If you have played a competitive mode long enough, you have watched it decay. The population thins, the skill distribution compresses, and eventually the top of the ladder is being held up by a handful of people who never leave. This is not a failure of the game, it is what happens to any ladder over time.
The three phases
Every competitive mode moves through the same arc, and the phases are recognisable.
- Growth. Population rising, skill distribution wide, ladder movement high. This is the healthiest phase and the one most games never reach.
- Plateau. Population stable, skill distribution compressed, ladder movement slowing. The mode is playable and competitive but the range of skill is narrower than it was.
- Decay. Population falling, the top of the ladder held by a small committed group, and matchmaking taking longer to find fair games. The mode still functions, but the experience changes.
What decay does to your rank
Your rank measures your position relative to the current population, not an absolute standard. As the population shrinks and the skill distribution narrows, the number of players at each rank falls, so holding a given rank requires being in a smaller and more selective fraction.
This means a rank you earned two years ago is worth less than the same rank today, and it also means that the way you got there matters. A rank achieved in a large population is genuinely more impressive than the same rank achieved in a small one, and the game cannot tell the difference.
Whether to keep playing
The honest test is whether you enjoy the games rather than whether you can climb. If the mode has decayed such that matchmaking takes several minutes and your opponents are the same small group every time, the competitive element has largely stopped existing and you are playing for the game underneath.
That is a perfectly good reason to keep playing. It is just worth being clear that you are playing a different thing from the one you started with.