The Non-Stress leagues

Many people in the Starcraft 2 scene play the game for the purpose of improving and profiting. Others focus more on playing for fun. Often, the people playing for fun indulge themselves in the world of team games, the generally less stressful ladders. The world where seeing someone build exclusively ravens, or only attacking with storms isn't questioned by the opponents. Team leagues are a great place for people to both learn to react to unique things, and unwind from the stresses of a losing streak and high risk play.

Just click it.

The team leagues serve a few purposes: they allow friends to play together without competition, and they allow for people to play while allied with random people. There are two different ladders for this: team random and premade teams. A premade team for 2v2s, 3v3s or 4v4s will face other premade teams, and a random team will face random teams.

Placements for premade team games tend to be more indicative of the skill of both team players, but since random team leagues will have 5 placements with anywhere from 5-15 different players as your teammates. Premade teams will likely be placed based off of the capability of the players. However, in my experience I would say if there is a gap in the quality of the players within, they will be placed in a league in the middle/on the higher end of the players 1v1 leagues.

Team leagues are infamous for having incredibly unconditional play. People like Day[9] can be seen as partially to blame for this. Many players use their 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 ladders to try out the new Funday Monday topic, or try monobattling. The fact that this is present in team leagues allows for the players up against it to try and see how their builds work against incredibly random things. On top of that, the no-stress nature of the team leagues allows for people to test new things.

The bane, and the hero of the team leagues.

These ladders permit people to enter a no-stress environment, where bronze players can face diamonds, where a 200/200 army of hellions isn't unseen, where reapers are used, and where the stress and anxiety of a losing streak is null. Players should find themselves here more often, and enjoy the silly nature of non-competitive play.