What does it take for a promotion?

[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