Overwatch: How I accidentally cheated the system

As my first ever post on this site, I wanted to talk about how I got my account to almost grandmaster without even trying.

If you have ever played competitive Overwatch, you would know of the ranking system that goes from Bronze to Grandmaster. In the ranks Diamond and above, if you do not play 7 games within 7 days you start to decay or lose your seasonal ranking (SR) every day until the requirement to end the day was met. I used to play the game a whole lot as it was one of my favorites for a long time. Around the time when Doomfist was added, I made the decision to stop playing Overwatch as seriously as I did before due to the fact that I was returning to college and I didn't want this game to distract me from my school work. So I climbed up to masters (3578), stopped playing, and decayed back down to 3000. At the end of the season, I played for 2 hours and thanks to the huge SR boost you get as a decayed player, I was able to reach 3422 at that time. Though I had a diamond ranking, I was playing in low masters for the entirety of the 2 hours.

Two competitive seasons passed and I haven't touched Overwatch since. A new character was added and some characters got reworks that drastically changed their play style. Needless to say, I was terrible. When I got around to playing competitive mode, I played late at night. Since it was the end of the season, most people were already placed so finding others that were doing their placements at my MMR was difficult. However, whenever I'd find a game, I was playing with grandmasters and top 500s. In the end, I only won 4 games, but I placed at 3999 -- 1 point away from Grandmaster even though I've never been higher than 3700 before.

This season (season 8), I tried this same thing with my brother's account, which has always been at around high platinum but has reached low masters only in the previous season then decayed back to 3000. The account placed around 3840 even though in previous seasons it has only been as high as 3515.

I don't know what you guys are going to do with this information (if anyone even reads this) but it's interesting to see and talk about how weird the Overwatch ranking season currently is to give these low accounts such high placements.