We've had many discussions on rank and skill and how they should be representative of each other. Rank decay is a good thing and it works as a filter for inactive accounts by simulating loss of skill through inactivity but is very poorly executed in my opinion.
In the images i provided from high master and gm games you can see accounts that have matches as far as 9 months ago in their match history (and trust me i've seen accounts with 2 years of inactivity just pop in gm games).
Lets take the one with 6 months of inactivity and try to imagine him as ending a season at 10k points as GM#1 for the best possible scenario. There's 183 days in 6 months and a maximum of 30 days grace period for rank decay. In 6 months 2 seasons would pass so that means an extra 10 days per beginning of season.
This brings the total of 183-30-10*2=133 days of rank decay and by losing 200 points per day that is 26600 points lost. This is capped to diamond 5 with 0 points. A diamond 5 account should never be matched in high master and gm games let alone in EU where there's the biggest player count. This is based solely on the idea of unplaced players being affected by rank decay.
Since August 2019 unplaced accounts are not affected which was changed from the original patch it was introduced in.
I would be very grateful if anyone would like to discuss this or offer a decent argument why this should remain unchanged or if a dev would like to chime in since there were no notes next to these changes in both linked patches.
*Also note that while there are only 3 images provided i've seen many more similar accounts but these are the ones i saved.
