unfortunately most professional and gaming software does not run <| sep |> yep you are correct absolutely . You just have to extrapolate everything you did into multiple seasons . If your mmr remains relatively close to the middle through multiple seasons , you are not substantially better in blizzard ' s opinion , not mine than the player who decided not to play the game for a year or so . This player cannot see the mmr decay as he is being matched with said player . If you are somewhat above the average , your mmr will rise through the multiple seasons and will stay above the average after the resets . From this guys perspective , he won ' t see the players who stopped playing for 5 seasons so the decay is in effect . Again , we might now argue that something should be done more frequently maybe the soft reset should happen every month of inactivity , but if we wait long enough and the inactive players are in fact inactive for long enough , the effect will be almost the same .