Quote Originally Posted by GayRobot View Post
No, this is not possible over a reasonable number of games. There will be speed bumps along the way, that's inevitable in any game, but the system hands out more stars than it takes away—so you need to be considerably worse than the people around you to fail to rank up.
It depends on what you consider a reasonable amount of games. 100? 500? 2000?

In the short to medium term, it is all in the distribution of your win-losses. Consider two people with 50% wins over the course of ten matches with the following distributions:

Player 1: w-w-w-w-w-l-l-l-l-l
Player 2: w-l-w-l-w-l-w-w-l-l

Player one advanced 3 stars. Plater two advanced 0 stars. Both won the same number of games, but due to RNG on matchmaking, one is stuck and the other is moving forward. Now consider the second example. Two players suffered a 5-loss streak, but one did that in Gold 1 (2 stars) and the other on Plat 4 (1 star):

Player 1: Gold 1 (1), Gold 1 (0), Gold 2 (3), Gold 2 (2), Gold 2 (1)
Player 2: Plat 4 (0), Plat 4 (0), Plat 4 (0), Plat 4 (0), Plat 4 (0)

Both players had a 5-loss strak, yet while one lost 5 stars worth of rank, the other lost 1 start only.

Of course, on average, like you said after a very large number of matches, things will tend to even out for two players of similar skill. But if you consider, for instance, 200 matches, there can be very large, luck-based differences.