[{quoted}](name=The Sword Saint,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=QkgmhRB0,comment-id=0003000000000000000000000000,timestamp=2017-03-23T16:04:55.744+0000)
They already do that even said it. You have to play against people at a higher mmr than your rank and win consistently in order to get through promos. That's how you prove you are better then your peers. Going 50% wr against your own rank only proves you belong there, going 50% against those in a higher rank proves you deserve an at least slightly higher rank.
You say that playing Promo Games "forces people to prove they are good enough to win consistently at their current rank". I refuted this by pointing out that losing your Promo Games doesn't mean that you don't belong in your current rank. MMR is the proof that you belong in one rank or another, and Promo Games randomly gate people with a higher MMR than their rank from reaching the rank they belong in, even if the difference is as extreme as a Plat player trying to pass Bronze Promos. Having a 90% win rate against Bronze players means nothing when it comes to Bronze Promo Series because you're matched with other Plat players. You still have a 50% chance to pass.
Also, we want the safety nets to stay. The do an excellent job of dealing with the ranked anxiety that added so much stress to players in earlier seasons that fewer people playing ranked and those that did dealt with more toxicity in game because they were never able to reach a point where they could relax and be assured they wouldn't slip down too far from a couple bad games.
The safety net exists so that you don't drop down too far and feel like shit just because of a lose streak, as long as your skill level is still around your rank so that over time your winloss at that rank evens out. We use to have the system where you just had elo = mmr and people were at all times a bad night away from dropping from the equivalent of plat to bronze. Such a loss is disheartening enough to make people quit the game or at least ranked, and the fear that any progress you can make can be lost so easily discourages people from even trying.
I'm not opposed to safety nets. My preferred solution is to make the RNG element of Divisional Promo Games bare minimum by requiring only one game to pass to make only extreme bad luck have an effect on the amount of extra games you have to play, and making League Advancement games played at the League's skill level regardless of the player's MMR as an accurate test for the player to prove they belong in that League. I would also like to see Divisional skips be more generous. Neither of these imply removing safety nets. I only brought up the complete removal of Promo Series and divisional barriers to make the point that solutions to your proposed problem and my proposed problem coincide.
What I want you to understand is that, just like falling out of a rank you just worked hard to earn, it would also feel like shit to be gated from a higher rank because of RNG. 1 in 6 League Advancement Promotions involve losing 2 Series by chance before promoting, causing a player to have to play at the very least 16 additional ranked games to promote when the system already knows they belong at a higher rank. If 100k players have advanced from one League to the next, 1,500 of them have had to play more than 32 games to pass the Promo Series. This would be hell.
