Yes, you split them to the bottom 50% BY THEIR MMR. You didn’t split them individually by race, like here’s the bottom 50% of Terran players, here’s the bottom 50% of Zerg, etc. Of course they’re going to have similar MMR. That’s exactly what you selected them for.
That doesnt make any Sense. If it would be Like you claimed there should be a deviation between zerg mmr and terran mmr for Said bottom 50% of the Population.
But we dont See that. Instead we See that the Race doesnt Matter If you are bottom 50%. There are Just more terrans. Thats it. Thats all.
It is Not Like i only Look at gold Players and say hey Look they have the Same mmr. No sh!t Sherlock. That would be obvious. Its a very interesting and noteworthy Stat that terran and zerg have in fact the Same mmr for bottom 50% and top 50%. The reason you dont See the exact result as with total 100% of the Population is because the avg mmr of terran gets dragged down by terran being so much popular in Low leagues.
And as i Said now i have established exactly that. There are Just way more Casual terrans than Other races. Which makes perfect Sense.
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Okay so playing devil’s advocate for a moment; How do you know the MMR they have now isn’t because they’re playing a weaker race? Or conversely, how do you know that the MMR they have now isn’t boosted by playing a stronger race as a bad player?
If there are just “more terrans” wouldn’t the theory then go that there are a roughly equal amount of terrans represented in each league as the percentage of total population, rather than a general glut of Terrans in lower leagues (particularly gold and below) compared to the overall population?
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Only if you assume that there are more terrans as a completely random occurrence without discernable cause rather than because its the race the game encourages casual players to pick.
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You know, it’s funny you mention that. Throughout the game’s entire lifespan, even when the game was pay to purchase, people have claimed that. But I honestly don’t see it, though I’m willing to have my mind changed.
People say that it’s because the game’s FTP; but that wasn’t true back in HotS or early LotV. People say that it’s because the campagin teaches you terran, but the campaigns also teach you how to play every race now. But the reality is that there have always been more Terrans from the word go, and frankly speaking, the above reasons just don’t fly anymore, and were barely passable then, only if you squint and tilt your head sideways while looking at it from an awkward angle.
Every player now has access to multiplayer, has access to challenges, has access to arcade and customs, to vs AI and the tutorial (which you don’t have to select terran for IIRC - though it’s been a while). Every player also has access to coop, which teaches all 3 races, albeit marginally differently depending on which commander you use. And campaign has basic introductions on how to play the race for each race, albeit again, modified because campaign is very different from multiplayer for many, many reasons.
Frankly I can’t see it; if anything I’d argue that Protoss’ generally bulkier units and construction mechanics makes it just as easy, if not easier than playing terran at bronze or silver where they’re barely able to tell head from tails and many players don’t even build orbitals or warp-gate. Zerg, I can at least understand as it’s completely foreign to almost anything else RTS wise, but Protoss and Terran - at least initially - play pretty similarly albeit with a couple tweaks.
So, you obviously think it’s more likely that 40,000 Terran players are “just casuals.” But you don’t think it’s more like that, at the top level, 6 or so top Protoss players are “just less skilled” than their Zerg and Terran counterparts?
So under your hypothesis, only the really terrible players pick the overpowered race?
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The race selection is in fact not randomized. Meaning no, we cannot say which people picked which race and why. All we know is that terran is by far the most popular race and there has to be a meaning behind it (you know marketing, design choices, the fact that you will start the game with terran, the fact that the story revolves around the humans, the fact that we are humans, etc etc you name it; in short: there are reasons…which one we dont know but we know they arent distributed randomly and there HAS to be a reason because the deviation is simply too much for it to be random)
Meaning the assumption that it should all be distributed equally is not fulfilled. This is not a standardized test. This is not a lab test. To assume that terran players should be overall distributed equally is not logical. By that assumption every league has to be 36% terran, 26% zerg and 29% protoss.
Because at that level the difference in balance/design needs to be so significant that it overshadows how freaking bad they are. We are talking about people who play 3 depots before a single rax. Do you believe there is a flaw in design that big that it completly overshadows the lack of skill in lower leagues?
AND to continue this further: This heavy design flaw has to be visible even at pro play/ higher levels of play. If something can mess up the lower leagues that hard, it would be very very visible on pro play and would get fixed.
Another point would be that this flaw would be so apparent all over the years that it would have been adressed already by the designers. We had so many designoverhauls in all years of sc2. Like swarm hosts or how many times did protoss get completly reworked?
The simplest solution is ockhams razor: Terran does not worse or better in neither top 50% nor bottom 50% meaning there is no hidden agenda and the game is balanced for about 99.9% of the players.
I wasn’t suggesting that it should all be equally distributed. I was suggesting that if the terran population overall has (for example) 38%, Zerg has 24% and protoss has 30% with the remaining 8% being random, then wouldn’t terran also have 38% of the population in most if not all leagues on that server?
Hah, no I don’t. Again, I’m literally just playing devil’s advocate. We see stupid stuff in pro play too. “An Elazer of overlords” for example where he literally spent over 1k minerals on overlord production before even hitting 100 supply. That said, nothing so egregious as 3 depots/pylons before a rax/gateway.
You can make the argument that the skill of the player actually minimizes or mitigates this issue though.
coughWarpgatecough
Yeah, I get your point. Again, just playing devil’s advocate. To say there is a hidden agenda is absurd, frankly.
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Is it suddenly random for the Premier Tournament level players?
Never said “overpowered,” your words. I said “easier.”
Exactly.
But you often play the devils advocate and idk if im correct but often times “in favor” of bourne. Im just scared that you could drink too much of his koolaid.
Not yet and it will need a very very huge overwork. But there were 100000 of reworks and obviously not for the better for protoss 
mothership core. pylon overcharge, nexus overcharge, shield battery, shield battery overcharge, recall and the aoe reduced to a hit or miss ball. Frankly protoss design is so messed up and bad it hurts. Because the race has warp in and because the community doesnt want a strong protoss they just get c*cked and now they need to be glued to their bases which is also hurting the reputation of protoss there is literally nothing strong left for protoss except for warpin (a bit drastic but i hope you know what i mean)
meanwhile there are dozens of not that well thought design choices too for the other races but the community doesnt really want to change it. Creep is getting patched until this day because its just booooonkers broken of a mechanic. terran to have super strong defense and literally the most cost effective unit in the game IF you can micro good enough or outmultitask like crazy is also a very bad design…that should be the reason why terran players just sit in the game waaaaay too long. because…they are correct! a) never try to kill a terran and attack into them and b) there is always a chance for comeback
also f widow mines. and f ghosts. why are they good vs everything? another major design flaw. its never good to not build ghosts. they counter hts and also kill a third of protoss health without any counterplay.
why are fights over in like 0.5 sec?
im just venting a bit and naming just a few terrible design choices.
but i exactly said that:
So yeah i can only repeat what i wrote:
“The race selection is in fact not randomized. Meaning no, we cannot say which people picked which race and why.”
Because right now we see this: terran has 46% in bronze and silver and goes down to 36% in gold and then down to around 31% to 34% for higher leagues. Worth noting that 34% in masters and thus leading.
Im saying this is because there are just more casual t players. meaning from those 46% terrans in bronze/silver there is a higher percantage of players that wont advance compared to those other races (note that the development of the whole mmr things has been completed already and we rather see the results of it after those 13 years; the population of t in silver/bronze was always through the roof btw). in my eyes this is pretty much demonstrated by the fact that there is no real avg mmr difference between all races, doesnt matter if you look at top or bottom 50% (the overall mmr of terran is obviously lower on average because there are many many many terrans in bronze to silver, they might have the same mmr as the other races but due to the whole distribution of terran across the leagues it still drags them down)
So in short we could just ask: why is the jump of population for terran a whooopping 10% from silver to gold? (46% to 36%). The mmr range of silver or gold is not exactly huge. its 400 mmr and 300 mmr range for gold (compared to 1200 mmr range of diamond). Why is the difference in percantage so high? Because is it really this hard for a terran player to get over those 400 mmr? Or is it rather because they dont invest the time and energy at all for it? Its worth noting that the time and energy needed is next to nothing since we are still in the casual area and not even close to being an average player.
So yes, im on your side that the playerbase should not be equally 33% in upper leagues and terran is rather leading…which they actually do. But however im saying due to my impression (which is based on assumptions but also a bit of numbers) the races should not be at 36% t 26% z and 29% p because i dont assume the same “quality” of the “starting” players. Which is fair, because we dont have a randomized standardized case. This is reality. Reality is influenced by thousands and thousands of things.
Are you trying to argue that all the terran pros are deliberately making it harder for themselves to do their jobs?
semantics. You know darn well what youre saying.
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I have stated before: i accept that there are several reasons why protoss has been the underachieving race in terms of pro play for about 7 years.
However there were times where protoss was much more competitive than now, even if you use the argument that not all heavy hitting protoss are present right now.
The balance council, the pros, the majority of the community agrees that right now protoss is in the gutters. Not in terms of ladderbalance (btw some people believe ladder is actually greatly influenced by pro player balance, which isnt exactly true since we knew how bonkers broken zerg was in 2019 but they still werent leading every league and not even gm → a balance patch needs to really really really really hit hard in order to actually influence the ladderbalance, thus pro play balance and ladder balance (-> design ) are different things).
Nobody is saying they should win everything. I dont even know if people are actually saying they should win an equal amount. They simply say protoss needs to be able to actually win something Protoss has how many wins in gsl in last years? 1 in…6? 7? And as solar has shown us: even a much worse player can possibly win for once in a lucky night. good for him, but the thing is the tourny/the match is not always won by the “best” player. There is a pretty heavy causation ofc but there is a reason why we dont declare serral the winner in 3/4 of his matches right away.
It it tells tales about how freaking stubborn you are that you switch the topic to the premier level tournaments and trying to get some “gotcha” moment. this is just sad. You wont accept the “terrans do the same in bottom 50% same as other races” just because. just because it doesnt fit your agenda. you dont even have a real counter argument for that wheras i actually have counter arguments against using whole population: the distribution of the population draggs the avg mmr down. You basically use the 46% of terrans in bronze in silver to somehow say that every terran is doing worse.
a little explanation why this is so misleading: if you say every race is exactly the same and t, p and z are just skins (in that example its because those skins dont have an impact on the game = every race is doing equally on ladder, having same avg mmr) and there is a skin thats getting picked much much much more often because its just looking super badass cool and therefore it gets picked much much much more often in lower leagues and lets say because it doesnt get picked that often anymore in higher leagues we could make the assumption that because of that distribution of picking the skin and avg them on the leagues, the badass skin performs worse. it has somehow worse stats to it…which is false (and this is exactly the conclusion of bourne)
This is why i would split the population in 2 parts rather than just 1 part because we have such a deviating playerbase and cant assume that every race has the same starting point.
tldr: just read the strong text
No. I absolutely not. Protoss is very weak at the higher levels. They didn’t win a single Premier this year. You think that poor results like that just fall out of the sky?
Same time, you think that 12 years of Terran players under performing on the ladder all happened because of the magical fairy dust of “they’re all just new/casual even though they’ve been playing longer and play more actively…?”
They dont perform worse.
They dont play more actively. Their activity right now matches their distribution. Stop using this “fact” as you have no evidence for all of 13 years of sc2 that t has been playing more actively.
Stick to the facts please. Stick to what you can actually show and provide.
So youre saying protoss is easier… to lose with then? Because otherwise your argument is entirely incoherent.
Yet for some strange reason, their MMR doesn’t. 
I find it interesting that you find it population size relevant in this matter, but not when it doesn’t suit your needs.
And my stance has always been that Terran players are not somehow superior, but that they are not inferior.
Easier on the ladder, specifically from the range of low-to-mid Masters to especially high Masters and GM.
Skill ceiling is far lower, even players like Showtime who’re an actual boss on the ladder find tournament play brutally challenging to stay consistent in.
But you need to somehow provide any logic/argument/data to show it. Since the race distribution is completly biased and there could be 100000 reasons why its that way its simply not logical to claim that every race should have the same mmr based on their population.
Terran players are per se not inferior. As the average mmr for bottom or top 50% says. They are not doing worse or better. They are leading the highest league apart from gm. They simply have more casual players. Thats it. Thats all. And thats pretty logical. In every other term the race distribution is perfectly fine…but not for bronze and silver.
Their mmr also match within their group of 50% of the players.
I didnt say population size doesnt matter. I actually gave reasons HOW i view things (unlike you; you dont give ANY explanation whatsoever) I have stated that there is a critical flaw when drawing conclusions out of it if the race distribution is this different (-> thus not random, and we cannot say that every population (z,t,p) should behave the same)
And i have demonstrated this flaw above in strong text.
Maybe you can show me where you dont agree with me anymore?
Do you think the race selection is random or is it influenced by something ? (Please explain)
Do you think despite the race not being equally distributed, you can expect the same distribution for all leagues? (Please explain)
Do you think the impact of completly casual players that have 0 knowledge about anything whatsoever and play like idk 1 game a week (idk how much exactly, need to look it up) in bronze or silver matters for the discussion if terran is the hardest?
How much do you value distribution of races in masters league or diamond league where people actually have played the game intensively and actually know the game pretty well and where you actually have to show so much of your skill?
Could you please answer those questions? It would mean so much to me because then i could finally maybe understand what is going on with you.
Terran gets the lion’s share of the demographic that don’t play to improve IE a lot of bronze and silver players. What, exactly, is the mystery about this?
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