I believe the plan was to see how well the matchmaling system worked them if it worked well male it the only way to get rank.

The reason it didnt work was a mixture of its coding and the size of the community. i.e. it doesnt seem to match by rank. At one point I was ranked 1st, the reason was I went on matchmaking and kept getting matched with the same person, the person was about rank 1000. And I keot getting matched to him despite the rank 2 and rank 8 being on matchmaking at the time.

The focus of the coding is on getting the shortest wait to a game possible, not on getting the fairest match, due to the size of the community the wait times might be too long any other way.