It is probably hell for Bronze 5 players only, as they get about 5 points for a win, but you would still be able to climb out, just a huge investment of time.
There are still really 10 placement games where your MMR confidence for each new season is slightly looser, so you will gain/loss more points in those matches. As it stands it gives you a reasonable chance to get a points boost with this system.
If though you are in Bronze 5, it will be harder for you I’m sure. I haven’t had to climb out of Bronze 5, so I won’t comment on how hard.
Until you get the xenterex logic treatment that adding more ranks will solve nothing. The b5 problem boils into the emotional vs logic solution. Logically a new iron rank would keep your mmr the same as now, dumb people would be fooled
Some are forgetting this. It’s not really 3 placement games. The real number is 13, except the first three ones you play with your previous season rank hidden.
During those games you gain and lose about 600 each game. So in a way, the game is lying to you just to get your rank visible sooner.
There are 13 placement games, or rather, 10 right after placing.
I get it, people were bored of playing 10 placements with their rank hidden. But the current system is a bit dishonest. Nothing changed at all, you just see your placement progress in real time now instead of it being obscured and hidden.
It really doesn’t if you go to Bronze 10 or even 15 those players will still move at the same rate. The players getting very few points per match are the ones with sub Bronze 5 MMR.
It never really was hidden. Your rank was whatever the rank of the other solo players on your team were. If I saw they were Gold 2 through Platinum 5, I knew I would be Gold 1.
That is why it is called as bronze hell… it is easy to calculate how hard it is.
Let’s say the player should be in silver or gold and manage to get a good 55 winerate. And let’s take as exemple the 17 points per win as previously mentioned.
After 100 games, which will take 25 days by playing 2 hours every single days. The player will get + 170 points. That means that he will get less point than a normal player will get with only one game. And here we are not even speaking about a retribution of 5 points per game.
Now imagine how much game he will need to play just to go to bronze 4… 1000 games ? Even more ?
How long will it take to just climb from bronze 5 to bronze 4 …? The answer is 250 days by playing every days 2 hours. I mean I can expect a master player to do that to climb to GM but who will do that just for the sake of the bronze 4 ?
As a result you have a population of player stuck in the same rank with nearly no one able to move to the next rank.
As a result you have a big diversity of players which is very difficult to manage for the matchmaker. And FINALY, as a result, you have random games which makes it very difficult to get more than 50 % of winerate if your skills are not several leagues ahead. And that is a loop… and I did not even mentioned secondary accounts here.
Who wants to tryhard more than 6 month, with randoms games, just to tell : « super ! I am now bronze 4 !!! » ?
Having a win rate close to 50% means that this person is already close to the rank where he belongs… That’s the whole idea behind the ladder - once you get to play with and against equally skilled players, the chance of winning is about 50%.
I am just wondering how some players think that they “should” be in silver/gold when their winrate in bronze5 is only 55%…
Sorry but that’s not the point of playing the ladder. Nobody really cares what rankings other players achieve. I don’t even care about my own ranking. Don’t play the ladder for the rank. Play it because you enjoy the matches. In my opinion SL offers the best matchmaking and the highest match quality in HOTS. What happens with my rank during that time happens passively anyway. I don’t have to care about it.
The thing is there is not a lot of difference between bronze and silver. If you add to that the fact that this league is a mess and quite random, don’t think that a silver 1 player will achieve better than 55%.
And even by taking 60%. After 100 games it will be only be + 340 points with an average of 17 points a game. That means that playing 2 hours per days it will take 25 days for only 340 points.
As a result a player will need to try hard for 3 months just to go the bronze 4.
That is the kind of efforts expected from player to move to the top ranks, not from player to move from the worse rank to the 2nd worse.
A good ranking system needs to be easy to climb at first ranks and very hard to climb for the last ranks.
The thing about bronze5 is, that it’s the lowest rank in the game. That means it’s also one of the biggest rank (a lot of players). You know, players can be endlessly bad at this game but they can’t get lower than bronze5. Bronze 5 is the catch basin.
The difference between two bronze5 players can be enormous in a negative way xD
The issue is not about players getting stuck in this rank because their skills is bellow bronze 5.
The issue is that even if a player is getting better and better by playing, even once he reach the skills relevant to be in silver, he will not be able to leave this league. He will need to play a thousand of games juste to climb from bronze 5 to bronze 4.
Anyway, this issue is acknowledged by Blizzard. Nothing new.