Problems with Blizzard's solution to "Smurfing"

"What if you're a pro player? For the first few matches you'd be playing against not so good players till the match making system works out you're a pro. So if the pro players waited a week or so and didn't play Battle.Net matches right away. In short they could have a few matches of easy win at the beginning."

You would. The system has to learn how good you are. You can't expect the pro to just play the computer in a "test run" and then get an accurate gauge of their skill. However, you only have a few profiles, so you can't keep smurfing forever, at least not without buying the game again.

"And for those who do play Battle.Net at the beginning. For the first few matches. It'd not be playing against equal skill. It'd be hope I don't get a pro till the match-making sorts us all out."

I wouldn't expect you to face a pro unless you've won your first seven or so matches. I presume you would start against total newbs and then work your way up. However, while this seems logical, I don't believe Blizzard has actually said so.

"What can be done about this initial flaw in the match-making system?"

I don't think anything short of precognition can fix this "flaw". I don't expect a student or new employee to immediately learn a new skill either; it takes a bit of time. Why should we expect battle.net to be any different?

Or were you talking about the first few games played after launch? I would hope beta rankings would persist (since the difference between the last beta patches and the final product would probably be minimal).

 

theres really no perfect way to solve this problem, blizzard has set up the easiest solution, i mean you could force all players to play matches against computers before playing online, but even then the pro player could epicly fail just to get a few easy matches in, but really is it worth it?

 

I was talking about everything you said in your post and the first few after the final retail release launch. But I doubt beta rankings (if there is any) would carry over to final release. Simple because not everyone will be in the bata. But I do agree with you. No system is perfect. And this system's flaw is that it needs to learn how good you are first. Amd in those few games a player might get others he is better or worse then.

But hopefully over time with a lot of SC2 games the match-making system will be such that those few early games and their results will for the most part become insignificant to your total SC2 rankings.

 

My Humble Apologies if someone mentioned this already, but.

The rating that pits you vs other players can be hidden, while the one you show to other players can be cleaned off so that you can start anew. (At least on the surface in looks)

So despite how many times you clean it up to make it look more appealing, your hidden match making rating will continue to pit you vs players of your overall progress in win/lose profile, or how ever they designed it.