Originally Posted by Aphyrax
There is a huge gap everywhere. My 5v5 team played late last night and due to the low number of people queueing Wednesday at 1am we played a wide range of teams. We are 1800 (somewhat undergeared and not very experienced playing together) and we got absolutely stomped by the 1950+ teams we faced. Conversely, we totally crushed all the 1700- teams. The highest number of points that changed hands was 17. So, other than some short term fluctuations, I think the arena system does an amazing job at putting people where they belong. Therefore you can make the cutoff pretty much anywhere percentage wise and get a good representation of that percentile of the player base.
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My point is that between say 1800-2000 and 2000-2200, the "skill curve" is dramatically different. Another person above wrote that you could simply que late at night and pickup points that way. Which is somewhat true. If you wanna play a TON of games. Playing tons of games = greater risk. Because the reality is, you may draw a 1700 rated team at 2000, but they're only gunna give you like 5 pts.
If you're in the 2000+ range and you LOSE to a 1700 team, that's a 25 pt. loss suddenly. Now it takes 5 wins vs. that team to make up rating. See what I mean? The risk vs. reward for queing late isn't there. Setups like we run in 5v5 are really scary for 1st page 2200+ rated teams. Generally speaking we lose, but that first match is a huge loss for them. They come back fired up and figure out what we're doing, but the risk of trying exploit the system can backfire. What if we stop queing after the 25 pt. win? They may figure out our little strategy, but what's stopping us from walking away? We've done it before.
Two things are at work here.
1. You don't get better at PVP by dodging teams and "dipsticking" by playing at odd hours. We've lost 100+ rating by queing in one day vs. (in my 3v3) better teams simply because we needed the practice.
2. There is a MUCH bigger upside to getting better as a team and playing equally rated matches. Conversely we actually STOP queing when the wait time is > 3-4 mins or we get some ridiculous blow-up team that nets us < 10 pts. We'd rather lose 5-10 pts. to a GOOD team, get better ourselves, and have that opportunity to steal 20-25 points from somebody.