Leagues absolutely - I know it sound stupid and I hate myself for it, but the fact that losing just two matches drops you a rank makes me extremely unwilling to play ranked play when things like this happen. A ranked number is simply not a good system, and it worries me that so far the only leagues they have talked about are for rank 1 players. It needs to be universal, to push more people into ranked play.
You and I touched on this in the last thread, but I agree wholeheartedly.
Blizzard set out to create the most casual friendly "ranked league" and instead they've made a league with more ladder anxiety than the other MOBAs they were trying to steer away from. Pretty funny, honestly.
I don't play HL because I got my rank and there's no incentive to keep going and too much risk to lose it. I'll just QM my day away or ARAM if I want to play.
What do you mean by duo queue restrictions? It's not like me and my friends are widely different in MMR, so any restriction on MMRgap wouldn't rally impact us. It just seems that whenever we duo queue we end up with awful matches, all the time. It's very depressing because solo queue just isn't as fun and I may as well be playing Grim Dawn instead.
My experience has been much better matches (and more even ones) all around, but that's without HL.
While I agree that sucks, that also kind of lines up with the vast majority of players...if they are getting good solo queue games, that's what Blizzard is probably aiming toward the most.
Sucks for those of us who group often or only play when we group, but we are def. the minority.
In general, though, I find our group goes through a spell like the one you're describing every month or two and it has little to do with matchmaking. Just changes in the meta or overall bad luck seems to pile up for a week or two and it's the most miserable experience possible...and then we gradually go back to winning.