A no new players feast queue?

[Zojha]

Either way, the bottom line is that people wouldn't stop queuing to protect their rank if it didn't work.

Or, if they weren't incentivized to do so in the first place, for example by basing the rewards on the highest rating you have achieved in the season, rather than the current. (Or whatever else you can think of to remove the incentive to not play - there might be better options)

As it stands, the rating rewards work as an incentive to qualify for them and once you do, as an incentive to play as little as humanly possible to maintain them. Rating decay and minimum participation don't have any huge effect on queue times there, since people will still shoot for the absolute minimum of games and you can't set that so high that it matters or people pretty much can't do anything "but" PvP once they committed to it once - and you'll have cases where people complain that they couldn't achieve the minimum requirement of a week/month/day simply because of not enough games popping when they play, for example because they had night shift and thus had to queue on off hours.

If you're going to shoot yourself in the foot with your reward structure, don't complain about the limping. And yes, I know it wasn't "you" who set it up like that. But everyone who supports the current reward structure has no real ground to complain about people reducing their activity to the minimum (which is 0 right now).