New League Distribution in HotS - Page 5

On March 12 2013 06:06 NubainMuscle wrote:
I'm not at all a fan of this adjustment. There are so many better solutions.

1) There should be a cutoff point established somewhere to protect the real practice league level newbs from smurfs, trolls, and farmers. For example, if an account reaches Gold level (league or MMR) they are no longer permitted to be matched up against bronze league level players.

As it stands, a bronze league consisting of 8% of the player-base will consist almost entirely of trolls and smurfs, greatly increasing the likelihood that a brand new player encounters these people and becomes readily discouraged. The lower leagues should be protected, similar to the practice league, to ensure that experienced and advanced level players cannot demote themselves to that level but with an 8% bronze league this only increases the likelihood.

2) It undermines the accomplishment of reaching Gold league, significantly. Promotions are fun and rewarding, for any player. The 20/20/20/20/18/2 system makes each promotion feel valuable and increases the level of difficulty needed to attain each subsequent promotion. With the majority of the player base in the middle of the spectrum at gold, the only meaningful promotions are now platinum and above.

On March 13 2013 00:46 Fus wrote:
I wish that they would do something about the "stuck in master" syndrome i am feeling, i have no way to track my own progress and im 2,5 years stuck in masters almost. There is just no way to track progress over seasons or even track progress during a season more than analyse the mathematical confidence intervall of the stochastian variable that is your win/loss ratio. The system is way to hard to understand to even get a general feeling if you are progressing in masters, most master leagues dont understand the system enough to determine wether they are low or high master league.

On March 13 2013 00:46 Fus wrote:
I wish that they would do something about the "stuck in master" syndrome i am feeling, i have no way to track my own progress and im 2,5 years stuck in masters almost. There is just no way to track progress over seasons or even track progress during a season more than analyse the mathematical confidence intervall of the stochastian variable that is your win/loss ratio. The system is way to hard to understand to even get a general feeling if you are progressing in masters, most master leagues dont understand the system enough to determine wether they are low or high master league.

On March 13 2013 01:02 snailz wrote:


i wish masters was split into three separate leagues, like it is in reallity.

on the subject of the thread, i welcome this change, because it will give you incentive to keep on trying. and lets face it, bronze is not what it used to be, i have a friend who would be platinum after WoL beta but was stuck in bronze for a month. why not tell him, hey you're improving, keep at it

On March 13 2013 00:46 Fus wrote:
I wish that they would do something about the "stuck in master" syndrome i am feeling, i have no way to track my own progress and im 2,5 years stuck in masters almost. There is just no way to track progress over seasons or even track progress during a season more than analyse the mathematical confidence intervall of the stochastian variable that is your win/loss ratio. The system is way to hard to understand to even get a general feeling if you are progressing in masters, most master leagues dont understand the system enough to determine wether they are low or high master league.

On March 13 2013 00:17 Plansix wrote:


My friends and I referred to Platinum league as “grown up league” as an inside joke because we all have full time jobs, wives/girlfriends and houses(houses cut into practice time, FYI). Its not an excuse, but 1.5 hour commutes, life and relationships limit the time you can dump into a hobby. It is just a fact of getting older. It really felt like we were a bunch of guys who were on a college sports team, but joined a pick up league to keep playing. We weren’t as good as we used to be(at games in general), but we still played because we liked it.

Also, having a wider gold league means that people are less likely to get knocked into silver. SC2 has one of the hardest skilled degradations for being out of practice. Taking over a week off would kick my ass, but there are days after work where I shouldn’t ladder(unless I hate myself). Improving the system to not crush the mid-low tier people for just having a busy week is good. At gold league, we should just be pumped people are playing. Let high diamond, masters and GM be the world of harsh realities.

On March 12 2013 11:27 Excalibur_Z wrote:
The funny thing about this change is that I bet when we look at the total distribution (like SC2Ranks takes, as opposed to Blizzard's "active player" metric) Bronze through Gold will probably look like 20%/20%/20%.

For a long time, Bronze has always had the most accounts. For some reason people get to Bronze and then just sit there, and there could be any number of reasons for this. Right now it's close to 35% in Bronze and around 23% in Silver and 18% in Gold in total accounts. Now, the intended ranges are 20%/20%/20%, so if they change this to 8%/20%/32% for active players, then the total accounts numbers may shift toward 20%/20%/20%, which would be pretty funny.

As to the reasoning behind this change, my guess is that the bottom 8% or so are probably portrait farmers, so perhaps Blizzard wants people who actually try to play the game for real to be Silver and above.

On March 13 2013 01:16 Crownlol wrote:



I feel this way about all games now. Years ago, I could be Master's level in any game I wanted- I was scrimming CS 1.6 5 nights a week for 3 hours with my team, then after that was 5 day weeks of WoW arena...

Now I have a career, a life, long commute, need to gym more often to stay in shape. After working 8 hours on a PC all day, coming home to a long game session isn't as rewarding. Being high Plat, playing mostly Plat, some Diamond players is honestly the best I can hope for with SC2, especially with my game time divided between SC2 and LoL.