[aztecx]

Originally Posted by Santi

Have you try getting into grandmasters?

Originally Posted by Tom

Well I just did a search of sc2ranks.com - Team = Arranged 2v2, Activity = last 30 days. There are now 199 teams, constituting 1.9% of active 2v2 teams. So in fairness to Blizzard, given their aim of having 2% of players by game-type in Masters, it looks like their fix was spot on.

In actual fact, the previous MMR bar for arranged team Masters league was unrealistically high for SEA, such that far less than 2% of teams were in Masters. The main problem I think was Blizzard's "moving average" system. There are so many teams that worked their way up with mass games, that it would take many more months of consistent high level play to get their "moving average" over the threshold. Coupled with the fact that there are so many random ways you can die in team games, only a very few teams were able to make the cut off.

This created a big problem for those who did place in Masters actually getting any points (especially last season before Blizzard tweaked the bonus point accumulating rate for arranged teams). So whilst placement in Masters was a very good indicator of skill, ranking in the division was almost meaningless. For example, the average points per game for nGenStarhunt and I was 0. Sometimes we would be lucky and get 1 (+1 bonus). I remember one day playing 10 games over 3 hours, and watching our bonus pool accumulate faster than we were using it.

Yeah I totally agree with the division ranking but personally that never mattered to me because I understood that it is just points and doesn't reflect your actual skill. The thing is, there will always be teams that are completely favored over 95% of their opponents and masters was generally full of teams like that. This is what gave it the prestige that it had and made it so hard to obtain for a lot of people. Making it much easier to gain masters now really makes it harder to differentiate between the mid/high diamond teams and those that really are a league above the rest. I guess once everyone has used up their bonus pool the better players will rise to the top but even then I have never really used division ranking as an indicator of skill. This is because I have found that mass gaming can get you to the top of your division without you actually being the best.

Personally I don't give a **** about division ranking.