Blizzard CEO'S Message to Starcraft 2 Players

[Blazur]

Which sport does NOT have seasons? If you watch any sports at all do you brag "my favorite team has not lost this year" or "my team has over 9000 wins since 1908". Not only that, but the reset will get rid of all the players who did their placement matches and never played again, so the ranks will be more compact and accurate since there are less placeholders. There will be some people who do the same thing, but there will be far less just because of the fact they didn't like multiplayer and will never play again. You will still be able to check where you were in the past seasons, but you need to play to keep where you are at. Seasons make the game feel more competitive because if someone comes in months later, they can come in at the beginning of a season and be able to be on top instead of being 3000 points down when they start and never have a chance to catch up.

Meh. Do XBOX 360 leader boards have seasons? What about other non-Blizzard games which offer persistent leader boards? I'd rather they implement a decaying point system, so players who don't get any games in in several months begin to lose points/rank. The longer they wait between games, the more games they'll have to play to stop their experience from decaying.

I just know the day I no longer see those precious metal icons on my account is the day my interest will wane considerably in this game. It would be like getting to the end of a game and losing your save point. I simply won't have the ambition to go through the effort climbing the ladder all over again.

Never played much WC3 so it never affected me there, and it never really bothered me in Diablo2. But getting my ladder record reset in this game would sap my desire to play ladder competitively.

[Gifted]

From what I'm gathering, you will be able to see how you do in every season and have them for records. A new season will have a new "season" record as well as the "all time" record.

I don't believe it changes your league of skill, but resets your rank and points within your division.

Blazur: While you're example of Xbox isn't a bad one, it's just a different scope. Xbox involves games with leaderboards. StarCraft is being approached as an electronic sport. A better example would be comparing baseball or football to it. You may understand that the Minnesota Vikings are a Diamond League team, and the St. Paul Saints are a Platinum level team.. but at the end of a season the stats of win/losses are wiped clean but will always be accessable in records if you want to know how the 2009-2010 season went. If you went so far, I bet you can look up the franchise win/loss record of all of their games.

The Vikings shouldn't be doing placement matches to ensure they still deserve to be in the NFL league after the season's over.

[Triceron]

Seasons for Arena works for WoW. Why can't seasons work for SC2?

BTW I was very surprised at the outcome of this league. A Zerg player taking home the prize was very surprising, considering Zerg are currently the underdog race. I got to watch it cuz my buddy at work subscribed to GomTV, and I watched it with him on a shared monitor. It was a pretty epic series, especially the TLO games.

[Norfindel]

Nope, still don't see what's the need for periodic resets.

If the system is well implemented, it would work continuously, and you wouldn't need to catch anyone, because if your skill improves, so will your position. If you don't play, your position would need to slowly get lower over time.

Periodic resets only serve to upset the matchmaking system, throwing away useful data for no reason, and to say "guy x won this season".

[MulletBen]

Team sports often trade players between seasons, causing a possibly large change in their effectiveness year after year. You are one person, so your skill level probably won't have a very wide variance, so why bother?

Unlike other games, Blizzard has a system of leagues and divisions. It would be a shame if people completed their placement matches once, never played another game, and then were left taking up space in a division for the rest of eternity. A decaying pints system wouldn't work, although you could reset someone's ladder rank if they don't play for a certain amount of time, and that would solve the problem.

Ultimately, I think the goal is to rotate people into different divisions, so they get a different group of people to compare themselves to.

[Norfindel]

Ultimately, I think the goal is to rotate people into different divisions, so they get a different group of people to compare themselves to.

Ehhh... i think i never played against someone in my own division (guardian phi), so how does that make any difference?

[MulletBen]

Ehhh... i think i never played against someone in my own division (guardian phi), so how does that make any difference?

You are ranked against the other people in your division. If you pay more attention to your rank than your points, you may end up in a division where you can't get above position 4 because the top 3 people are hundreds of points ahead of you. On the other hand, you might be 1 person hundreds of points above everyone else and have to look at your points in order to find other people to compare yourself to outside of your division.

[Norfindel]

You are ranked against the other people in your division. If you pay more attention to your rank than your points, you may end up in a division where you can't get above position 4 because the top 3 people are hundreds of points ahead of you. On the other hand, you might be 1 person hundreds of points above everyone else and have to look at your points in order to find other people to compare yourself to outside of your division.

To my knowledge, the system is totally undocumented, and i have no idea how it's supposed to work well if it compares "points" that depend on the people in your league, which you don't ever face, and the "points" are earned by winning games with people outside your league (because you never really play against your same league, unless it's a cosmic coincidence), where the top player maybe has half the amount of points of the top player in your league.

If it works like that, i'm not surprised it requires periodic resets, because it doesn't really works. Anyways, i think that the resets won't really make it work, just upset stuff still more and keep things in constant motion, in an attempt to hide how bad it is.

I did really got that right? It just looks too stupid to be real.

[Gifted]

In this case, I can see pros and cons with tournaments and seasons. The question is if it aligns with what people will want or appreciate.

[Blazur]

Having my account get constantly wiped in the beta was what destroyed my ambition to play then. That is, once I got past the novelty of playing a new game and getting some experimentation in. I play games to win, and when it's a modern competitive game I play to get a good record or rank up in whatever fashion that game offers. Having an online stats page or leaderboard is great for motivating me to continue playing and improve. But I just know having that wiped would destroy that same ambition.

I understand there's a reason to reset stats with the way the system was designed. Players who get constant games in will have unreachable scores that casuals will never be able to surpass. If they maintained history of our rankings over each season then I suppose it won't be as disheartening, and might even provide further motivation to play to improve your game over each season.