Isn't this better for the lower skilled players, who no longer get dominated by professionals?
Also, why would a "pro" want to sandbag like this? I've been an amateur athlete most of my life and my goal was never to compete against known weaker athletes - there's no fun in that.
Or, do these games lack the ability to spin up "practice" sessions fully under the control of the player? That seems like the real answer, and would mirror what athletes in meat-space do - train for weeks/months, then compete at well-timed intervals against the best (or, at least relatively equal, if you're doing age group amateur competitions).
Now, one day you decide to try out goalkeeper. You get to face world class competition because of your status as a striker.
Two possible results:
1. You get discouraged and don't play the off positions. You only maximize. Maybe you get burned out because you never relax.
2. You do switch back and forth between things you are good/not good at. Your skill averages out and you play easy matches where you carry your team, alternated with impossible matches where you drag your team down.
I know a lot of pros will have secondary accounts for things like this. Sometimes it gets viewed as sandbagging (and sometimes it is).
2- sandbagging against weaker competition
In your striker-wants-to-be-goalie situation, the wanna be goalie would practice against the clubs B team. He would not step into the WC as goalie. Nor would he shit up the local junior tournament while he tries things out.
Also, a lot of pros make more money from playing the game without a team and streaming it on twitch or youtube.
Back to your striker... he can do all sorts of drills solo, but also needs practice time with his team. The former he can do at home (given a big enough yard). The later, he does at the clubhouse.
But, he isn't going around joining local pick-ups games. I'm still unclear why an e-sports player needs to the play the equiv of local pickup soccer matches. If the answer is "that's how he makes money" well, sandbagging a sport to earn money is a pretty silly way to make a living. That would be like Jordan paying his mortgage playing HORSE.
or entering a dunk contest?
Content creators for chess also do "speed runs" from 1000 to 2500 Elo for example where they explain the mistakes and produce educational content while playing "easy" opponents. They don't do it just for the fun of owning people. CoD creators perhaps could do the same?
The most hilarious thing is when people ask that there be a ranked playlist with sbmm and an unranked playlist without. The one without, they assume, would be more favorable to them, since they would experience a random distribution of players (and they assume they are above average, naturally). But for players in the bottom decile of skill, unranked would have a dramatically worse experience than ranked! So they would leave for the ranked playlist. Now the new bottom decile of skill would be having a terrible experience in unranked, so they would leave, etc. By induction, unranked would quickly become depopulated.
It is really tough to be a below-average player in a game without any matchmaking. You lose all the time and almost never have an impact. You can kiiinda get away with this as a developer in games that have very large teams. For example, World of Warships has no skill based matchmaking (although tier level is somewhat a proxy for skill and performs a bit of a weed-out of the lowest skill players in the higher tiers). There are people who play that game who have only a 30% winrate over a large number of games. This is in a 12v12 game where presumably things tend to average out in the mix of skills on each team, so having that negative of an impact on team performance is in some sense pretty impressive.
The only thing difficult for me to understand is the resilience of the mentality involved in continuing to play that game if you are one of the way below average players. I would not have fun if I never had a positive impact on my team's performance.
It's also worth noting that if WoWS had the playerbase to support it, they'd probably build SBMM too. But it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. The issue is that their monetization system requires what is effectively forty or fifty different queues (5 tier-based matching bands * 4 ship classes * 2-2.2 game modes, depending on whether ranked is active). Queue times can already be quite extended in some tiers and for some ship ship classes. Developing a system that continues with this alignment of tiers and classes and also substantially reduces skill gaps is probably unsolvable without a much large player base or a more complicated role selection system.
Its harder in World of Warships because of the absence of respawns. Each kill has a bigger direct impact on team win/loss probability than in War Thunder.