Yeah , it sounds like it just pushes everyone proportionally toward the middle , so while it may indeed decrease the MMR of players in the upper half , every player was changed similarly . 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 . 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 . 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 ? Thus , while there may be effects in the game that create a decaylike solution , it ' s not effective enough , and only effective at all in the upper half of the spectrum .