Protoss players on the new patch be like
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Straight muta against vikes, no pre damage or anything else, although im probably a bit out numbering him, i dont think it was by much. its at 26:55 on the latest stream i had. Also i think they were map hacking on this game in particulur, as when i came in to fight them i had the vike army waiting and another one coming in right behind him and the third guy sitting in wait with hydras and infestors. if they were they were terrible at it.
Air combat in particular is heavily affected by slight differences in the amount of units or upgrades on each side, so that is not surprising.
On Reddit, there is a 300 upvote post complaining about the balance patch. The person who posted it also posted this. Many of the people who are freaking out about the balance patch are not well adjusted human beings. Their behavior is rooted in serious mental health issues. Best to ignore them!
P.S: this is why I avoid reddit in general. I consider it a breeding ground for severe mental health issues.
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reddit has always been a joke,
hey look im actually agreeing with you.
I bet you those posters on reddit overlaps with the Protoss trolls on these forums.
So ghosts are 3 supply but tempests have their supply reduced back to 4 to be massable lmao, cuz mass tempests under an unabductable mothership are definitely not overpowered.
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Late game PvZ fight on the new patch
Oh and they are in the process of having a melt down that they are getting nerfed. This is why I view the common protoss whiner as an enemy of SC2. Their lust for wins is biblical and their game understanding comical. There’s a good chance they bring down the entire RTS genre like termites gnawing at the structure of a house.
The issue started in the pro scene. Professional toss picked protoss for being a 1 and 2 base attack timing race. These players had zero multitasking skills. Broodwar was seeing a resurgence, so SC2 designers moved its design towards broodwar in the hopes of retaining broodwar players. This involved removing game ending moments & making the games longer and more multitasking focused. The problem is, broodwar fans still went back to broodwar but in the process they deleted Protoss premier champions from the game. Removing game ending moments means the games go longer, and the people who picked Protoss picked it because it was a 1 and 2 base attack timing race with zero multitasking. Now the only way to win is through multitasking. The game designers deleted Protoss champions from the game.
Well low league protoss saw no protoss tournament winners and started to cry. They were lathered in buffs that shot protoss up to 61% winrates in the pro scene, winning twice as many tournaments as zerg, and dominating half of grandmaster. This goes on for ~6 years and the game’s popularity plummets because the imbalance of Protoss makes XvP highly unenjoyable play, and the diversity of pro games plummets as well. Terrans and Zergs are boxed into using only the strongest strategies, and that makes the game boring and predictable.
The balance counsel works up the courage to do something about it only to get hated on by YouTubers who see it as a cheap way to cash in on some ad revenue by catering to the average whine toss. Now they roll back the changes to where it’s a net buff for protoss and the protoss whiners are crying for EVEN MORE buffs. It’s unreal.
These players will quite literally kill the game and in the process they will create a branding issue that will permanently taint the entire RTS genre for at least a decade. All for cheap ladder wins.
That’s why the balance counsel needed to buff the void ray by giving it a line based splash ability. It would be an objective buff but totally useless because the new thor’s splash annihilates void ray play and zerg won’t care since ground based anti-skytoss play is being buffed through microbial. Make Prismatic Alignment a splash ability that targets only air & does 100 damage but allows 5 seconds to dodge. Neither terran nor zerg will care because it’s an air-to-air splash weapon and t/z will be using ground-to-air armies.
Whine toss will think it’s an objective buff and the rest of us will know they actually got nerfed. Oh and make the void ray drop its shields when it activates the ability. Toss players will do it at the wrong time and lose every void ray for free. But MaxPax will use it at the perfect moment & we can all point to him and tell the whiners to learn to play.
It’s a great plan but it makes the assumption that protoss whiners are actually capable of satiation. They got unabductable mothership, massable tempests, a whole new energy ability, and they are still saying they need more. They dominated grandmaster, esl cups, and had 61% winrates at in the pro scene, and they need more.
When measuring a variable you want to measure it in isolation. The method for doing this is by taking the average of many samples. The variability on an individual level cancels out to give you the broader trend. At the premier tournament level, there just aren’t enough data points to achieve this effect, and that means you’re not measuring balance in isolation. How do you plan to steer a ship without know where you are at?
ESL cups show what would happen if there were more premier tournaments.
Right now PvZ is at 57%. You definitely don’t have to take my word for it.
Kiddo, when balance advantages Protoss to the point they have a 61% win-rate and yet they still can’t win premiers, it is 100% a skill issue. Balance favors them and they still can’t win.
It’s a vocal minority made of mostly GM and high masters protoss who do the whining because only they care that much about the game. 99% of protoss players are fine; it’s the vocal 1% that will destroy the RTS genre through balance whine. That is, if the designers keep listening to them.
The #1 predictor of a tournament outcome is the participant list. The #2 predictor of tournament outcomes is the tournament format. Protoss win twice as many ESL cups as Zerg and the tournament format is a big factor in that. ESL cups are single elimination with short series best of 3’s. The EWC by contrast had triple elimination and best of 7’s and 9’s. If you want protoss to win premiers, you need to change the participation list and or tournament format. A good solution is to limit pro players to winning 1 premier tournament per year UNLESS they switch races in which case they can win up to 3 if they offrace.
It’s time to stop blaming balance for what is caused by a combination of skill and tournament format. The rest of the SC2 player base does not need to pay the price for the top Protoss’ inability to get good. Protoss whiners need a reality check but the YouTubers simply aren’t brave enough to do it when they can join the whiners and cash in on the ad revenue.
Look tehbatz. If you’re going to spend (waste) a decade of your life on this forum constructing an aura of intelligence and wit, you’d do best not to undermine it by arguing from such a HILARIOUSLY egregious bad actor position - that the thousands of people that chose to play X race in video game simply need to “try harder”, and that it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with poor design/balance. God forbid.
I really can’t comprehend this staunch commitment to arguing in such poor faith, and going through the work of gathering and possibly cherry picking a bunch of data. Maybe you’re just a victim? It seems a lot of people in the Sc2 community have PTSD from getting A-moved by Colossi in Platinum league or whatever, and carry that resentment long after they’ve been promoted, years and years later.
It just baffles me because you seem like an easy going and relaxed dude when you’re streaming. The contrast between how you converse here and there is a pretty shocking chasm. Don’t really see why though.
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I have about 400k investment riding on an indie RTS game that will disappear in a puff of smoke of the branding issue of the RTS genre isn’t fixed. Thanks for asking.
Technically it won’t disappear, but it will be delayed by 15 years because you have to wait for a new generation of gamers who aren’t impregnated with the same anti-RTS biases that are in the current generation of gamers.
Balancing SC2 around Serral will be the doom of RTS. If you think average Joe gamer trying to have fun on a friday night cares at all that some elite protoss lost a best of 7 then you’re not living on the same planet as the rest of us. The elitism of SC2 will make zerg and terran unplayable. The pro scene will be nothing but protoss for days with PvP being the most common matchup. It will be the “hots swarm host turtle meta” effect on steroids. What little niche the RTS genre will occupy within the gaming market will vaporize.
SC2 should stop kissing butt to these players anyway because they don’t buy skins and things like that. Start catering to the people who actually spend money. Joe drinking 2 beers on friday night thinks that skin’s hilarious and so he buys it. But elite sc2 pros who think they are the next serral? They won’t spend a dime. Why are these people so important?
Still having bouts of delusions of grandeur I see lmao. Never change.
Not in the slightest. My biggest flaw is that I am hyper realistic. It is a disadvantage in political situations because I say the truth and not what is politically advantageous. It shows how off base your perceptions are that you can get something like that so backwards.
By the way, did you ever finish your degree in statistics from berkeley? You definitely weren’t lying about that, were you? 
Funny enough there are whitepapers studying the SC2 ladder that quote my analyses. Ask me how it feels to be the most quoted man in the science of RTS games. You’re not convinced by the arguments but you’re not the guy I am selling to. Imagine trying to sell a corvette to a dude who doesn’t like corvettes. You’re not the target market, man. You aren’t that important.
Yeah. The games played on the new patch are being entered into Aligulac, which is showing a very steep increase in PvZ win-rates. This is a blend of the current patch and the new patch which means it underestimates the new patch. Lord have mercy.
We NeEd MoRe BuFfS. These people are living in another dimension, man. They are checked out from reality. Lowko’s tweeting that Protoss needs battery overcharge & energy recharge. 
If the game continues the same win-rate trend, that’s sayonara for me. I threw everything I could at fixing the issue but the inertia of the SC2 system is too great for anyone to change. The only way to save RTS at that point is via market mechanics. Let it crash and burn. I have clean conscience. I did everything I could, and you can’t ask for more than that.
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“One of the least useful things is people saying stuff without actually trying it”
Funnily enough Zerg was my most common opponent on the PTR.
Harstem comments on the new update.
- Thinks energy recharge is better in general but there are situations he’d prefer shield battery overcharge. Has noticed he enters the mid game in a better situation in PvT.
- Doesn’t like the cyclone change. Says it is harder to micro against & more restrictive to build orders. 2 stalkers no longer capable of defending 1 cyclone; need a shield battery. Feels like he can’t do anything without blink. Says he can’t beat it but admits it might be a practice issue.
- Stalker change is irrelevant since it’s not an issue w/ timings but with scaling. He likes the change for other reasons, such as making protoss better vs proxy reaper. It may make the proxy gate PvT builds stronger.
- Ghost feels like a 4 supply unit so he likes that the supply has been increased but wishes it were raised even more.
- He doesn’t like the mothership abduct change; thinks it will make the unit invincible since zerg doesn’t have long range anti air.
- Doesn’t have a position on the ultralisk change.
- He likes the brood changes because he doesn’t like the unit and doesn’t like how it negatively affects diversity (can we get a standing ovation?).
- Tempest change is fine, is already strong against zerg.
- Likes the liberator revert for no particular reason, saying it “didn’t feel nice”.
- Hydra change underwhelming for a hive tech upgrade
- Doesn’t like the lurker nerf. He says nobody makes disruptor vs lurker anyway. Zerg struggles in late game vs toss in general, no need to nerf zerg’s late game more. He says he doesn’t see how zerg will ever win a fight vs a late game maxed out protoss army (he’s kind right – parasitic bomb and fungal is the only way now).
- Missile turret salvage removal is good.
- Blueflame change removed. He said nobody was excited for it.
- Thinks it’s good remove the spine change, but he says he doesn’t like their reasoning. He says proxy spine rushes are very bad vs Protoss and non existent. He’s completely right about that.
Overall a very reasonable response. Seems like a very well balanced and reasonable dude. Color me impressed.
Steadfast notices the extreme and impossible standards of Protoss whiners. He points out that if a mothership can turn around a lost game then you can’t ask for anything more since that’s literally as good as a unit can get in any practical sense.
UpATree and Feardragon argue about how fast a planetary dies to dts. No real insight value just sharing it for the lol’s. This was about a previous patch anyway, potentially relevant due to the planetary armor change.
Harstem usually has pretty good takes, and is very level headed. I do wonder if the fact he’s done so many of the “Is it Imba, or do I suck?” has allowed him to have a more objective outlook… or maybe he was just like that anyway.
By the way, to illustrate just how crazy your position is I am going to point out that the only thing I am doing here is chatting about things I find interesting. There is no “constructing an aura of intelligence” or whatever half baked conspiracy theory you’re spinning in your head. I am interested in both RTS and marketing and combining the two you can ask interesting questions like why RTS has become a niche within the gaming community and where is the RTS genre headed in the future to grow its player base.
I stopped posting here for years and when I came back it was, and still is, really shocking to see how negative and extreme people are on this website. You just can’t have a discussion about how balance whine affects design decisions and how those aggregate into the entire RTS genre at large without someone freaking out and attacking you personally.
That’s a cultural problem in the West in general because there is this bizarre intolerance of ideas. Even if an idea is wrong it can still be useful to explore it because it has learning or diagnostic value. Imagine if someone at McDonalds messed up, got 3rd degree burns, but nobody is allowed to reproduce that outcome because it might burn someone else. It’s like, no, the point is to understand what happened and find the point where things went wrong. Studying wrongness can be useful but you can’t do that because there is a weird religious style intolerance of ideas that are considered “impure” and this attitude is festering in western culture. You’re not even allowed to talk about things that are labelled as “impure” and the idea that protoss balance whine has negatively affected the RTS genre is an “impure” idea that can’t be explored regardless of if it is true.
Religious style thinking is making a come-back in the western world but this time it is not rooted in the common sense traditions of old religions which are tried, tested and true. You have these people who think religiously without a bedrock to build their religion on, and that’s why it makes such an unstable configuration. It’s like building a house on top of sand.
Mind you I am not a religious person but I recognize that religion is a fundamental part of the human experience and that’s never going to change. Humanity co-evolved with religion and are mentally and psychologically dependent on it to function. So as traditional religions declined in the West the religious people of the West are trying to create a religion from scratch. Without the ideas tested & proven effective from the traditional religions, they are basically fumbling around in the dark.
That’s why you can have people who think we MUST build solar panel parks to generate electricity but don’t care that the solar panels come from the worst polluting country on Earth. Or how people are obsessed with reducing carbon but refuse to use the most effective carbon reducing energy source (nuclear). It’s a religion and ideas are shunned if they sound impure regardless of if they actually are. Somebody who actually cares about the environment should be very concerned about the possibility that windmills might not make sense because your goal is to save the environment and if this isn’t working then we need to change our strategy. But the goal isn’t to save the environment, it’s to adhere to some weird religious purity test. They just gotta check the box, say they support the “right” thing, and that’s all they are doing. It’s a sacrament.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNlC3NEs-ss
UpATree’s take on the balance.
- Marauder change would be better to instead give protoss more things to do rather than to remove things terran can do. Quite illogical if you consider that the sum of options must equal one. So if you split the options into two (terran, protoss) you obviously can’t give protoss options without taking away from terran. Accordingly, if you take proxy marauder away from terran then it creates options for protoss.
- He compares the ghost to the queen (lol). I dislike mass queens but it’s insane to compare the two.
- He suspects the mothership change is a big deal but admits he doesn’t know much about zvp. I can fill in there: it means zerg has to turtle like crazy while wearing down skytoss with parasitic bomb – it will be the zvz swarmhost v swarmhost turtle meta from hots on steroids. Zerg will get mass amounts of spores, queens, infestors and they will put lurkers into a nydus. The nydus will unload lurkers anywhere a ground assault shows up. The queens will buffer damage off the interceptors (using microbial) while the spore DPS kills the interceptors. 1 viper will repeatedly parasitic bomb the carrier and or tempest glob while the zerg goes for a nydus at far off protoss bases. That will be ZvP late game on this patch. It will be massing static D, turtling, and then nydus vs recall decides the game.
- He likes the ultra change, saying that it forces terran to turtle. He has a very interesting idea of making concussive shells stronger vs ultras rather than flat nerfing the ultralisk speed.
- He likes the brood change citing concerns about stalemate play and complains about free units.
- He says the liberator change is fine.
- He says the hydra dash is a “zerg stim” and then the zerg just goes back to doing whatever he was doing. In general he is not impressed. He is not going to be happy once I start showing him how good it is on the ladder, lmao.
- No real position on lurker change. He thinks maybe it’s to increase disruptor use in zvp.
- He says that the turret change allows terran to “fortify a position, then salvage and leave” aka he’s admitting it increases terran’s mobility.
- Glosses over blueflame.
- He thinks the queen cost increase is a huge change since terrans can hunt the queens to make zerg pay more for creep. An excellent point.
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I saw this nonsense take a few times on reddit over the last few days, so it’s good to know where it’s come from
U are irrelevant. Deal with it.
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