Yesterday I grabbed some hot fresh data off the CFN site because I was curious about this
Look at the distribution just within Platinum or Diamond compared to all the lower tiers. It's normal to see between a quarter and a third of a tier to be in the lowest rank of that tier (one star out of five. E.g. Bronze 1 is the lowest rank within Bronze as a tier.)
But almost half of the characters in Platinum, are in Plat 1--and in Diamond, two-thirds are in Diamond 1.
Other Observations:
- There are almost as many Master ranked characters, as the entirety of D2 - D5 combined. That sounds odd, but I expect this is due to the small number of Master-ranked players, getting all 19 characters up to Master--rather than a larger number of players achieving the rank.
- Platinum 1 is the biggest rank of them all, by a long shot. SO many characters are in Plat 1, significantly more than any other 1-star. Platinum 1 is 10% of the ranked population, all by itself. There is simply a lot of competition in that rank, so I'd expect it to take a lot longer to rise out of than any other 1-star--on top of lacking the win streak bonus.
- Plat 1 is so big, it skews our perception a bit. We want to say "oh look, about half of everyone are in Bronze through Gold"--but if you move that 10% over, and change where the line is drawn, it becomes "two-thirds of everyone are in Bronze through Plat 1," or, "75% of everyone is in Iron through Plat 1."
Some general perspective
If your character is in the middle of Silver somewhere, you are better than half the ranked population. Not to mention everyone playing who's afraid of touching Ranked to begin with, and everyone in the world who's not even playing.
If you're saying "aw man, I'm only in Bronze, I suck"--I'd like to point out that you are playing that character better than almost 350,000 others out there! That's like if you went to Anaheim, CA or Honolulu, and beat every human being who lived there. That's wild. You are good at this, actually.