[devonin]

The point is that if you beat a team that is better than you, you get a LOT of ranking, and if you beat a team that is a lot worse than you, you get only a small increase to ranking.

So when you are brand new and it is still figuring out your appropriate matchmaking level, if you're losing a lot, you tend to lose very little if any ranking, and if you are winning a lot, you tend to win not as much ranking.

I mean new teams that are running more like 50/50 or 40/60 are getting 45 ranking per win, and a team that is beating the pants of people might get only 10 or 12 BUT their matchmaking value is still increasing, so they get places against better and better teams as they keep winning, so they aren't in fact only crushing crappy teams, they just aren't getting LARGE ranking increases until they start beating teams that are better than them.

Let me rephrase it: Matchmaking value is a measure of how "good" the team is. Ranking gain/loss is a measure of how much better/worse the winning team was compared to the losing team. If you start fresh in a bracket, the game does not know how good you are, so it places you against teams of wildly different skill levels. If you perform very well and win the majority of games, your ranking gain is slowed, because you're clearly very good and still playing very poor teams, so it's unfair for you to get a ton of ranking that easily, but your matchmaking value DOES increase, thus making you play harder teams. The goal is to get you placed according to your actual skill as quickly as possible, while giving you the least amount of "free" rating against really bad teams while they move you up.