CornsaucemustardoverlordAnd again, why does it NEED to be balanced?Because it's fun?
Is this discussion not about keeping the game alive? Imagine in any other game if a diamond rank player could choose to play in gold lobbies just because they felt like it. People literally quit games over bad matchmaking. I find it insane that you think dissolving all meaning behind divs and letting people self-sort will have no issues and end up being a preferable experience.
I mean, in a way, you're right. Ideally there are no restrictions, because there are no divs. In a perfect world, we would take all ~100 teams, throw them in a giant round-robin pool, and play it out. At the end we'd have a perfect ranking from first to last. But obviously nobody has time for that. You could do a bracket and get a similar result in a fraction of the time, but then FROYO has to play 50+ matches, while the newcomer teams only get to play 2. That doesn't sound fun on either end.
We have divisions as a compromise between time, competitive accuracy, and player experience. Are the divisions completely arbitrary? Yeah, totally. But they're arbitrary in a CONSISTENT way (at least somewhat, that's what we're trying to fix!!!). Even if you find 1st place meaningless, almost everyone enjoys improving. You need some kind of semi-consistent structure that players can measure their growth against.
And yeah, I'm moralizing sandbagging because it's often selfish, at the expense of other players' experience. There's nothing wrong with being a stagnant team that doesn't want to go 100%. But why do these teams always seem to hang out at the top of divisions? Why do they find it unacceptable to "chill" in the lower half of teams? They're optimizing for their own experience with no regard for the rest of the playerbase. Your idea sounds nice, but you realize it will just be a scramble for everyone trying to get their perfect amount of competition, and most people will fail to do so? Everyone can't be a winner, and since there's ego involved from all parties, we need a system to balance things OBJECTIVELY.
Besides, as ghadilli mentioned, there is already a self-sorting system in scrims! People act like being worst in your div is this terrible, miserable slog that you have no control over... Matches take like, 2 hours per week, maximum! Most people spend triple to quadruple that amount of time scrimming! You can just play your matches, get rolled, and spend the rest of the week having fun with your team scrimming down at whatever level you feel comfortable with! For anyone who's butthurt about it, it's quite literally a skill issue!
Yes, the current system is too restrictive, but a free-for-all isn't gonna work either. Yes, TF2 is not some tier-1 super-esport, but it's not full dead either. It's so lame that you guys think we're at some point of no return, where we should just give up any notion of competitive structure and just make RGL a pug league. There are other ways to enjoy sixes for those who don't enjoy the seasonal/divisional format.
dafuq?