I just clapped a 5200 mmr terran. This was after losing to two protoss in a row – one 4900, the other 4600. Look what happens to Protoss army strength given equal economy: https://i.imgur.com/oIcJE4s.png. And they aren’t good players, either: https://i.imgur.com/S7UNiUG.mp4. Their army value skyrockets while using poor micro/positioning/control. How does that work. Protoss has become so powerful that they can F2+aclick through Grandmasters. It’s absolute insanity.
There are several ways to calculate PvZ win-rates. What we want is the PvZ win-rate given equal skill & effort from both players. If you calculate it, using a variety of methods, it comes out to ~70% for toss and 30% for Zerg. That equates to about 300 mmr.
You can calculate this from:
- GM representation (how much MMR is required for the ratio of Z/T/P in GM)
- From GM demotion thresholds.
- Using GM win-rates.
- From tournament representation statistics (either opening round, victors, or finals).
- It can also be calculated from skill metrics (like APM, Screen Movements Per Minute, etc).
They all give the same result. Protoss is favored by ~1/2 standard deviation in performance.
This is wild because Grandmaster is a sigma 3 outcome. That means balance takes a sigma 3.5 zerg and moves him down to 3, and takes a sigma 2.5 protoss and puts him at 3.0. What does this mean, though? 3 .5 sigma is so rare that it happens 1 time in every 5000 people. 2.5 sigma is 1 in 161. Game balance is taking your garden variety top 1% player and makes them play as well as a super genius.
It’s important to remember that SC2 is a game of exponential growth. A small advantage compounds into a massive lead. So the performance difference between two players separated by 1 standard deviation should be absolutely enormous because higher skill nets exponentially larger rewards. In other words, toss is EXTREMELY broken in order to cause a 1 standard deviation difference in performance between Zerg and Protoss.
As you can see, I’ve done some very thorough analyses of SC2 balance, and have even unified the trends from the pro scene and the ladder. The evidence is overwhelming which means we are just playing the waiting game. The “IMbalance” counsel will have to sober-up eventually. They can’t drunk-balance for eternity. I am thinking someone in the pro scene might accuse them of cheating and crap’s gonna get real when lawsuits start flying, lmao. I don’t think they realize there can be real world consequences to this stuff. People could be missing out on real money if balance is insanely broken. I wouldn’t sue because I am not a pro player and I am not giving legal advice here. I am just saying I wouldn’t surprised if that’s a likely outcome.
At a bare minimum, I think it’s irresponsible and unethical to let Protoss dominate like this, and it’s not like they didn’t know toss was like this. Toss has been doing very well in a variety of statistics for quite some time. GM dominance goes back to 2020. In my estimation, they extended that dominance from merely PvZ to include PvT (from the latest patch). What on Earth are they doing. It’s genuinely baffling. It’s not like it’s hard to balance a game, either. We can definitely say that a 1,000 HP interceptor would favor toss and a 1 hp interceptor would favor zerg, which means there is a value between 1 and 1,000 that would be balanced. An hour or two in the unit tester could determine a decent estimate based on trading efficiency. You simply reduce the trading efficiency until Protoss in GM equalize to 33%. It’s really quite simple. You don’t have to pick interceptors either. You can even pick multiple things – pick 5 random protoss unit stats and reduce them until toss is 33% gm. Balancing a game is quite simple – it is not rocket science.