Blizzard Confirms Bugged Promotion System

Yeah Blizzard finally confirmed what everyone felt, the promotion system is currently bugged.  The problem comes in how the system works.  You have your rating and your league.  Your rating is a number, mine is 1300.  Your league is a color, mine is platinum.  You are matched against people with the same rating as you (not league).  As your rating goes up you face more and more opponents who have played and won/loss a similar number to you.

As you win more you will face better opponents who have as high of a rating as you.  When you lose you face weaker opponents.  The promotion mechanic comes in after you win quite a bit and consistently lose to people in a different league.  So if you beat all platinum players and only lose to diamond players they will promote you to diamond.

So what’s the bug?  It comes in when you actually are beating players you shouldn’t be.  Theoretically if you lost every match to people in higher leagues you’d actually get promoted FASTER than if you were to beat them.  The system doesn’t really have anything in place to deal with this so instead it just keeps putting you against people of an equal rating but never promotes you.

It’s been plaguing me for quite some time.  Basically all my ratings are 1200+ and my win/loss record is very good.  Yet my friends all get promoted to diamond with worse win/loss records.

Good to hear blizzard is finally fixing this.

The Ultralisk Bug/Nerf Fix

Starcraft 2 forums have been inflammed after that hotfix

The controversy is over a language difference.  In the original Patch 1.1 the intention of the change was to nerf ultralisk damage against buildings.  Instead the intention was to have ultralisks cleave everything they attack.  The obvious bug was the range increasing the cleave range against large targets.

Terran players are calling this a fix.

Zerg players are calling it a nerf.

It feels that this is a very different Starcraft community.  In the original Starcraft community there was a lot of anger over changes but never anything this bad mannered.

Patch 1.1.1: Ultralisk Bug Fix

Well it looks like they’re going to ‘fix’ the ultralisk bug.  It will still cleave units near buildings but instead the splash damage will be significantly lower.

This is actually going to have a pretty severe impact on zerg play.  What it means is that mass ultralisks are going to lose to mass thors.  In his latest match up Cool (A Fruit Dealer) was able to topple OGSTop by dropping ultralisks on thors and mineral lines.

Could be a sad day for zerg once again.

Edit: It also looks like they’re going to make mineral boosting impossible.  This is actually kind of sad for anyone decent because it means you’ll have nothing to do for the first minute of the match.  So yeah…. guess you’re just going to have to go back to just spamming buttons without purpose or flavor if you want to look like you have high APM.

Bugged Starcraft 2 Ladder

Blizzard indicated that the ladder is currently bugged.  They stated the problem was mid to lower ranked teams and players are going against strong players/teams.  I think it’s a little worse than this.  Look at this:

So what you can see from these screen shots is that our bottom bronze team is full on favored against this team.  Yet their team is a 3v3 platinum team.  And I do mean bottom bronze.  This team has been bugged from the start after 15 placement matches to get into bottom bronze and then another 10 wins with no ponts to them.  We are literally stuck at 0 with this team.  This is probably the worst possible bug blizzard has because it means I cannot play with my friends.  Blizzard has already indicated that any lost wins/losses will not be rewarded, so really what’s the point in me playing this game?

I’ve had a few 1v1 and random 2v2 matches not get credited but nothing as severe as this one where we’re facing very powerful platinum/gold teams and getting no reward for our wins over them.

Blizzard’s going to have to just go into the system and fix all of this stuff fast.  Otherwise they’re going to irritate a lot of gamers.  Blizzard’s getting so many reports about this that they have a generic QA response wrote up:

“We are currently looking in to this issue. Please continue to add any information or reports if you are not seeing points for a game in either the scorescreen, match history, or otherwise. “

Why thank you Blizzard it is good that you are looking into this.  It’s unfortunate that in the BETA TESTING they did not test out the achievement system or the ladder system otherwise this probably wouldn’t have happened.