A no new players feast queue?

[Februs]

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.

Agreed, but it would depend on how steep or shallow the rank decay is.

If we're only talking about a match a week, then I really don't think it would be twisting anyone's arm to participate. Outside of real life obstacles, it would be pretty easy to maintain unless you truly didn't care about your rank. Likewise, for those at the top, the idea isn't necessarily to drag them down when they're inactive. The idea is to generate the potential for mobility while avoiding stagnation, which is what we have now. It really doesn't have to be a steep rank decay to provide incentive to the top end players. Firstly, the point difference between ranks isn't all that great, so even the slightest nudge each way would help. Secondly, there are micro brackets within the top 100. The bottom 10 would fear getting booted out for inactivity. Likewise, the top 10 would fear losing their crown if they didn't keep up. Even if the point gap between 1st place and 10th were somehow astronomical, there would still be activity within those ranks.

Basing your end rank on your top recorded rating is an interesting idea as well, but I still think you'd have to adjust the matchmaking to make it work. Allowing people to keep their personal best as their standard would certainly be an incentive to keep the top players in the matches, worry-free, but it would still support a system in which the earliest people to the game would have an advantage. The best option would still be to horde as many points as possible in the early season, then watch the ranks stagnate mid to late season when everyone starts getting unevenly "balanced" by the ridiculous matchmaking.

There's definitely a few ways to handle this, but for anything to work at all, SE would have to do something about the matchmaking system first.