How advanced is the matchmaking system in Starcraft 2? Does the server attempt to match you up with people who are as good as you, or does it just randomly pair you up with another player? And if it's the former, how well does it work?
Starcraft – How does Starcraft 2’s matchmaking system work
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According to a post by a Blizzard employee, you might be able to play with your friends no matter where they are:
Getting people online, playing and interacting is obviously the overall goal for the Battle.net platform, and that includes allowing people to play across regional boundaries as they have in the past.
Unfortunately, there are a multitude of challenges we have to overcome due to the unique regional account and billing options that didn't exist in the past. But those hurdles aren't insurmountable, and we are looking into solutions that will allow interested players to obtain access to other regional versions without having to buy another full copy of the game. Those solutions are something we're currently planning to have available through Battle.net Account Management within the first few months of StarCraft II's release.
Before that solution is implemented though, you're correct in that you'd need to purchase a US copy of the game on launch day to play in the US region.
However notice that he is talking about a potential future feature which may end up not getting implemented (or not implemented in a satisfying way), so in the meanwhile I would be careful about which version to buy.
Handicap reduces the HP of your buildings and units to be the specified percentage of its full value. For Protoss units and buildings, both the HP and shields are reduced to that percentage.
So setting it at 90% means that a 150 HP unit will become a 135 HP unit (10% less). Setting it at 50% on a probe means that probe will have 10 HP and 10 shields. In cases where the result is a fraction, it is rounded up.
Here's a marine with 80% handicap value (and the nearby command center has 1200 HP):
Best Answer
The matchmaking system attempts to place you into matches at or near your skill level, after you've been initially evaluated by the 5 placement matches. It then maintains a few scores of your performance (based around wins/losses, and recent streak) and places you against players of a similar skill level.
I personally found the matchmaking in the beta to be quite accurate, matching me to players of my fairly average skill level. The more matches you play, the more accurate the matchmaking system seems to become; my first match after placement was a cakewalk, while the next few matches were more edge-of-your-seat types of matches.
If you want more in-depth information into the matchmaking system, the best place to look seems to be the Battle.net Leagues article on the TeamLiquid wiki.
Edit:
There's also a thread on the TeamLiquid forums titled SC2 Ladder Analysis which has a fairly comprehensive write-up of bnet2.0 matchmaking.