I’ve run some numbers and I’m excited to try out the humble rank proposal. It’s going to be a wait and see kinda pattern to see the real effects on the rating system as a whole, but I’m optimistic it’ll at least result in more quality matches overall, and be a lot more beginner friendly during those crucial first few games. We might have to fiddle with the rank bands in the future to account for the difference in point injection into the system, but so long as it improves the quantity and quality of the games played on the server and gets more beginners to stick around and fall in love with the game, then the rest doesn’t really matter and we can figure it out 
This chart indicates to me that currently after about 10 games we have a pretty good idea what someone’s rank is. After about 25 games played, the deviation is pretty flat all the way out as far as you want to measure.
What I’m thinking is we implement @Tofoon’s humble rank proposal with the modification that we interpolate the humbleness adjustment based on deviation between 350 and 125, so that after an expected ~12.5 games played, we’re using your true rating. That is to say,
humble_rating = rating - ((min(350, max(125, deviation)) - 125) / (350 - 125)) * deviation
In practice what this means is that someone who just joined will have their 1500 ± 350 rating as they do now. For the purposes of matchmaking though we’ll consider their rating to be 1150, which corresponds to 21k. Assuming they play another 21k’er, if they win they go to an effective 17k, if they lose they go to 25k. Of course if you pit two brand new players against each other, the winner is going to go on to challenge at an effective rank of 14k, which might be a bit high if it’s their second game ever, but at least they’ll have hopefully had a positive experience with their victory in their first game so when they get crushed in their second it doesn’t hurt so bad and they know it is at least possible to win this infuriating game
As you continue to play games the effects of the humble rating adjustment dissipates as your deviation goes down, and after about a dozen games or so the effects will have gone away completely and we’ll be using your true rating to do matchmaking.
The following chart doesn’t have any real relation to anything in this post, but it’s fun to look, and it serves as a benchmark for us heading into this proposed change - hopefully the red line will go up afterwards . One thing to note though is that despite the problems noted in this thread, it’s still the best system we’ve had (at least when considering the number of games new players are playing, which I think is an important metric). And if the humble rank produces better matches for beginners and ~13k’ers, it should only get better.
