pull players from outside the master/predator skill bucket. There just aren't enough of them to fill up their own matches. And that, my friend, is where the rest of us come in. The first people pulled into these top tier matches are diamonds. But also, given the dwindling population, they're probably often if not always dipping into the platinum pool as well. And this process repeats all the way to the bottom of the skill ladder. Legit bronze players being pitted against high gold players feel the exact same way that you do.

So the questions are these:

1. Should the matchmaker simply force players to wait however long it would take in order to fill a lobby exclusively with players of similar skill? Even if that means that some of the worst and some of the best players, in remote geographic regions at off-peak hours, might never get a game?
2. Is this on the developer for having been too aggressive when they formulated the skill gap in this game six years ago?
3. Is this on the developer for failing to maintain the population required for functional matchmaking in a wide skill gap game?
4. Is it on players for not being more flexible?
5. Is it on players who don't cheat for not being willing or able to cheat?

Some of those questions are straw men, but... are they really? It's as if we all want to live in a competitive, player vs. player world, right up until that world sends us the message that in a dog-eat-dog environment sometimes you eat and sometimes you get eaten. It isn't always pretty or fun, but to some very real extent that's baked into the formula. Dwindling population is making the downside a lot easier to see now than it ever were before. But this is still how it works. How it always worked.

Like it or not, the one thing you can be sure of is that it can only get worse as the population continues to drop. Regaining population has to be the dev's no. 1 priority, and I really believe that it is. I just think that the things they're doing in order to achieve that goal are going to have the exact opposite effect. They call that "irony."