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I never understood the amount of these cute ladder stories that pop up on a near-daily basis. They all complain about basically the same thing: not making progress i.e. the feeling of stalemate or even set back.
Let me tell you brief and short why the ladder system gives you this impression:
- All players get better: The Gold League is by far the best example for this. I have been a platinum player for all of WoL. Sometimes after a losing streak i got a gold opponent, and those guys were absolutely terrible. Hell my roomate, who played like 50 Laddergames as a hardcore casual just doing the 7RoachRush (and a badly executed 7RR at that) was Gold in WoL.
At this day i myself am in Gold League and i play very decent players on a daily basis. Point is: Gold League is no where near comparable to 2011.
- Fewer players in general: By this point the influx of new players is very low. Alot of casuals have gone to other games. The remaing players that play ladder matches are almost all trying to make progress, which leads me to the most important point
- The divions are based on percentages of the hole playerbase: So, as i said, it's pretty safe to assume that almost every player on the ladder plays to make progress. But the ladders are distributed on a percent-base.
At some point it should be:
GM 200 Players
Masters 2%,
Diamond 18%,
Platinum, 20%
Gold 25%,
Silver 20%,
Bronze 15%.
Right now it is:
GM 175 (0.41%)
Masters 567 (1.33%)
Diamond 3,266 (7.65%)
Platinum 4,903 (11.49%)
Gold 14,043 (32.91%)
Silver 15,493 (36.31%)
Bronze 4,222 (9.89%)
So the percent values vary a bit, but the global picture stays the same. As the playerbase in the whole declines, it gets a lot harder to get into the higher divisions.
To the conclusive paradoxon: If you stayed in your league, lets say diamond for every one of the 21 ladder seasons there were, that ironically means that you got better at the average pace => Staying in the same league means you got better at the same speed as others.
Almost every person that rants about not getting promoted neglects this point. The Ladder System is not designed to give you the feeling of progess, if you just improve on the average pace.
Addition: If you want to get promoted in the current sc2 ladder sytem: You need to improve faster than the guys that are around the same level as you are and (that is even harder) you have to work against the declining overall playerbase i.e. the league percentual distribution.
  
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Interesting post, I came fairly late to the party (the end of Wings) and once I got to grips with the game I always felt people looked down on the lower leagues too much as just people with no strategy clulessly clicking.
What I am more interested in though is that your numbers suggest only 43k people are playing ladder, I guess this is NA server, where did you get the numbers from please?
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Many of the "problems with ladder" that people show here stem just from their inability to read and understand Excalibur's Comprehensive ladder guide. Endless bitching about being/not being promoted based on W/L ratios and whatever other irrelevant numbers. In particular I love all those who complain that they were top X last season and got placed into low X at the beginning of the next one, that's some amazing display of logical thinking - and yet you see them almost invariably every couple of months.
Only a small minority that has enough brain cells to get through these issues is then even able to experience the problems you write about.
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On January 20 2015 23:49 Edpayasugo wrote:
Interesting post, I came fairly late to the party (the end of Wings) and once I got to grips with the game I always felt people looked down on the lower leagues too much as just people with no strategy clulessly clicking.
What I am more interested in though is that your numbers suggest only 43k people are playing ladder, I guess this is NA server, where did you get the numbers from please?
43,000 people for a five-year-old RTS game is huge though, regardless if it's just NA or all servers combined. Popular RTS games back in the day barely had 3000-5000 people playing a couple of months after release.
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It`s probably the number for Korea, as both NA and EU not filled in correctly.
Nice blog!
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On January 21 2015 00:54 maartendq wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2015 23:49 Edpayasugo wrote:
Interesting post, I came fairly late to the party (the end of Wings) and once I got to grips with the game I always felt people looked down on the lower leagues too much as just people with no strategy clulessly clicking.
What I am more interested in though is that your numbers suggest only 43k people are playing ladder, I guess this is NA server, where did you get the numbers from please? 43,000 people for a five-year-old RTS game is huge though, regardless if it's just NA or all servers combined. Popular RTS games back in the day barely had 3000-5000 people playing a couple of months after release.
SC2 every season starts with around 300,000 players total and end around the 400-500k mark. That's people who have played a game, probably only 80k online at any one time, compare that to the 27 million daily players and 47 million monthly lol supposedly has and the 32 million viewers their finals had.
Compare that to the 1 and a bit million viewers our finals had.
Heh, they have a fair amount of padding from people who try the game once and never play and pretty much all the players now are dedicated SC2 players, since attaining anything higher than bronze without RTS experience now would be very tough I imagine (going off what people who complain about how hard lower leagues are even though they put lots of effort in)
I'm looking forward to the LoTv numbers, we also have weathered age it's been 5 years for SC2 and 17 years for SC in general, league has been "popular" since 2011/2012, so they've had 3/4 years of being a game also they are free. I'm sure if LoTv was free and advertised more etc that our numbers would suddenly become huge!
edit - numbers taken from Nios.kr more reliable than sc2ranks imo.
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The reason there are so many complaints is that the SC2 ladder is even more fucked up than ICCup ladder.
- You cannot be demoted mid season. da fuq? Fire that intern who came up with that idea.
- MMR decay => weaker players getting owned on a regular basis by better players who don’t play regularly
- Useless divisions. Not a real reason but comes still up every time
- Everybody is in Gold. Gold should get sub leagues because there is a day and night difference between low gold (e.g. bought the game 2 days ago) and high gold (knows some BOs and can macro reasonably well)
- Not getting to promoted unless you beat everybody two leagues above you at least twice (e.g. you need to beat every GM to get from Diamond to Master)
- Probably some more reasons …
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On January 21 2015 06:20 Biolunar wrote:The reason there are so many complaints is that the SC2 ladder is even more fucked up than ICCup ladder. - You cannot be demoted mid season. da fuq? Fire that intern who came up with that idea.
- MMR decay => weaker players getting owned on a regular basis by better players who don’t play regularly
- Useless divisions. Not a real reason but comes still up every time
- Everybody is in Gold. Gold should get sub leagues because there is a day and night difference between low gold (e.g. bought the game 2 days ago) and high gold (knows some BOs and can macro reasonably well)
- Not getting to promoted unless you beat everybody two leagues above you at least twice (e.g. you need to beat every GM to get from Diamond to Master)
- Probably some more reasons …
I don't think any of these things are actual problems.
- Whether or not you're demoted mid-season doesn't really matter since your MMR still changes. It doesn't affect anything other than the picture you see for your league.
- MMR decay isn't that significant. It takes multiple seasons of not playing before your rank completely resets. After a few games you're basically back at the same point.
- There isn't that big of a difference between low and high gold... none of them can really macro or do builds.
- The last one about promotions is simply untrue. You don't have to beat a single GM to hit master... you won't even be matched against them if you're high diamond/low master MMR.
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Thanks for posting this, clears up some questions I have had myself personally. Nice write up sir.
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If you haven’t noticed there were many exaggerations in my post, just to clarify that. But the main points are still valid.
On January 21 2015 09:22 Sero wrote:- Whether or not you're demoted mid-season doesn't really matter since your MMR still changes. It doesn't affect anything other than the picture you see for your league.
Exactly that annoys the crap out of people.
On January 21 2015 09:22 Sero wrote:- MMR decay isn't that significant. It takes multiple seasons of not playing before your rank completely resets. After a few games you're basically back at the same point.
It’s still stupid. It matches you against weaker players that you simply demolish. No fun to be had for both sides, in my experience. I’m ex Diamond stuck in Gold because I don’t play enough. 100% winrate against dudes that haven’t been higher than Gold. Some interesting and fun games against other ex Plat/Dia players who are also stuck in Gold.
On January 21 2015 09:22 Sero wrote:- There isn't that big of a difference between low and high gold... none of them can really macro or do builds.
See the point above. I am in Gold, I know the huge fucking skill disparity between those who can play and those who are in my eyes just bad.
People always assume they know everything there is to know about every league but in fact you DON’T. You can only talk about your league that you are in, ± the leagues above and below you (only if you have played against them). And by league I mean MMR because the leagues don’t say anything about anything, especially skill.
On January 21 2015 09:22 Sero wrote:- The last one about promotions is simply untrue. You don't have to beat a single GM to hit master... you won't even be matched against them if you're high diamond/low master MMR.
Of course that’s not true. But you have to beat the good people (if you divide every league into: noob, mid, good) one league above you consistently to get a promotion mid season. That is unrewarding as hell. Those complain posts often contain the statement that they don’t feel like they are making progess at all. Maybe next season they will get the promotion after the placement match, but do you truely believe that crap is rewarding? I can only speak for myself: I would much rather be promoted mid season after a win against a higher ranked player (rank means MMR) than be promoted after some random “placement match” that may or may not let you play against some random dude of your skill level.
Edit:
To the last point: I have seen my fair share of Diamond streamers getting matched against Master and GM and even beating them. Still no promotions to Master. There is something broken in this system but don’t ask me what.
WoL ladder worked much better than HotS ladder in my eyes. My guess is that you cannot be demoted anymore. But only Blizzard can answer that.
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On January 21 2015 00:19 opisska wrote:
Many of the "problems with ladder" that people show here stem just from their inability to read and understand Excalibur's Comprehensive ladder guide. Endless bitching about being/not being promoted based on W/L ratios and whatever other irrelevant numbers. In particular I love all those who complain that they were top X last season and got placed into low X at the beginning of the next one, that's some amazing display of logical thinking - and yet you see them almost invariably every couple of months.
Only a small minority that has enough brain cells to get through these issues is then even able to experience the problems you write about.
I'm one of the people who place in some shit league each season. And the logic is simply that I don't grind enough games.
When I played hardcore I was easily mid to top master player. After that, the decay etc had me placing in lower league even though I'm roflstomping people still.
And since I don't use all my bonus pool and play like 30 games a season (and go like 30-0 or whatever high win % stat) I barely rank up to plat or whatever. And then each season restarts and I'm back to silver or gold because of the decay again.
And I assume since there are others like me, when I'm playing in the plat teir and winning most of the games, the only losses are versus other people who were dia or master and the game doesn't know they used to be those ranks and just assumes they are another plat or gold or whatever.
So really there are a bunch of fake/smurf players who aren't trying to be and fucking up the ladder for themselves and everyone else.
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EPT
