What does it take for a promotion?

[Yipperpants]

To guess at my own hidden rating, I've been generalizing the hidden skill of my opponents based on their estimated win percentage.

So say a guy has a score of 1400 and 100 wins. 1400/10 is 14 pts per game which, assuming wins award somewhere between 10 to 20 points and losses deduct 10 points, is pretty close to a 100+% win percentage. If the points/wins is closer to 10, then (without doing actual math) it's more towards 70%. At 5pts/win, then it's probably around 30-40%.

So assuming that they didn't changes leagues and are not currently in a streak and a few more really terrible assumptions, being matched against players with higher win percentages generally means your hidden skill is climbing. And then somewhere around 10+, you'll start to get matched against players of the next league. When you only get matched against players of the next league, you're likely to get promoted. I think.

[Magnum]

I won my 5 league placement matches and was placed in the Gifted league. Precedently, I had won 3 placement matches and lost 2 on my father's iPad and was also placed in the Gifted league. So, why does I get placed to Gifted league with 5 placement matches won ? There's a problem, don't you think...

[wonderpug]

I'm pretty sure it depends how good the players you beat were.

[L3R4T]

A friend won his first 5 games and was promoted in master directly.
For you information i had to do 97games (around 4 or 5 loss) to become super titan

[Magnum]

I've lost more than 10 games due to huge mistakes. I'll have to wait for a while before gettting promoted to Master xD

[CombatEX]

The system is certainly broken but I'm sure the devs know it and will address it soon. A friend of mine (roommate actually) went 5-0 in placements and landed in masters. He beat 7 masters and a supertitan. He got demoted to gifted with ~17-1 record (the loss being to a supertitan, CtrlAltDefeat). Since demotion he has played almost exclusively gifted players. Granted recently many of these gifted players are being promoted to master mid game but seriously... How is he supposed to be promoted if he doesn't play against masters? Matchmaking seems to be flawed at these lower levels. He currently has a 90%+ record but isn't motivated to play league. Now he mostly plays friendlies and is currently 10W/14L against top 100 super-titans (and he was player 2 in almost all of these games to get better practice). Of course he should keep getting matched against Gifted players in ladder though! =P

Though still a pain, I play enough that the long time it took to get to Masters was ultimately okay (still incredibly boring though), but for people who only have a couple games going at a time the issue is further aggravated.

I'll say it again, in SC2 if you go 5-0 in placements you may not place masters, but you can be sure you'll at least play diamonds the next 5-10 games and if you win all of those you'll go on to play masters. Promotion to masters will rarely take 30+ games if you have a 90% w/l. Or even so, you'll be playing exclusively masters players at the very least since the goal is to lower w/l to 50%. Ld

[Thrutchy]

For reference, I was just promoted after 35 wins, 1 loss (3rd placement match), and 599 points. I think my last 10-15 games were with one league ahead. Hopefully I get a little more competition and start losing a few more games.