Balance is irrelevant

General Discussion
1

Balance is irrelevant as long as skill is a more impactful variable. Even in Grandmaster league that is the case. Watch as a Grandmaster protoss is obliterated by slow lings:

https://streamable.com/el03n

This should basically never happen but it proves that even in Grandmaster league, balance has an infinitesimally small impact compared to skill. For this reason, balance should always be irrelevant to your game analysis - a small difference in skill can radically rewrite how the game works and for that reason it should be your primary focus especially since that’s a variable within your own control.

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2

Or it proves that Zerg is broken and protoss really is in desperate need of help against zerg, being outmatched by a landslide and a half except the 90 second window of immortal-prism all-in.

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3

This allin hits faster than an immortal allin so if this was op do you really think immortal allins would ever be a thing?

4

I can’t believe I actually upvoted you…

5

At the very highest levels such as GSL code S, everyone is more or less at the peak of possible play. For instance, Serral only plays like what, 6% faster than Reynor? Balance cannot be ignored.

6

I mean, you say this, but yet you find Imbalance was the cause of literally every Terran GSL win…

(If I’m wrong, please tell me you think you were wrong in writingnof Maru as a patch Terran and then we can agree).

Otherwise, this post should be titled, “Balance is irrelevant… Unless Terran wins, the balance is the only relevance.”

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7

Good point.

I can’t count how many times people flip flopped. When Maru/innovation/TY loses, the game is broken. When PvT was at 43% win ratio, skill matter more.

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8

You post these as humble-brag posts. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, but you disguise it as a “lesson thread”.

Just come out and say “look how great I am”.

Pretty decent wins.

9

True, but when was PVT at 43%? (Or did you mean Terran won 43/100–which did happen, but was rare).

10

Aligulac around the time when WM was first buffed to do AoE 1shot sentries and HT.

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11

Exactly, which is precisely why immortal all-ins stopped being a thing at pro-level. Yet, they are nerfing it anyways. It will be fun laughing at how bad protoss does after this patch.

12

2016 Q4 - 2017 Q1, lists from 171 to 182 on aligulac. PvT was mostly 45% or lower (except for perhaps one or two periods), and even dropped to 40% (list 180)… until Adept Phoenix resurfaced… and then immediatelly nerfed.

There’s nothing really noteworthy more recently, as there were around 3-4 periods in 2018 and 2019 together where PvT was over 55%, and around same number of periods in 2017 where it was sub-45%, with those “breaches” never reaching 43% and 57%. And it was scarce enough to be considered as isolated incidents (that is, they weren’t consecutive periods).

13

Beating a low GM with a troll build isn’t anything worth bragging about. You should see people like PartinG when they lose. THAT stuff is funny.

14

That statement might have meaning if you were capable of distinguishing between balance whine and a simple discussion about the game.

15

Sigh… Alright, let me explain.

Lets immagine you always played Tom and Adam. Tom is Zerg player and Adam Terran, while you like playing Protoss. All of you are evenly skilled and enjoy playing one another. Suddenly, patch shows up that grants infestors root again, adds +1 range to broods and zergling attack +1.

Now, Tom wins all games and soon stops playing with you. You dont really mind as you still have Adam to play with and some other Zerg soon shows up to play with you anyway. And he indeed will. Meet Jake. Jake is a bit special. Where before you enjoyed wholesome games playing against Tom, now Jake just A-moves lings into your wall.

He cant macro, he cant micro, he only knows one strategy and is overall worse player than both you and Adam. Yet he still win games against you because his lings were buffed.

Would you not feel discontent?

16

It is not a troll build, he get proxy hatched, he scouted don’t see any gas but didn’t panic build a forge and skip the nexus in response. He deserved to lose.

17

It is a troll build. It should never win a game ever.

18

If both players are at peak human SC2 ability the result will 100% be determined by balance (if they play enough games vs each other).

I define peak human ability as someone with a one in 1.000.000.000 talent practicing for 40.000+ hours in a perfect practice environment.

The current best players on the planet are nowhere near peak human SC2 ability. Maybe 40% at best. So a standard GM is maybe playing at 15-20% of peak human ability.

In other words: Balance influence all levels but below pro level the effect is very small.

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19

In theory, that would be true but only over an average of a large number of games. In reality, the game is too chaotic and constantly shifting to know what is best and who is best at it. Serral is doing well in this meta but in the previous one he couldn’t make it past opening rounds of tournaments. In HotS there were players like Byul who dominated but he retired when ling bane hydra replaced ling bane muta. He just couldn’t get it to work. The current meta really fits in well with how Serral thinks and plays to his strengths, but that probably won’t always be the case. Another example is neeb. He was at where Serral is now. He’s still really good but nowhere near the level he showed when he was dominating. Serral is now losing much more than he did last year just like Neeb did. The game is always shifting and as it shifts it plays to different peoples strengths so there isn’t a defacto “x player is better for y reasons” because what is best changes.

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20

The zerg had a plan. He built the proxy hatch to deny the protoss wall but why would he do that? It is so obvious as to why the protoss want to wall vs zerg in the first place. He didn’t saw the inevitable ling flood coming his way that’s why the build worked. If he canceled his expansion and get a cannon up asap instead he could have won this easily.

People should stop being arrogant and think only the “meta” is the valid way to play the game. If a strategy works, then you should pay attention and learn something from it, that’s how you improve. Be humble and you will get past these cheeses that will eventually net you easy wins.