How rating works

Every ranked game changes one number: your rating. Here is what it means and what moves it.

The short version

• Everyone starts at 1,500. It is a starting line, not a score you earned.
• Your first five ranked games are placement. Your number jumps around, then settles.
• Only ranked games count. Games against the computer or against friends never change your rating.
• You are matched with players near your number.
• Beating someone better than you is worth more. Losing to someone worse costs more.
• Your rating is yours and it stays. A new season does not reset it.
• Each race has its own rating. Your Terran and your Zerg are rated separately.

Your rating is a guess about you

Your rating is the game's best guess at how well you play. Every ranked result is a clue, and every clue makes the guess better.

Picture the game watching you through fog. At the start it can barely see you, so one result can change its mind by a hundred points. After twenty games the fog has cleared and it takes a lot more to move you.

This is why your number bounces early and steadies later. Nothing is wrong when that happens. Your first number means very little. Your tenth means something.

Your first five games

The first five ranked games on a race are your placement games. Your profile counts them for you, like "Placement 2/5".

Two things are true while you are placing:

1. Your number can move a long way after one game. That is on purpose, so you reach your real level in five games instead of fifty.
2. You do not appear on the ladder yet.

Placement happens once per race. If you have played fifty games as Terran and then try Zerg, your Zerg starts its own five games. It does not start from nothing, though. The game uses what it already knows about you as a starting point.

What counts and what doesn't

Only one thing moves your rating: a ranked 1v1 against another player, from the Ranked play queue.

There is a reason for this. If friendly games counted, two players could trade wins all afternoon and climb without playing anyone else. If games against the computer counted, the number would measure free time instead of skill.

Those games still count for everything else. They appear in your match history with full statistics, and they add to your games played, your win rate and your record by race.

How you are matched

Press Ranked play and you join a queue. We look for an opponent close to your rating.

• We start close. At first we only look at players near your number.
• We widen the longer you wait, so a quiet evening does not leave you waiting forever.
• We never pair two players who are far too far apart, however long the wait. A game nobody can lose is not worth playing.
• The map is drawn for you. Nobody picks the map in ranked, because picking the map is picking an advantage.
• You choose your race before you queue. That is the race the game is rated on.

Nothing else is going on behind the scenes. There are no streak bonuses and no pairing that tries to keep you playing. Whoever has waited longest goes first, and gets the closest opponent available.

What a win is worth

One idea covers almost all of it.

You gain by doing better than expected, and lose by doing worse.

Before the game starts, your two ratings set an expectation. Then:

• Beat a higher rated player and you gain a lot. Nobody expected that.
• Beat a lower rated player and you gain a little. That was the expected result.
• Lose to a lower rated player and you drop a lot.
• Lose to a higher rated player and you drop a little.

So "I won but barely gained anything" is normal, and so is "I lost once and dropped a lot". What matters is how surprising the result was, not how hard the game felt.

Time away

Nothing is taken away while you are not playing. Your number stays exactly where you left it.

What fades is how sure the game is about it, because players improve or get rusty while they are away. Your first games back may move your rating more than usual until it has seen you play again.

The ladder and seasons

The ladder is the ranking: every player whose rating has settled, best first. To appear on it you need to finish placement and keep playing. The ladder shows your rank, your rating, your record for the season and your current run of results.

A season is a quarter of the year, like 2026 Q3. It exists so there is a fresh race to the top a few times a year.

The important part is what a season does not do:

• Your rating carries over. It is yours, and a quarter away does not erase it. This is the number on your profile.
• A season's table is a record of that season only: the games you played inside it, and where you finished.

So if you played a lot in spring and nothing in summer, your rating is exactly what you earned. You are simply not on the summer ladder until you play a game.

When a result does not count

A ranked result only counts when both players' games agree on what happened. Almost always this is instant and invisible.

If it cannot be confirmed, because someone dropped at the wrong moment or the two reports disagree, nobody's rating changes. We would rather leave a rating alone than move it on evidence we do not trust.

Quick answers

Is 1,500 good? It is where everyone begins, so on day one it means "we don't know yet". After a few games it starts to mean something.

Why do my races have different ratings? Because they are different skills. Most players are not equally good with all three.

Which rating shows on my profile? The race you have played most. The tabs on the rating card switch between them.

I won and barely gained anything. You were expected to win, so the win was worth little.

My rating did not change at all. The game was not ranked, or the result could not be confirmed. Your match history shows which.

Does playing more raise my rating? Only winning more than expected raises it. Playing more makes your number more accurate, which is what puts you on the ladder.

Do I lose rating for not playing? No. Your number stays where it is.