Provisionals are a formality, proposed solution

The first time you go through your 10 games theyre a big deal, since the system has no other metric to determine where it can place you. Every season after that, it has your previous mmr to look at and that is what it mainly uses. This is why we have people winning all 10 games and getting bronze 5, or losing all 10 and getting considerably higher than b5. The 10 games matter because they impact your mmr, but not an order of magnitude more than 10 regular games.

Why does this matter? Because such an opaque system frustrates people. They get placed 12 divisions lower than they were because of all the factors at work (mmr soft reset, diamond being empty, smaller playerbase) and dont understand why. Sure theyre getting massive lp gains and maybe skipping divisions, but thats not immediately apparent. So regardless of how well it functions, the ranked reset is frustrating. Then we get endless threads about it. I kinda get how it works and i can live with it, but others not so much.

Instead of this, we should have a different start of season if we have already been ranked. New players can do the 10 games because that works fine for them, but for the rest I propose a period at the start of the season where ranked is enabled but ranks arent distributed yet. Players can play normally, and once there are enough people for the ladder to look kinda normal, everyone gets ranked at once, based on their current mmr.

At the same time, we get a popup in client telling us about the soft reset, so that we aren't surprised when we place lower. However, since everyone gets reset proportionally tiers will look fairly similar (tiers being based on percentile not raw mmr), the difference being that people climb much faster early in the season. Over time the ladder will rebalance to match the same mmr values of the previous season because players will naturally rise toward their old mmr.

The main downside I can see is the "inflation" in the tiers, where if someone in gold doesnt climb much they could actually start dropping because "gold" is actually rising from its artifically low start of season mmr. Also, people who dont play early in the season will get kinda boned, but in roughly the same way everyone does under the current system.

Or just let us see our MMR in raw and percentile terms. That would go a long way too.

If you read all this, consider that what im suggesting are cosmetic changes. Although the current system is messy and opaque, it still does its job.