in your opinion, did the average skill level of amateur players on bnet increase or decrease over time ?

depends of personality.If you want to learn from your mistakes by watching replays and train hard, and not be bored after 5 games, you will improve. If you keep losing to 1 strategy for several times, you will not.

I think the average level decrease beacuase the best players play on pro ladder.

Currently its not as high as it used to be because of the pro ladder + summer time. I've played and won some of the players ranked between 10th-20th on ladder (northrend) and I'm an average player. The highest rank on ladder is barely 44, remember when some people even had 60- 61?

So it's definetly worse now but it will get "higher" as school starts. But overall the skill has increased because you just don't meet noobs anymore, even if you meet people with shity micro, they may have learned the strategies and do decent at them.

just look at the ladder levels , 2 years ago to get ranked u needed 36 lvl , now u need 26 lvl.Maybe thats because much fewer ppl play bnet nowadays but I think the level has rather lowed since most of the decent players nowadays prefer ggc because of the much better play conditions

how can the skill level be high when about a third of all players are hacking?

have u noticed that before u got lvl 3 (1.21) for winning ONE solo game, now u get lvl TWO!!!! for ONE solo game, its like rt. -.-'

With the new zMap hack it'll decrease because the maphack basically detects when your units are low on hp and moves them back. Auto-micro technology ftw! Only $25!

Post creater said about "average skill level of amateur players " not the pro players that dont play on ladder anymore. I think it was increast alot, over that past 2 years avrage lvl of my opponents has decreased from 40 to 38, but when i look my old replays, I really played like a noob back then.

yep, skill level in bnet has increased over the time. As a newcomer you have to play at least 1 year to be average(depending on games/day and talent and the way you train). For dota you need 1 month and you are the king of all the noskiller dota player. YES dota is NO skill! (compared to WCIII)

dota is noskill in its purest form we all know that but stay on topic plz