[2021] Dropping to Master tanks your ELO…

The LP gain issue where you continued to gain high LP in Master after your LP passed well into GM or even Challenger should be fixed as of 2.5.

So your LP gains should smoothly decrease as you gain LP in Master until your LP matches your MMR.

This should reduce how often Rank can outpace MMR.

But, yeah, it's always bad in the long run to throw matches because your MMR will drop and it'll make it hard to eventually climb.

Whereas if your MMR really is too low, you should have a >50% win %, making your MMR climb, which will make your LP gains higher.

That's a variable we tune separately from the ranks. Sometimes it decays, sometimes it doesn't, but we base that more on whether or not players are actually worse than expected after not playing for some period of time.

I think it's currently possible in some cases for your MMR to also decay resulting in worse LP gains on return, but I can't guarantee that it will always be the case.

Yeah, you are correct, losing will always hurt in the long run.

I believe we fixed one of the main factors that made players think it was worth doing. So now, when you drop back into Masters, your LP gains aren't actually more than they were in GM, given the same current overall LP. This should make it so there's no reason to drop back anymore, and best to just grind where you stand.