Right. So then you’d be winning more vs Terran and losing more vs Protoss and Zerg and still have a 50% win rate overall. How is this an argument for Terran not being harder?
Primarily, because it’s not an argument into itself. It is an example of how you can make something that seems even but isn’t.
It has the same logical basis as:
No matter what races are put in the example, it holds exactly as true.
What it is an actual argument for is that you could theoretically make something that looks even but actually isn’t.
This is because that sentence was brought up as, specifically, a refutation of the idea from earlier:
Because the first part is an inherent contradiction with the set up of all things are even and the second’s just… intentionally missing lots of possibilities.
The only way to hit equilibrium (50% win rate), even with more Terran than P/Z, is that if the win rate is lower vs Z/P, it has to be higher vs Terran. The higher population can dissipate that effect, but it’s still there.
That it went upwards for zerg at some point. For protoss 2017 was peak. It went rapidly downhill after that. The voidray buff was the more balanced eras of sc2 but that was incredibly poor design and had some very unfair cheeses against terran.
The buff for EMP existed because of how steady targeting works. Prior to LOTV ghosts beat HTs directly with snipe. Now this is no longer possible. HT will always beat ghost in 1v1 fight (if not straight up kill him). Enhanced shockwaves were introduced to help terran deal with mass energy units, especially infestor which saw return to prominence in 2019 a.ka. “broodlord infestor 2.0”.
Currently EMP has been restored to original radius from wings of liberty but what about snipe ? HTs are now SUPER DEADLY in tvp. Landing emp on all of them is literally impossible. You will alwasy get 2-3 storms in the face. On ladder i see most protoss abuse this by getting lots of templars. More than ever.
Yeah No.
If you lose with Ghost vs ht you did a Lot wrong.
Please send in a replay to harstem iodis with this Claim. The Last Time someone did this He almost Had a Heart Attack from laughing.
Ht vs Ghost is Like saying Close range sniping is easier than having a shotgun. Because this is what its basically comes down to (only that if you successfully snipe you have 1 ghost down. if you shoot your shotgun 5 hts are down).
Just to add a few things to the topic:
If ghosts are so weak vs high temps, then why do pros build ghosts to counter high temps? Ok lets thay its the only real possibility then why there is just one small paragraph on liquipedia for ghost saying:
“Well placed EMPs from a handful of Ghosts will devastate an opposing Protoss army, eliminating the majority of their shields and nullifying any casters that they may have. This is especially helpful against heavily shielded units such as the Immortal and also entirely removes the impact of High Templar and Sentries from the battle”
And there are multiple multiple paragraphs for high temps stating how difficult it is to keep high temps alive without getting emp such as: spreading high temps across the map, baiting terran to waste all the emp or just having them in a warp prism and do a storm drop.
Or just easier: Just looking at the blizzard tool tipps would be enough. It states: ghosts are strong vs high templar and high templar are weak against ghosts because literally everyone whos competent at sc2 knows that its far easier to emp all the high templars compared to feedbacking all the ghosts. Also if you feedback all the ghosts, do you have energy left for storm? 
Yes, that’s what I said.
In fact,
What I don’t understand is what you’re getting at. I checked these numbers already - the average win rates as each race against each race is, as it should be, in the 47 to 53% range, if you exclude Bronze and Grandmaster*, which means, very directly, that there is no weird problem or issue at hand in this regard despite the ridiculous over-population of low league Terrans. Their win rates don’t lag compared to the not-actually-50% win rates of similarly ranked players.
There was another point here, but I deleted it in editing and forgot what it was because I am a statistics gremlin or something.
* a. Bronze player win rate is 37 - 42 % and Grandmaster win rates are 58 - 62%. It’s absurd, but logical - There’s no longer ranked placement to fall or climb to move the player’s win rate closer to 50%.
* b. This is not completely accurate, as the average win rate of Silver players was 44 - 48% and of Masters players was 50 - 55%. But it’s for the same reason.
Tangent, but interesting from this same data is that versus random, GM win rate is 75 - 80%, while Bronze win rate against random sits at 45 - 48%, much higher than their actual win rate — and further interestingly, this disparity isn’t true of Silver - vs Race ranges from 44 to 48 but vs Random is 45 to 47 - and this stability of Random is true as you climb.
1 Like
That the fact that Terran players have lower average MMR means that they, on average, have to lose more than they win. Of course, the algorithm tries to keep you at roughly 50%, so that means they get demoted (or not promoted, as is the case).
First, no, players of a race do not have to have imbalanced win rates for their race to have deviated MMR. They can have a population difference instead: Suppose that Silver is 20% Protoss but all other leagues are 33% of each race, with 50% win rates.
Protoss average MMR would be inflated from this, but that doesn’t mean - inherently - that there’s something wrong.
And, no, “X rank is (not 33%) of a race” does not mean that there’s anything wrong - after all, the game is 37-38% Terran when counting random separately (7-8%). We should expect to see that carry over, that 37% of each rank is Terran.
As you go up the ladder, Zerg players steadily increase, while Terran players decrease but spike in Diamond but Protoss population has a sine curve on its bars. That’s got dozens of possibilities by itself.
But, and most importantly: No. The reason Terran MMR is on average trash is not because they lose more. It’s because there’s many more of them at lower ranks. The percentage of Terrans in Silver, Gold, and Platinum - all Leagues whose win rates are 50% - is significantly higher.
While, yes, you could argue that that’s because the system is bumping them until their win rate stabilizes near that 50% mark - and I would not be able to actually disagree - the thing that that data suggests to me is the following:
Terran is the easiest race to get an initial handle on, to understand as a player still learning the game’s flow.
What this, in turn, means, is that of the players who will be bronze this season because they are currently bad at the game, for a number of factors, choose to be Terran - We’ve gone over these before, but once more:
• Its mechanics are intuitive for most, and those mechanics are present in most RTS.
• Its tutorials do the best job of explaining how the race works. The Wings campaign works very like ladder Terran, but the Heart and Legacy campaigns don’t. The tutorial game nuances fail to prepare you for Zerg, and Zerg’s production generally is a big stumbling block for players*.
• Its unit advantages and play aides - Bunkers, Tanks, repair - are things that players feel greatly comforted by the safety of, and therefore will pick more often.
• It’s also the humans, and there’s a lot of people who will pick the race because it is the humans, whereas the people who will pick a race because they don’t want the humans are divided in two.
• Bio is ‘hype’ so there’s a fair contingent of people who want to learn how to do the cool hype splits and devastating comebacks - except don’t have the mechanical foundation for that so it doesn’t work.
In a sense, this boils down to this:
Bad players are more likely to be comfortable with, and therefore play, Terran.
Which I repeat despite being something that last time I said it you insisted it said something it didn’t say, because I have studied this to the degree that is particularly feasible for my personal range of influence (<200 samples).
However, these statements have already been said, the quoted line’s relevancy disputed at length only for you to almost entirely ignore it when those rebuttals got originally posted. :\
*As a note, because I like notes, being pissed at Heart of the Swarm’s babying was actually the thing that made me care and have tracked this information a few years ago. I was infuriated because it took three missions to explain stuff that Wings basically didn’t bother explaining – but then getting other peoples’ opinions and watching them play really let me realize that, no, Zerg macro just is weird and hard to parse for quite a few people.
1 Like
The difference is now Terrans get 2 ravens, one to tax apm from a 4 gate blink stalker player and the other to deny vision around terran’s main. I think you’re downplaying the nerf, the 20 seconds delay on medivac production does hamper the ~7 min +1/stim/combat shields quite a bit. That’s the difference between 1 and 2 colossus or charge finishing or an armour upgrade etc. It’s one of those instances where I have to ask if it wasn’t a nerf let’s change it back then. 
I think you’re downplaying the metashift also. We have Classic opening up mechtoss, We have Hero going fast HT and immediately storm-dropping SCVs. We’re seeing more motherships earlier on and we’re seeing tempests stomp face which pair really well with HT. Go watch Nightmare vs Byun for an example.
The one thing I can agree with is that cyclones are a pain for Protoss early game since gateway units don’t cut it without upgrades and they easily stop aggressive builds from toss with the exception of voidray cheeses, ironically. I watched Parting try to make the MaxPax build work and the amount of shibals went through the roof.
So then, Terran players are, on average, inferior players…?
Nope. Rather than do some fine tuning so it has more impact. I just doesnt make sense that you can disable an already very tech heavy and very costly but weak t3 unit just like that. Its still a very viable build.
You mean like we further let the meta settle and let protoss figure out new ways to play ? And what if terrans counter it by figuring out how to play against that? So far they dont have a good standing vs terrans in general. So we let them cook but in the end they will most likely fail anyways. Not to mention that one of the biggest tournies is like tomorrow and we already can assume that protoss wont play a big role in it.
Its pretty sad to see.
Yeah. exactly. The problem is it shuts down nearly every aggressive play from protoss, while terran aggressive builds are still plenty and viable and the cyclone added some further aggressive plays too. This is nuts. This is one of the reasons i want raven push turned further down, since t already got plenty of strong shenanigans while pros agreed that protoss need more stability in early/midgame.
Are you just deliberately trying to be wrong at this point, or whats going on here?
2 Likes
The degree to which you desire to state this is absurd. You keep saying this and I have kept posting continually more information about why this isn’t the case, every time, but you eventually just loop back to it without having ever addressed literally a single one of the reasons I’ve told you that this sentence does not actually bear resemblance to reality.
“Terran players are on average inferior” is true if and only if you decide to exclusively use a mean average over the player statistics. As has been shown, if you do anything more complicated than that when analyzing the player base’s ranks, you will very quickly notice a dozen other weird things.
Let’s use an easy pro player example to demonstrate those weird things - For a very long time, Serral’s Zerg was completely indominable. Is that Serral being simply a god gamer, or does it stem from Zerg being the strongest?
And the answer to this question is that it's both. Zerg becomes naturally favored as you go up in the ranks - this clearly demonstrates that as you gain skill, Zerg becomes stronger, because there’s weirdly fewer Zergs in Platinum* than you would expect from the other trendlines.
But Serral is also just that good at the game. Tons of practice and making sure to mind his well-being goes a long way.
Consider Wilt Chamberlain being seven feet tall - sure, it helped him a lot in his sport of choice, but it wasn’t that he was tall that made him good - it’s that he tried so hard and did lots of work to get there. Serral’s been nonstop trying since 2011. One does not simply place 1st or 2nd in over 5/6ths* of tournaments entered in five whole years without being an extremely good player.
*I picked Platinum to put a league here. I don’t actually remember what it is or have access to my statistics right now. For Serral, I did a quick count on the liquipedia page, so I might have miscounted.
1 Like
The most imbalanced matchup in IEM so far is TvZ where terrans have a 57% win rate. PvT is 48% and PvZ is 49%. The ones that made it into IEM were solely based on their vP performance. I can see Zerg struggling more than usual this tournament.
You’re about the only person I’ve seen campaigning for a raven nerf and ironically the solution is uber warp prism micro.
Yeah but there have been “balance reports” on reddit which listed the winrates of all tournies and pvt got around 40% to 43% (not saying its 100% reliable but using only iem would be also pretty flawed too) and pros especially said with last balance patch they actually wanted to fix pvt…they didnt but they claimed they wanted to.
Its true, terran now has a pretty big advantage in both matchups tvp and tvz so i suspect terran doing well in kato. Or at least its like 100% certain protoss will do exactly nothing.
Watch what king of clown balance council harstem has to say about this after latest patch that let terran be the winner of buff/nerf ratio:
//twitter. com/HarstemSc2/status/1743627088953790707
I mean the raven was nerfed in patch. Im just saying it was not enough. I dont know many guys who said the same but i know many guys that basically said that the nerf wasnt that visible.
You mean hot pickup of colossus when disable is about to hit?
My dude, whether or not they’re attracting bad players because they’re more accessible, that still means they’re worse players. This is literally your sentence, man.
Denotatively, I agree the statements A and B below have a significant degree of similarity.
A. The mean average SC2 Terran is worse than the mean average SC2 player.
B. Bad SC2 players are more likely to pick Terran than any other race.
They are not factually* equivalent, in both directions: A does not mean B, and though B almost ensures A, it doesn’t guarantee it.
The important distinguishing mark that I am drawing between these two sentences, however, is that if one was to read them without context, the conclusions most people will draw from them are radically different - especially when you exclude ‘mean’.
Statement A can be read as a sweeping generalization, a complaint about balance, an analysis of numbers, but also is a value judgment to Terrans about how good they are when reading it - and, in my opinion worse still is that pre-established biases can lend it to saying two opposing things: Either, because the ‘average’ Terran is worse (as a player), it means that their race carries their rank more than other races; or, as you’d previously asserted, the average Terran has lower rank because their race is more difficult than other races.
The advantage of B is that will be more likely - though far from guaranteed - to be interpreted as something close to, though not actually, the intended message, and has no ambiguity on what it’s saying and it passes an easier to swallow judgment - By having “Bad players” as the head, people will be more likely to distance themselves from the sentence.
* And if this wasn’t what you meant when you used the word literally, then you need to go read a dictionary or seriously consider your words better. Using a word as an auto-antonym, losing the distinction between the definitive “This is just a fact” and the emphatic “It’s TOTALLY this I swear” within a single word is to the massive detriment of toneless speech like pure text is.
1 Like
You ever hear of “arguing semantics?” You knew what I meant and you know I was being hyperbolic.
Is it safe to say that you’re categorizing players as “inferior players” in order to explain the MMR disparity?
1 Like
Half the issue is that you’re arguing that A is B when they are not actually equivalent statements! I have no idea when you’re being hyperbolic or factual, because there is no tone over text: The only thing we have are forms of emphasis but what that emphasis means to me is not the same as what that emphasis means to you.
In this paragraph, for example, I’ve used italics when, were I talking aloud, I would have stressed my voice differently, and bold when I would have used my hands.
Also, in no uncertain terms, semantics are important! While, apparently, I was able to figure out what you meant, that wasn’t a guarantee, because misinterpreting what’s gotten said has been a theme this whole thread, so as far as I was concerned, you could very well have meant that you were asserting the sentences were completely synonymous.
No?
The meaning of that sentence, when someone reads it, is different than the actual point. Like, look at the distinction from Miro:
The scan read of the lines in question -
Terrans are on average worse players versus
On average, worse players are more likely to pick Terran -
The important nuance of the idea that no, a Terran of X rank is not a better or worse player than another race at that rank is far more clear in the latter.
And, importantly, that’s also semantics!
1 Like