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The Practice League no longer exists in the game, but was available early on in Wings of Liberty. The Practice League was separate from the rest of the ladder, which allowed new players to practice multiplayer matches prior to their placement matches.
Practice league was completely optional. Players could conduct up to 50 matches in Practice league, which used a special "novice version" of the ladder maps. The novice versions differed from the standard version as they included additional destructible rocks in rushing paths to slow the game down.
This provided early game protection for newer players, which afforded them time to explore and learn both the interface and game. Additionally, the game speed in Practice League was "Normal" instead of "Faster". After 50 matches, regardless of whether a player won or lost, players progressed to their placement matches for the competitive leagues.
It will work just like the regular league, except it doesn't do a bunch of ladder stats, so you don't have to worry about your rank and where you are.
It'll be at a slower game speed setting, so it will be what you're used to from the campaign, and it will be on a bunch of maps that are anti-rush -- that are designed specifically to prevent rushing. Now, I can't promise you that you won't die at minute six -- you could be minding your own business and here comes a fleet of Banshees and, "Aaauugh! I can promise you that.
You'll at least have a chance to get your feet wet and experience some of the tech tree before you get rolled. Players are ranked within their division based on their Points. The function of points is to determine a player's rank within their division. After having completed their placement matches, players start out with 0 points. The number of ladder points is only weakly correlated to skill.
Especially if players have unspent bonus pool, ladder points tend to measure activity level much more strongly than performance. On November 15, , Blizzard released a chart for season 4 explaining the point cutoffs required to almost be guaranteed a promotion.
The charts also contain information for team formats and for all regions. Note that this chart reflects the Wings of Liberty ladder, and no such chart has been published for Heart of the Swarm, where the league populations, bonus pool accrual rate, and season length are different. You earn or lose points by winning or losing matches, respectively. To simplify how it works in practice [11]:.
As of Patch 2. When a game is lost, points are subtracted from the bonus pool of the player. The Bonus Pool is the sum of all "bonus points" a player can get, which are added to the rating points a player earns after a victory or, in the case of a defeat, points are deducted from the bonus pool rather than the player's ladder points. The Bonus Pool serves two purposes: Players receive Bonus Pool points at a set rate per league. Before Season 3, all players received points at the Master league original rate.
Season 3 introduced a separate accrual rate for leagues below Master. A player joining StarCraft freshly after the start of a season instantly receives the Bonus Pool as if he started at day 1 of the Season. This change was made in Patch 1.
Bonus pool accrual rates have been tuned for team matchmaking modes to make them more competitive: This rating decides which opponents a player will meet, and tries to quantify their skill level. When a player's MMR climbs above a certain value, they will be promoted into the next league. Each play-season the visible points will be reset, while the skill rating, MMR, stays intact. There also is a value " sigma " that measures how uncertain the system is of a player's MMR.
This is usually high if a player has not played many games recently, or if they are on a winning or losing streak. Sigma is used to calculate how wide a player's search range should be, and by extension how much their MMR will change as a result of playing rating-distant opponents i.
MMR is now visible for players, each ladder league below Grandmaster is split into three tiers, and the post-game screen now shows specific information about a player's current skill rating, how close they are to the next tier, and the upper and lower limits of their current ladder tier. The MMR boundaries are based on a prior distribution from the previous season, and during each season roll, the values are recalculated for the upcoming season. In Heart of the Swarm, if a player did not play any matches for an extended period of time, their MMR would decay, or automatically decrease.
The details of the system are unknown, but it appears to be a linear decay, [17] and Blizzard has confirmed that decay begins after 2 weeks of inactivity, and decay stops after 4 weeks of inactivity. The matchmaking system attempts to place you into matches at or near your skill level, after you've been initially evaluated by the 5 placement matches.
I personally found the matchmaking in the beta to be quite accurate, matching me to players of my fairly average skill level. The more matches you play, the more accurate the matchmaking system seems to become; my first match after placement was a cakewalk, while the next few matches were more edge-of-your-seat types of matches. If you want more in-depth information into the matchmaking system, the best place to look seems to be the Battle. There's also a thread on the TeamLiquid forums titled SC2 Ladder Analysis which has a fairly comprehensive write-up of bnet2.
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Home Questions Tags Users Unanswered. How does Starcraft 2's matchmaking system work? Kevin Yap Kevin Yap McKay 11k 16 67