[Tom]

Originally Posted by Xeen

Blizzard doing its best to make laddering a full-time job.

100% agree. GM league will probably be accurately reflect skill for the first few weeks while everyone is laddering, but as nirvana says (or perhaps asks?), if you go inactive for two weeks and hit 180 bonus, you lose all your points and have to start from scratch. Personally, whenever I get busy at work for a few weeks, my bonus pool shoots over 180 in no time.

So as Xeen said (and nirvana alludes to) the guys up the top of GM league will be those who can afford the time to consistently ladder every week, week in and week out, non-stop, the entire season.

What is the alternative? There is a superficial attraction to displaying actual MMR rather than points (eg a proper ELO rating), but the obvious problem is that someone could have a very high rating early on in the season, then stop playing, and by the end of the season their high rating may not be justified in light of the increase in average player skill over the season. This is the problem the bonus point system (which is in reality a decay system) intends to address ("unjustified rating problem").

I actually think a decay system (read bonus point accumulation) is necessary to avoid the unjustified rating problem, but at the moment it seems to me the rate of ladder decay is too high (ie bonus pool accumulates too rapidly). Blizzard could halve the rate of decay (even if for GM league only) and still adequately address the unjustified rating problem. They already recognised this problem in arranged team games, where the bonus pool accumulating has now been considerably reduced as it was simply not possible for higher rated teams to play enough games to use up their bonus pool.

One reason why the bonus pool currently accumulates so quickly is because in a normal distribution, many people would be sitting at 0 (or theoretically negative) points. But by the time we're dealing with GMs league, I think its time for people to suck it up for the sake of accuracy.