Season 4 of StraCraft 2 has finally begun!
For those of you who don't know, when you play StarCraft 2 multiplayer using the Battle.net matchmaking system it will rank you in accordance to how often you win against people who are better than you. The first time you play a multiplayer game it will ask you to play 5 placement matches so that it can pit you against people from the different 'leagues'. The leagues are similar to any league in that the more you win against people who are better, the higher up the league you go. This eventually leads to you increasing from Bronze, to Silver and so on. And as you go up, other people must come down. It's all a crazy number crunching headache of sums based on many data sets including how often you win, who you win against, who they win against, how often you play and so on.
Essentially, anything you do in the multiplayer game generates a number which is used to calculate where you sit in the global StarCraft 2 player base. It also allows Blizzard to match you up so that you should on average win half of your games, and lose half of your games. If this isn't the case then you're in the wrong league and Blizzard will pit you against a player who may be at the bottom or top of their current league in a placement match, after which the winner goes into the higher league, and the loser drops the league just below. It really is awesome.
Right, so about this season malarky. In order to keep the game fresh, allow new players to come in and to stop people having ridiculous numbers in their win/lost stats page, Blizzard reset your history to an extent and everyone almost starts again. If you were in platinum before however, you just need to play one placement match in this new season before you can continue where you left off rising through the ranks. Your history for the previous season isn't lost, instead it is all recorded in your profile page on Battle.net for all to see. Big news with this release is that Season 4, and every season from now on, will last 8 weeks, before the ranks are frozen and reset again. I'm not sure if this is too fast or just right, but 8 weeks doesn't seem to be a long time . . . we'll see how it goes I guess.
Now the reason I'm so excited is that this is perfect timing for me to jump in and start playing multiplayer on the ladder more, and to also try and get more people into doing the same so we can all have more fun :)
See you out there in Season 4 :P
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