Is Blizzard's League system going to keep non-hardcore players in the game?

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Originally Posted by rdragon87

I also don't expect casual players to participate in the Ladder system anyways, I expect them to play Custom matches with their friends for the most part.

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I think this actually hit the nail on the head :p. I realise now that as I started playing more and more with some of the other forumers here, I just stopped laddering altogether :p. The fact that I recently had to play a soul-crushing 5 ZvZ games in a row on ladder also helped :p.

I'm curious though - what's the point of 'removing LAN so that everyone plays on Bnet' if everyone just sticks to their own little playgroups and doesn't interact with the rest of Bnet? :p

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I also don't expect casual players to participate in the Ladder system anyways, I expect them to play Custom matches with their friends for the most part.

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I wouldn't expect that behavior to last. Friends rarely have the same skill level.

My ladder experience;



I’m in the beta! Woohoo! Let's play some Starcraft! Now given it has been ages since I last played an RTS I played the first five matches in practise league. I absolutely curve stomped the opposition given the players I was playing against they also got their key the very same day. Great I thought, this is really fun.

I don't like 1v1 because it is too intense, not in the fashion that it requires more APM than other game modes, but intensive in the way that it's you versus someone else and you can't drop the ball for even a second. Therefore I tried 2v2 random, the random partner relaxes the games because you can always blame it on the other guy.

Great, now I got the game mode down lets play! With the influx of new players on that very day, my placement matches were against new players all the way through. I won 4-1 with the loss being due to an afk partner. Great I thought, were does that place me?

Platinum league rank 6.

Shit.

The next twenty matches I've spent being more or less brutally curve stomped because the new people I was supposed to play against in my platinum division aren't available. Therefore I play against other platinum players from other divisions, who have deserved their placement from going through the silver and gold league.

So, the placement system didn't work out for me. People are right in that it is beta and it is not supposed to work properly. But, it sucks and further than that it also points to the placement system being faulty. Instead of going by wins and losses which it predominantly seems to be doing at the moment (I know other parameters also factor in such as APM and unspent resources), it could look at how many games the player has played total for instance.