ye
4 Likes
quit your complaining some like you that is terrible at the game shouldnt be complaining about toss.
2 Likes
And what do you want to say with this clip?
That someone who misreads the entire plan of the enemy loses to an all in ? Having a few hydras out at that time means he wasnt preparing to get all inned because thats not the correct response at all. He confirms that by typing “all in xD”
You can do cheeses/all ins with every race and they arent even hard to pull off. For example uthermal presents the easiest way to get to gm: proxy 4 rax
youtube. com/shorts/8GcC9j2MDw4
Shown how to get to gm but Sentry STILL isn’t sitting in gm. hmmmmmm
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
2 Likes
You sonofaaaa…
jkjk
Ive beaten gms with any race with cheese. I dont get satisfaction in getting a good league with something a monkey could do. Thats why i dont get gm with that bs. I also never got gm at the beginning of the season because its just low hanging fruits. Any 4k can have a shiny badge for some days if he played 30 games in like a few days.
Remember my akrij build beating a 5.1 gm protoss? 
This is why skill metrics like APM matter a lot. They indicate how much effort is required to achieve a performance level. For a given performance level, Protoss lag in all known metrics, meaning less skill and less effort required for that level.
I play most 6k GM toss and I watch their play I can’t see a single thing that is impressive about how they play. They turtle, make blink, cannons and storm, do some basic blink pressure. If you ever get on top of the stalkers, they storm. I legit can’t see the difference between them and a masters 3 toss. They will float 2k resources all game.
I play vs 6k GM terrans and it’s very obvious that they are 6k. Their reapers are giga annoying. Their medivac drops aren’t seen until they arrive in your base. They multi prong – after dealing with the medivac drop, you find a liberator killed 10 drones. Their builds are tight and clean. They will have 400 apm.
It’s very obvious that Protoss was designed to be the MOBA race of SC2. This has been well understood for a decade. Where things went wrong was when the designers decided that MOBA-level skill should be able to beat RTS-level skill, and at the highest tournament levels. Now toss is insufferable to play against. It requires easily a thousand mmr difference to win reliably and every game is a truly ridiculous amount of effort.
Played a guy on stream. Beat his mass carrier play using swarm hosts and spores. The dude could’ve easily won if he knew how to split his army onto 2 hotkeys to shut down the nyduses but he got to 5.2k mmr without knowing how to multiprong. Even better, if he learned what a unit comp is he’d know he could adapt his unit comp for the situation (make tempests) but the dude gets to be GM with diamond level skill. Protoss simply aren’t playing the same game as the rest of us.
Imagine GM terrans not knowing how to deal with banelings because they are too dumb to make tanks. That’s what’s going on here with GM protoss not knowing to make tempest vs mass spore. Scouting and adapting is a completely foreign concept to them. They are playing simcity, spamming carriers & cannons, and that’s it.
GM has no clue how to engage the zerg army: https://i.imgur.com/lgCRQYx.png
It’s so cringe. How on Earth is this quality of play allowed to be anything but diamond league. “I am going to attack into spores, corruptors and 8 fully charged vipers, using nothing but void rays and phoenix. Upon seeing I am getting annihilated, I commit to the attack until I lose everything.”
Zerg by contrast has setup the dream fight. Spores supporting the corruptors, fully charged vipers, vipers are safely behind the corruptors, damage is being evenly distributed between the spores and corruptors, half the toss army is engaging before the other half even arrives. Zerg has adapted his unit comp to counter the Protoss’.
The difference in quality of play between these two players is night and day and yet they have the same MMR value. That ladies and gents is the protoss advantage. It tacks a thousand mmr onto diamond league players and makes them grandmaster.
3 Likes
Asmongold rants about machiavellianism while wearing a t shirt that has a zerg logo on it. Hmm I wonder where it gets it from. Moral grandstanding about the fairness of the game doesn’t matter because toss players are going to follow the incentives and the only people who know how unfair it is are their opponents – with billions of people on earth, who cares about losing favorability with your opponents when you make 400k by doing so.
The flaw in this logic is that it maximizes a known reward while maximizing an unknown cost. The true cost of utilizing machiavelian tools isn’t known in the modern world. In the past, there was no surveillance apparatus to record your every move. Machiavellianism relies on being able to separate out your public persona from your private actions and that’s virtually impossible. So they are chasing incentives to maximize a known reward, tournament earnings, without knowing the true cost later on down the line. Pretending onlyfans doesn’t have a reputational cost is absurd, which is the context of asmongold’s video. Bare minimum, it delays career progression. Every year spent on onlyfans is a year not spent getting real world experience in an actual career. BuT ThE MonEy iS WorTh It. No it is not. Impulsivity is inversely correlated with wealth. Taking the easy route indicates impulsivity. The people who take that route will lose the money they earned in a heartbeat because in choosing the easy route it proves they don’t have the self discipline to manage their finances and plan for the future.
A perfect example of this is Life from team startale. Reports indicated he’d lose his tournament winnings gambling and shrug it off as “eh, I will just win another tournament.” Having talent in a domain that produces a lot of wealth is absolutely useless without the self discipline to tell yourself no on financial matters. The ability to tell yourself no is negatively correlated with impulsivity. Taking the easy route practically guarantees failure on long time spans.
We see this in inheritence money as well. A billionaire’s fortune is ground to dust in just 3 generations because the people inheriting the money never had the discipline to manage it in the first place.
Toss players will abuse protoss, not caring how unfair it is, as long as they can maximize a known incentive like tournament money. The long term consequences are not known and I susect they will, on average, outweigh any advantage gained (and to a significant degree). The lost time in career progression is in and of itself extremely costly, not to mention the doors that might close if a scandal develops if the public comes to the conclusion that protoss is advantaged. Does anyone talk about StarTale’s Life? Nope. Pray to jeebus that the public never concludes that balance issues are a form of matchfixing.
Another good IRL example is Alex Jones. He maximized a known reward without knowing the true cost and got sued for a billion dollars. Toss players are maximizing their tournament winnings (known reward) with no care at all for the unknown cost and what do you want to bet it won’t end up being worth it in the end.
1 Like
Within a week we have an example of this happening in the vtuber space. Cinder treats her friends terribly but the surveillance apparatus made sure the whole world knows. Machiavellianism is no longer as powerful as it used to be. Surely it is a cautionary tale to all those who would seek to maximize some metric ($$$) at the cost of all else. What will happen as Protoss players abuse the balance of the game for free money? Nobody knows but I honestly think it won’t end well. In the past, only the Protoss’ opponents knew how unfair it really is, but will that be true this time around. Hmm. Good question. Place your bets here.
the 1v1 population of this game is significantly declining since the stupid balance council started intervening this game, especially since the last two patches. Every 1v1 ladder player can feel it.
This is grandmaster: https://i.imgur.com/FLfTbHO.png
5 out of the top 5 are protoss.
7 of the top 10 are protoss.
10 of the top 20 are protoss.
I am 90% certain this is a form of matchfixing:
Match fixing is when the outcome of a match in organized sports has been manipulated. The reason for fixing a match includes ensuring a certain team advances or gambling. Match fixing is seen as one of the biggest problems in organized sports and is considered as a major scandal.
The cost will be that eventually the game will be balanced, Protoss will finally be fair to play against in TvP and ZvP, and most of the Protoss GrandMasters will become Diamond or low Masters.
do you know how little that makes sense statistically?
there are 600 gms overall. even if we assume equal race percantage that means there are 200 protoss (33%). That means right now we have 240/600=40% protoss. meaning those 40 protoss “should be diamond or low masters”???
We are talking about thousands of master players and you want nerf protoss to the point that those 40 extra protoss are low master or diamond?`
Also, in a time when zerg was completly busted, guess what percantage toss had in gm? exactly. 40%. Same as today.
Which pretty much means that top level balance doesnt really have that much to do with “low level” balance and that either toss is more popular or a tiny bit easier to get gm with. also note that while we have 40% gm for toss, diamond and master representation of all races seems to be fine.
So no, its not like you would pick protoss and get instantly gm or masters or even diamond neither does it mean that if you mained protoss you would get like 300 extra mmr or something. Thats just cope.
Blizzard’s own balance team was already treating protoss favorably and we know this because protoss professionals who interacted with Blizzard’s design team have reported the design team was biased against protoss. Furthermore, we know that there has been a distortion in the skill metrics (APM, SPM, SQ, etc) and how they correlate with league, with Protoss requiring lower metrics for the same performance level. Lastly, they were very cautious about buffing Protoss and when they finally did it produced the void ray meta & protoss shot up to 50% Protoss.
Combine these factors and it paints a clear picture that Blizzard’s design team knew toss had an advantage and was refusing to buff it because they knew even a small buff could cause Protoss to utterly dominate. In fact, they probably designed it that way deliberately to attract low skill MOBA players. If you truly equalized all imbalance, each Protoss would lose close to 1,000 mmr because the talent pools aren’t the same. That, however, is not a realistic goal because nobody will ever do that to Protoss – even Blizzard’s design team wouldn’t do that. I think Hero is more or less at the mechanical level of most 5500 terrans but he has 6700 mmr. So yeah. It would delete protoss from tournaments. There wouldn’t be a single protoss in any tournament anywhere.
Here enters the balance counsel who are just some pro gamers and esports employees who have zero game development expertise. You need 500 level statistics to understand how the matchmaker works & how to measure imbalance despite the matchmaker, and the number of people who study statistics to that depth is roughly 1 in 15,000. They were doomed from the start. Literally the only way they could possibly understand balance was to watch the best protoss in a premier tournament, and that’s it. They were cooked from the very beginning. So, in their naivety, they buffed Protoss another 200 mmr.
I think the most realistic goal is to simply strip protoss of the additional advantages they’ve received that go above and beyond what Blizzard originally gave them by dropping them ~150 mmr. This would reduce Protoss in GM from 45% to 33%. That’s a more realistic goal.
Good example. 6k mmr but amoves his army into widow mines despite literally nothing else happening all game:
This feels like a 5k player in terms of mechanical skill but he’s 6k. 
Contrast to 5k zerg:
The games a complete disaster with his attention spread across multiple places on the map; still finds time to multiprong a search for widow mines, disarms & kills them for free while using spellcasters to neutralize a bio drop; fits in several macro cycles & drone management on top of it all.
Toss by contrast is on 2 base, has nothing going on, is f2 amoving and has nothing to do except watch his army, has no spellcaster complexity and no multiprong. Still takes widow mine shots to the face, still beats a Code S player despite taking widow mine shots to the face.
TLDR
Balance probably favors toss +1000 mmr, but let’s be realistic and only nerf them -150.
Its getting more and more 
It’s always been that large. I estimated it many times in many threads. One notable example was Stats vs Dark. Stats beats Dark in a completely one sided fashion in Code S from a 1,000 mmr deficit in PvZ. Stats’ aligulac rankings were out of date & the ladder doesn’t use per matchup MMR ratings, so I took Stat’s PvP win-rate off his account & adjusted his MMR rating. Taking the difference between Stat’s PvP and Dark’s ZvZ gave a 1,000 mmr difference. Dark beats 7k zergs like Serral and Stats loses to 6k Protoss like Jeishi and yet Stats>Dark in PvZ.
The 150 mmr figure is calculated if you assume the entire set of Protoss is roughly as skilled as the entire set of Zergs, meaning you do no skill adjustments based on APM/SPM/etc. If you simply assume they are the same skill level, then measure their performance vs themselves and vs the other race, there is a 150 mmr difference. Protoss simply get +150 in performance in PvZ as measured relative to their PvP. If you add in skill adjustments using APM, it’s roughly 800-1000 MMR from the last time I calculated it which, to be fair, is about a year out of date.
It’s to the point that I just leave games vs protoss if he’s over 5.2k mmr. Without any effort, I am about 5200 right now. That means vs a 5200 protoss, I am actually 5050 and he’s 5350. That’s a big gap, but tolerable. If he’s above 5200, I just leave. I am not going to play it out. The game is preset with a preset outcome. I am not going to bother wasting time on it.
By the way, 150 mmr is roughly a 60% win-rate in favor of Protoss.
Good point, but I counted the number of races in GM on the NA server and 69 of the are Protoss, 73 are Zerg, and 55 of them are Terran and the others are Random. You can’t just say 33% of them are one race, etc. some races are more popular the others, from this, Zerg is the more popular one. But on NA, EU, and Asia, around 50% are Protoss’. Most GMs on EU like to 50 are Protoss’ since I last checked (A week ago).
Yes, that would be a more realistic goal.
Yes, most Protoss’ look lower than they actually are, because Protoss doesn’t require that much of a Mechanical demand, as Zerg and Terran.
Just shows how imbalanced this game is. 1000 MMR is 50 wins in a row IF you win 20 MMR per win. And 1000 MMR difference is a huge gap, and the high level player should win no doubt. Unless the high level player chokes, messes up the build, etc. Which at that level of play is very unlikely. Especially if we are talking about one of the best Zerg players.
Overall? Not at all. Overall the most popular race is ofc terran. Terran has 35% of overall playerbase. Toss 30% and zerg 26%. Because of bias of race selection of new / casual players we still wouldnt assume those percantages in higher leagues. But in high leagues (master) the percantages are the following: t 32.66%, p 30.70% and z 27.33%.
So idk how you would conclude that zerg is the most popular race. Its the opposite.
Also: In 2019 the game was completly busted for zerg. Everyone knew. Casters/pros/the community. Everyone knew. Zerg was favored in every stage of the game.
Protoss gm percantage? 40%.
Protoss requires:
Zealots
Protoss games are exciting, macro Zealots to be communicate with your team - which is Zerg and Terran.
Expansion to stalkers is powerful, the response to building more Protoss units has always decided the ability for stalkers and zealots to be communicative.
What is, mass formation psychosis. Go to catholic mass and ask them about evolution. Prepare to hear science denial. Go to reddit and ask them about abortion. Prepare to be lectured about politics by randos without a 5th grade level understanding of biology. Go to a flat earth conference and prepare to hear about 12 dimensional hyperboloids. Go to the balance counsel’s discord, prepare to hear “muh zerg op cuz muh serral win muh premier tournament” aka denial of 5th grade level probability/statistics.
There’s lots of dumb people, we get it. They are everywhere. Consensus in no way equates to truth. In fact, consensus usually indicates the opposite. The only thing you prove when you point out that casters believed zerg was op is that casters aren’t very smart. We already knew that. They cast video games for crying out loud. Do they require a PhD for that? No. OK then not exactly a gold standard now is it.
One catholic once told me that the dinosaur fossils were the left overs from the previous world that god had created and destroyed and which he used to create this world. They were leftovers basically. He confidently asserted that the world is only a few thousand years old.
That’s the esports complex’s understanding of game balance in a nutshell. I had to explain to this fine gentleman that that makes no sense no matter what framework you analyze it under. Geologically, the way sediments are deposited, can’t create layers of rocks if god just smashed together a bunch of pieces of another planet.
Likewise we have to explain to these esports casters that serral has absolutely nothing to do with balance because the game was designed so that multitasking is the primary mode of winning. You could buff immortals to 10,00000000,0000000,000000000000 HP and it still won’t make a premier toss win a tournament because he will always have his immortals in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is entirely a player trait.
Unless you give toss a siege and forget unit, which would be disastrous under the current balance scenario, toss will always have the wrong units in the wrong places while struggling to spend their money while not watching their army while not watching the bane runby – it’s all multitasking.
Toss professionals are simply 0.5-1% slower at multitasking than Serral and that adds up big time in a long macro game. At 500 apm, you’re talking 5 actions less per minute. Those 5 actions are what toss needed to prevent this from happening:
The balance counsel has buffed protoss to where toss can make these mistakes and still win. Meanwhile for everyone else, who plays on the ladder in an equal skill vs equal skill scenario this is a doomsday scenario because you were never going to get those kinds of bile shots and protoss can now win even if you did get those bile shots.
The top 10 is now 70% protoss and people still deny that toss is OP. They are SC2’s own version of flat earthers. These people are illiterate. It’s amazing they can even use a computer. Ignore them:
https://i.imgur.com/pu7JuZi.png
What’s mind boggling about this data isn’t just the sheer number of protoss, it’s the win-rates. Hero has a 75% win-rate. Showtime has a 74% win-rate. Zoun has an 87% win-rate. Skillous has a 73% win-rate.
These are statistically impossible win-rates. Not even Serral can achieve these win-rates (http://aligulac.com/players/485-Serral/) and yet you have 4 protoss now achieving them. 
This is how I concluded if you understood how to read:
I stated that I counted the people it GM and their races, and that’s how I got the
conclusion.
Everyone has their opinions and they all stink, haha.
Facts