Guild Wars 2

I was reflecting today on the off-season awkwardness, and I think that simply removing MMR decay/volatility/whatever it’s called from Unranked would remove a lot of the grief that has come up from the wide skill variation currently being experienced by players returning to Unranked during the off-season after playing Ranked exclusively during the League, while still allowing Leagues to perform what I believe their intended competitive function is meant to be.

Leagues and Ranked MMR decay is structured in such a way that at the beginning of each League, all players are on much more even MMR footing. I believe this is ultimately a good thing, because it allows players that improved during the off-season to rise easier to their proper MMR skill level in Ranked, and makes players that have not been playing not be able to simply keep their MMR rank by having played well last season. In this way, each League functions as a skill crucible for current talent, which I believe is the goal of their structure. (This is why I don’t think that having Ranked queue open during the off-season is the solution)

The obvious gap in this structure, however, is that improving during the off-season is nigh-impossible, because after your Unranked MMR decay/volatility increase from not playing in Unranked for so long (due to playing in Ranked during the League), you get placed with a very broad skill distribution, and games are decided much less by your personal performance and much more by whether you got lucky or not during the matchmaking process.
Unranked, in the context of Leagues, is primarily a practice ground, where you are able to play to improve without affecting your Ranked standings. Because of that, I don’t believe that it would be unreasonable to remove MMR volatility from Unranked, as it isn’t intended to fulfill the same goal of “current talent testing” like Ranked Leagues are, and doing so would allow players to be placed more accurately with other players of similar skill levels in Unranked during the off-season.