Before I start I fully understand this only affects a small portion of the population. However, for that small portion it’s a very big issue.
Now for those who don’t know, your hidden MMR is everything when it comes to the ranking system. It’s what determines who you can match and how much CSR you can gain or lose based on your team and the other teams MMRs. Also, it gets carried over from season to season. It’s a very good system for the large majority of the population but its flaws become much more apparent in the champion bracket.
Recently 343 made this great change :
> We are doing two things to increase the competitiveness for Champions. First, the new minimum CSR to earn a Champion rank will be 1800 rather than 1500. Additionally, we’ve placed a cap on the highest CSR you can earn after your placement matches at 1700.
The thing is the high MMRs from the January season seem to still be in place. So even though they’re capped at 1700 out of placement peoples MMRs are still extremely high creating two problems. First, it’s still extremely hard to find games in most playlists. Second, because of your high MMR you gain less CSR from most wins and lose more from loses even though you’re starting at 1700 CSR creating a sort of handicap.
So what do high players do to combat this? They take turns getting on lower level alt accounts, usually referred to as smurfs, to combat those two issues I listed above.
343 have even acknowledged the issues of players having to do this :
> Over time, it’s possible for players to get skill values that make it difficult for them to find matches. This was an issue that lead some players to create alternate accounts or party up with people of much lower rank to find matches.
However, so far we haven’t seen much improvement from whatever it is they’ve changed. So what I suggest to fix it is this. Since the highest possible level you can obtain out of qualifiers is 1700 CSR, all high MMRs should be reset to 1700 as well. This would greatly help alleviate the need to use smurf accounts. I understand this isn’t a perfect solution and may create a few uneven games are first, but I think it’s wrong to just leave those at the top high and dry having to constantly do workarounds to enjoy the game.