another thing unrelated to shadowchat, but amitsharma's scenario reminds me of a potential problem for the 7 day rank calculation cycle, where someone joining on a monday or tuesday is put into a situation where the time until their first rank increase can seem like an eternity, and because of the time involved for waiting on it to change the anticipation grows a lot more than it should, so by sunday they are counting the minutes until the change and may have already imagined some specific amount of increase. The problem can pervade to anyone with low rank and is more about psychology than functionality similar to something like a big game release where there is lots of hype before launch and people judge the final result more harshly, just because they had so much time to imagine rainbows and unicorns, if that makes sense. I think a longer duration of anticipation for something positive makes it increasingly likely for it to be perceived as negative once the anticipation ends. I'm not sure the technical side of calculating rank or how intense an operation it is on the server, but if it is possible I would say having rank calculated more often into fractional amounts would be a good improvement for people being able to see their progression happening sooner and more consistently, even if the overall rank increase over time was roughly the same, or even less.

This might be especially important when someone is in the bracket of people that are 'testing it out' because having to wait several days to see any change might be too much for the experimental kind of mentality, and in terms of new people I would go so far as to predict people reacting better on average to increasing in rank 0.2 per day than they would increasing 5 in a week, just because of the strange ways most people interpret things that have a large delay when there is no direct comparison to be made. (for example, anyone reading this would obviously opt-in to 5/week rather than 0.2/day, but two groups of people receiving each without knowing what the other has would have an inverted view of what they are gaining. The people with the worst deal think it's best and the people with the best deal think it's terrible, for no apparent reason other than the anticipation problem from one having a large delay) Just for clarity I will say I am not advocating some nerf bat to rank increases of new people, but just use that as an illustration.

Of course, this is a double-edged sword because anticipation of positive things creates addictive behaviors, and I would not be surprised to find some unexpected downside of having more frequent rank increase such as similar rank related complaints happening even more often because monitoring the rate of change becomes more common. Some risk could be mitigated by either using metrics to see if there is a difference between retention rate of 100+ SP accounts based on the day of week they joined, or by making a poll and see what kind of responses are given in favor of more frequent change in rank and if the kind of response correlates to having lower rank. If higher SP accounts are less likely to stay after joining on a monday, or newer shadow casters seem to be more enthusiastic about higher frequency in a poll, then the delay could be a real problem, otherwise it is probably fine the way it is.

Anyway, I am not even sure the delay is actually a problem, but figure I at least mention this as something to consider / a random idea.