Hey everyone , this guy is right . <| sep |> Another good point . Does selective breedng technically count though ? I don ' t know enough about that . <| sep |> Short answer no . There are just as many university students that would say SAA is killing us , or Assad regime is killing us . Of course regime propaganda wouldn ' t show them . <| sep |> The 9 players closest to my MMR are still the same 9 players after the squish , so it doesn ' t functionally change who I should be placed with over time . yes . Those 9 players may play while I ' m inactive and rise above my MMR , but that ' s a small consolation that acts similarly to an actual decay system . Yes they can rise but no , that ' s not a decay , it ' s the fact that these players have become better ! To prove it ' s definitely not decay , one can just look at the bottom half of the playerbase . The argument presented above seems to suggest that a lowMMR player who remains inactive for 8 months should have their MMR decay higher than what it was due to normalization ? You can ' t compare the MMR before and after normalization , it makes no sense . MMR are relative for each season , it ' s not absolute values . What matters is the differences at a given time , not the reached values which represents nothing until compared to the others but only at the same time .