[2023] Smurf Queue?

For some more context, grouping smurfs was a secondary benefit, the primary goal of using visible rank in matchmaking was to improve sentiment around fairness of matches for most players, stuff like "why is this Silver in my Gold game". Problem was the population who was in that bucket of disjointed MMR and visual rank: smurfs, decayed Diamond+ players, and people starting their season climb later than everyone else (returning players, new players). It was a pretty poor experience for that segment and most of those groups besides the smurfs are just going to go play a game or mode that isn't going to do that to them.

Yes that's correct. An oversimplified way of how matchmaking worked was to find players within X MMR and Y LP difference of each other. Those start out pretty tight, but if no full group can be formed, expand X and Y by some amount every Z seconds.

So it's just a consequence of that that you have the groups of people whose MMR and LP were close together (the bulk engaged players who'd been participating since the season began) and those who aren't (the everyone-else group already identified). If for some reason anyone in those groups had to wait an excessively long time to the extent that their search envelopes would overlap, they could still be put together, that was just pretty unlikely given the tuning.

No, because the way it was implemented was making the experience pretty unreasonable for any of those late returners. There are other tactics we should use to improve game integrity that don't have those other painful effects.