How do sc2 divisions work

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IEM Katowice DHM: Last Chance NeXT S2. King of Battles 2. IEM Winter EPL Conference Season Pinnacle Fall Series 3. V4 Festival Budapest ByuN 2. Dark 4. Solar 5. Nerchio 7. INnoVation Rain 2. Flash 3. EffOrt 4. Bisu 6. Soulkey 7. Mini 8. This guide is designed to provide detailed information about the core functionality and design of the Starcraft II ladder, its leagues, and matchmaking. The information within this guide comes from empirical findings as well as Blizzard developers.

Overview Immediately noticeable upon searching for a ladder match is your remaining Bonus Pool. The Bonus Pool is a reservoir of points that are awarded for wins, doubling your earned points per game until the Bonus Pool is exhausted. The Bonus Pool also absorbs lost points, reducing your Bonus Pool by an amount equal to the number of points you would have lost for that game. The Bonus Pool accrues at a set rate for each league, whether playing or not.

Platinum League -- Gold League -- Silver League -- Bronze League -- Patch 1. Patch 3. Because of this set rate and because it applies equally to everyone, this essentially acts as a global decay mechanism, separating active players from inactive ones.

In a typical division, it's expected that not all players will remain active, so this means that players who consume more Bonus Pool will typically rise above most of the players in their division, because the inactive players' points are decaying relative to the active players. We can therefore say that your displayed points minus your spent Bonus Pool are your "adjusted points", or points that account for the inflation of the ladder as a result of Bonus Pool. Overview At the heart of the system is a hidden value known as the matchmaking rating, or MMR for short.

Matchmaking rating helps to ensure you play against players around your skill level and influences how many points you stand to gain or lose per match. For this reason, it is extraordinarily difficult to reverse engineer MMR from points. Fortunately, patch 3.

Favored System On the post-game score screen, an amount of points are awarded or lost in accordance with what the system determines to be a favorable or unfavorable pairing. The Favored system compares your opponent's MMR with your adjusted points and calculates an amount of points that the game will be worth if you win or lose.

If you stand to gain points or lose , you are Favored; if you stand to gain points or lose , you are Slightly Favored; if you stand to earn or lose points, the Teams are Even. This value is independently calculated for each team and the results will not necessarily be zero sum.

If a player plays in multiple regions in identical teams that team will be counted several times for the world total. The region numbers are a more accurate way to count players. In 1v1 and random teams each teams only consist of one player. As of Patch 2. When a game is lost, points are subtracted from the bonus pool of the player. How do sc2 leagues work? 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: to encourage players to play games so their points are always trending upward, and as a global decay mechanism since all players have equal access to the same amount of Bonus Pool.

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: [4].

This rating decides which opponents a player will meet, and tries to quantify their skill level. Each play-season the visible points will be reset, while the skill rating, MMR, stays intact. Since Patch 3. 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. In Patch 3. 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.

Can other people paraphrase it for me? So that small competition between individuals of the same MMR waters still exists and applies. And so that to match you with opponent of similar skill, a MMR system is required. Without MMR :. Frankly all divisions should rank by MMR because how many games you play means very little. MMR is the only thing that represents skill; and I guarantee you the people that hold their accounts in GM are playing a lot of games to do that; regardless of whether or not they only play 10 games a week on one account or another.