[G] Comprehensive SC2 League and Ladder Guide - Page 16

On April 20 2011 00:08 Excalibur_Z wrote:
They're at the bottom of the MMR scale so some of the people they face who are legitimately in that situation (not as a result of win trading or intentional losing) will get bumped up a tiny bit, and the people that those people face will get bumped up a tiny bit, and so forth. It's probably not going to have that big an impact on the ladder as a whole though.

On February 22 2011 15:13 Excalibur_Z wrote:
[When you are moved from one league to another, your score is reset to 73 + the amount of bonus pool you have spent so far.

On April 24 2011 19:43 Gulzt wrote:
Great

Hey I was wondering about something else. You divided the leagues into different tiers. As reference to figure this out you used the top 200.

But now that the top 200 has moved to the Grandmaster league, does it mean that if blizzard decides to add a tier in a league, or changes the value between tiers (now +63), that there will be no way to figure out about it?

On April 26 2011 02:18 Holliday wrote:
when i started to ladder last year, i got placed in bronze 81st place.

when i played, and i played pretty activley, i lost alot. so i had like 25 losses to 2 wins. when i did win, as rare as it was back then, i only got 2 points, but when i lost, i would lose everthing. So it was virtually impossible to rank up from 80th place.

One day for some strange reason i got 4 points instead of 2, and then 6 , 8 and eventually everything normalized at about 30 points, and -10 points for a loss.

How do you explain this weird point distribution?

thankyou in advance

On April 23 2011 04:16 Excalibur_Z wrote:
Made an important correction about skipping leagues, which is no longer possible.

1) When the ladder reset, I lost my first game, and was placed into diamond, with 0 points. Does 0 points mean I am in the S tier (since I didn't start with N*63 points)? If it helps, my division is Hanson Echo. Also, I've looked at all my wins/losses since the reset, and the points won/lost add up to my current displayed score.

2) Can points go negative? Since the reset, I have used 240 bonus points, but my ladder points is 202. Are my points -38, or 0?

3) Any idea how many points will approximately get to masters? It looks like top diamond people have ~650-800 points (with 418 bonus points as of this posting). If my goal is to get in to masters, should my target be to get my points in/above that range? (I know it's MMR, not points, that matters, but I can't track my MMR, and having something quantifiable I can track helps.)

On May 07 2011 04:51 Excalibur_Z wrote:
Okay, so the ladder adjustment hotfixes just went live on the remaining (non-NA) servers yesterday. This was the hotfix that modified the MMR breakpoints for each league. This is going to cause a shift in league populations over time, as more and more players play games post-hotfix. What is important to note about this hotfix is that it applies to each region differently.

What this should mean is that the populations for each server should start going back down to the expected percentiles (2/18/20/20/20/20), but because the MMR breakpoints are no longer going to be the same for each region, there may be actual skill discrepancies across regions for the same leagues.

To use some hypothetical numbers as an example (and I'm just using SC2Ranks values because they're more visible, active players will be a little different but this should illustrate what the effects will be), let's say that right now 55% of the population in LA is in Bronze while 26% of China is in Bronze, and the Bronze threshold is like 1000 MMR. LA has fewer players which means skill doesn't deviate as much from the starting point. What will happen is that after the hotfix, LA will get closer to 20% in Bronze, and China will also. However, China is already pretty close to 20% in Bronze so their MMR breakpoint for Bronze won't change very much. LA is really far from 20% so the MMR breakpoint will change to whatever matches up with the current 20th percentile, so maybe 300 MMR or something.

Not sure how this will impact servers like KR which is already regarded as far and away the most skilled server, but I can predict that we'll see more types of statements like "Korean Plat = NA Master" =)

On May 07 2011 05:06 Archerofaiur wrote:


Thanks X
How does this effect (if at all) the league deflation over time where bronze gets bigger as more and more players stop playing?

On May 07 2011 06:24 Excalibur_Z wrote:


I think the leagues should be a little more stable this time. What probably happened was that they expected a certain level of retention in active players but players were either worse than they predicted or quit faster in lower leagues than they predicted, and those problems are more apparent on the very small servers. When Season 1 ended, we already knew that Bronze was larger than the other leagues to an extreme degree on all servers, with an even larger divide on servers like LA (we didn't have active player info but we could maybe get kind of close based on what SC2Ranks showed). When Season 2 began, we started to see the same disproportionate league populations emerge, which was something that was not expected (it should have been a lot closer to the ideal distribution than it was). Now that the league breakpoints are basically adjusted to the current population for each region, things should stabilize because now each server is taking all of that into account.

EDIT: I should say that leagues will probably continue to drift in size, it just won't be as extreme as it was in Season 1.