Are we seriously going to act like Zerg isn’t under powered right now?
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EU top 10: 2 zerg, 1 terran, 7 protoss.
KR top 10: 1 zerg, 2 terran, 7 protoss.
NA top 10: 1 zerg, 3 terran, 6 protoss.
Less of a zerg underpowered thing and more of a protoss overpowered thing. I’ve said it many times. Protoss is definitely favored (by about 300 mmr) and the one place where skill differences are large enough to overcome the balance advantage was the top 10, which is why Protoss dominate GM & esl cups but can’t win premiers. Now, they’ve buffed Protoss to where the imbalance is large enough to overcome the skill differences in the top 10, and so they dominate that as well. The only question that remains is if the imbalance of Protoss can overcome the skill differences in the top 3.
Serral still leads his nearest Protoss competitor by about 200 mmr, meaning the answer to that is no. I predicted this would be the case, by the way, by calculating the skill difference between Serral and Maxpax, and how small Zerg would have to be in GM in order to make Maxpax=Serral. You’d have to put Zerg at 10% of GM, and that clearly hasn’t happened so Serral>Maxpax==true.
Another thing worth noting is that the balance advantage alone isn’t enough to describe what’s happening in the top 10. This effect can only be explained with second order effects, such as players choosing not to play as a result of the balance advantage, or switching race. A balance advantage increases the probability of players quitting, playing less, and/or switching race to the overpowered race, and you can clearly see that happening because Clem’s protoss is in the top 10 but not his terran. Reynor is also MIA, probably because he doesn’t want to deal with Protoss. Shin isn’t laddering either. Byun isn’t laddering. Nobody wants to deal with Protoss right now, and so Protoss are the only ones playing.
I think TvZ balance favors Zerg at the moment, but specifically Serral’s style of making 12 queens and turtling to 90 drones on hatch tech is giga-nerfed, so high level ZvT is going to act like it’s terran favored for awhile. They need to realize that 2 base lair openers are way stronger than mass queen plays. Until that happens, they are going to struggle in ZvT. VS protoss, nothing works. There is no build order capable of getting an advantage vs toss >50% of the time. Chronoboost guarantees an economic lead, they already had the tech lead, and the oracle guarantees the protoss has adequate scouting to hold all early and mid game timings, meaning the game always goes longer. Longer games with an economic and tech lead is obviously very protoss favored.
Protoss can open 2 base and defend a proxy hatch by going stargate. That would be like zerg defending a proxy 4 gate by going mutalisks and still affording an expansion. The idea is absurd. Zerg is so flipping far behind protoss from the very start of the game that it’s just amazing that protoss ever lose games ever. It is truly amazing that they can actually lose games of starcraft with such a large advantage.
In the top 3, these protoss go into a long macro game with a huge advantage and just waste it away, through tiny mistake after tiny mistake, until it’s ground down to zero. Outside of the top 3, well, it’s a herculean effort just to stay in the game against a protoss 300 mmr lower than you on the ladder. It’s obvious why nobody except toss wants to play 1v1 right now.
I mean Zerg isn’t underpowered until zergs are deleted from GM. Just delete the race. Delete terrans too. Just make it 100% Protoss since they are so underpowered.
I don’t know who all is in the “balance council”, but it’s pretty blatantly clear they all need to be fired. Or at the very least disbanded completely.
They keep trying to balance zerg around Serral, which doesn’t work because he is a complete outlier. Serral is lightyears ahead of everyone else, even against Dark.
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That might’ve happened already, we don’t know. There is obviously turbulence in the pro scene which is probably motivated by ESL being bought by EWC, but we don’t know how the balance counsel factors into this. When tournaments are suddenly 80% protoss, I think it would hard for tournament organizers to not notice. I also highly doubt that they think PvPvPvPvP is going to be good for the viewer’s experience. I suspect there is a chance that the balance has had an impact and that it contributed to the uncertainty. Are they really going to launch a tournament circuit, awarding money and points to players, when Protoss is clearly so favored?
The top 20 worldwide is 75% protoss: https://i.imgur.com/OFD0BJy.png
This is going to be the most boring pro circuit in the history of the game if this top 20 is any indication.
LMAO
There may be even 199 protosses and only 1 zerg in GM and still that zerg (Serral) will sweep all these tosses because Zerg is still IMBA and you zergs finally get a dose of reality after 10 years of zerg imbalance. Enjoy.
That’s not how math works but thanks for trying anyway. Toss is so busted vs Zerg, it shows up in individual player rankings:
https://i.imgur.com/sl4Oo78.png
Protoss players are uniquely gifted, but only in the PvZ matchup. Why don’t their skills show up in PvT, or, even better, PvP? PvP has no imbalance – both players have access to the same tools. If skill is the cause, why don’t Protoss do well in PvP? Why is it PvZ they do well in?
Is hero the only one to be this way? Nope: https://i.imgur.com/elocuoU.png. Why does Protoss, as a group, have drastically higher performance than Terran, as a group, vs Zerg? Notice the avalanche of high ranked Protoss. Protoss is simply a better race than Terran (when it comes to beating Zerg).
Let’s compare PvZ performance to ZvP performance, and use PvP and ZvZ as a baseline: https://i.imgur.com/R467oTT.png
The Y intercept is what matters here. Protoss on average do +32.7 higher in PvZ than in PvP. Zergs on average do -28.2 in ZvP compared to ZvZ. The difference is 60.9. What is that in terms of win-rate? It’s a 41% win-rate for Zerg and a 59% win-rate for Protoss. If you subtract skill out of the equation, which is what the mirror matchup baseline does, it shows Protoss as a group have a 59% win-rate advantage in PvZ.
Blizzard considered anything above a 55% win-rate to be imbalanced. So, yeah, toss is giga-busted against Zerg, and has been for a very long time. How this isn’t considered matchfixing, I don’t know. I don’t know enough about the legal side of things but it certainly begs the question when it’s obviously giving Protoss competitors an advantage when it causes such a crazy performance boost.
What about TvP? https://i.imgur.com/aqdNQem.png. A similar trend emerges, but is smaller at +40.5 in favor of Protoss, which is a 44/56% win-rate. It still meets Blizzard’s criteria for imbalanced. Now what’s interesting is if we compare the ratios: 60.9/40.5=1.5. PvZ is 1.5x more imbalanced than PvT. What’s the ratio between Hero’s PvZ and PvT, relative to his PvP?
(3807- 3339) / (3636 - 3339) = 1.57.
So Hero’s performance trends almost perfectly mirror the entire Protoss group. There’s a very good argument to be made that tournament balance is rigged to favor Protoss players in a way that is going to be very unfair to the Terran and Zerg competitors.
How does this compare to Protoss’ GM representation? https://i.imgur.com/5ROUo7D.png. Yep, toss is giga-busted. But let’s tie in Grandmaster as a neat bow on top of the giant imba-report. We’d need to demote 8% of Protoss to equalize Protoss to 1/3rd of Grandmaster. That’s 16 players. How much mmr would they have to lose for 16 of them to be demoted on EU? Let’s count up, from the bottom of EU GM, 16 players and take the difference in MMR. That difference is 5113-5016=97. How much is 97 in terms of win-rate?
0.43 = 1 / (1 + exp(97/400)) aka 43% vs 57%.
Aka, a very similar number. Thus we have shown that top 3 pro trends == all pro trends == grandmaster trends.
Protoss is overpowered. Nerf it. If they want more diversity in tournament outcomes, there are other alternatives:
- Do crazy maps. Don’t reveal the new maps until tournament day (prevents top Zergs from doing “camp on creep to 90 workers” as a valid strategy – they will need to be more flexible and dynamic because they don’t know what maps are going to be revealed at the tournament).
- Provide off-racing incentives, like a +10k bonus if a person off-races in the top 8.
- Provide race-switching incentives, such as preventing back-to-back tournament wins with your main race (if Serral wins with Zerg, he’s required to off race the rest of the season until he wins another one with Zerg or Protoss).
- Etc. There are solutions to this problem that don’t require rigging game balance to give protoss competitors an advantage.
Balance status from the game.
Balance council knows what it is doing. Toss champion without terran getting nerfed.
Here’s a fun thought exercise.
-
Gaming corporations crack down on hacking by using copyright law – they say the hacks modify the game’s copyrighted material in a way that gives a player an advantage and/or degrades the experience of other players.
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The balance counsel is also modifying copyrighted material in a way that gives some competitors an advantage and degrades the experience of other players.
So balance counsel == hackers? It makes sense to me.
I am not saying they are hackers, but I am saying if I modified SC2 to give myself an advantage, I’d get banned for hacking.
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Dude
No amount of math is going to deny the fact that zergs are still making lot of mistakes and then they come to the forum and cry.
- Most zerg players are used to F2 amoving (because zerg benefits from this - it is a race designed to attack with large numbers of fragile, expendable and easy to replenish units. Most of zergs aren’t even stealing their units with Alt + F# to split their armies into 2 groups to make pincer attack.
- Against skytoss they are not even using their spellcasters properly - vipers, infestors etc. They are so used to F2- amoving that they literally forgot how to micro. All 3 races should have micro potential which SCALES with player’s skill - player is good - race is good, player sucks - race sucks.
- most zerg players don’t even know how to inject properly - stack with backspace method - you can inject up to 6 hatches under 1 second and then forget about queens for next 1.5 min, because they will keep injecting automatically.
You blame toss players for making mistakes, but because protoss is such trash race, they actually improved over last 10 years - learned how to use different control groups for various spellcasters, learned how to defend terran/zerg aggression, how to launch novas without killing their own zealots etc.
Objectively false. All variables known to correlate with skill also underpredict protoss performance, meaning protoss do better than expected. There is not a single variable that is known to over-predict protoss performance. If protoss were a “real” faction in starcraft, there would be a mixture of variables and some would underestimate and some would overestimate Protoss performance. But, that’s not what happens. Protoss is most definitely the training wheel race of SC2. They designed it to be easier to try to attract MOBA players to SC2.
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Not mutalisks but solid gold none the less: https://i.imgur.com/rsRfjbp.jpeg
4 gate abuser legit thought he had a chance vs a gm w/ 1000 more mmr.
Raise your hands if you have beaten a 5600 terran by covering their main base in creep. 
https://i.imgur.com/89VpBQA.jpeg
No
This is a solid argument that zerg is the easiet race when it comes to unit control - amount of SECONDARY abilities:
- terran: stim, siege mode, yamato, burrow mine, cloak, reaper grenade, medivac boost, mechanical unit mode switching (viking/hellbat etc.) + spellcasting. Terran has the highest amount of secondary abilities of all 3 races.
- protoss: blink, nova, prismatic alignment, warp prism mode switching + spellcasters (protoss has highest amount of spellcasters in the game - sentry, HT, oracle, mothership. This forces protoss players to operate on many control groups to efficiently cast all of their abilities.
- zerg - corrosive bile, caustic spray and lurker burrow + spellcasters (only two viper and infestor). If not countring macro abilites like morph one unit into another, then zerg mechanically is the easiest of all 3 races. You control an army which is “a-movey” and you need to cast infestor or viper’s spells. Occiasionally you can make sandwich with stealing mechanisms.
To measure all of above you don’t need sophisticated variables. Just count all of seconday abilities that you need to activate to play your race.
And if Protoss has more abilities, why do they score lower in EPM and APM and screen movements? You see, ability use is counted in various statistics. A zerg shifts his screen to do multiprong harass, and it’s counted in screen movements. When he biles, it’s counted in EPM and APM. Why are protoss lower in these metrics if they have more difficult unit control? Why is there not a single variable known to correlate with skill and that also over estimates protoss performance? You see, if protoss were hard it would show up as higher apm for lower rank, but they have higher rank for lower apm, and this is true for every variable known to correlate with skill.
You must demonstrate a way that protoss skill can be measured because “protoss are super secretly skilled in ways that aren’t quantifiable” sounds a lot like you believe in ghosts which are also real but not measurable and quantifiable (trust us!).
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Variables known to under-estimate protoss performance:
- Actions per minute.
- Effective actions per minute (EPM).
- Screen movements per minute.
- Spending skill (bank size divided by economy size).
- Number of hotkeys used.
- PvP performance ratings.
FYI mirror matchup ratings have the tightest correlation with skill of any variable, and even they under-estimate protoss performance in non mirror matchups. But, mirror matchup rating is a direct measurement of skill. The other variables are only subsets of skill, and the one with the tightest correlation to win-rate is APM at p=0.65. If you account for racial differences in APM, the correlation grows to 0.97.
So, yes, apm alone can accurately predict performance level, not to mention all the other variables, and there isn’t a single one that is known to over-estimate protoss performance. It’s simply a fact of reality that Protoss is the “MOBA” race of Starcraft. It distills the more complicated game down to a single hotkey army that attacks through a single lane on the map. Terran and Zerg are playing a way more complicated game that involves 2 and 3 hotkey army arrangements, which drastically increases the tactical and strategical complexity. Basically Protoss is a game of chess but you’ve only got 1 piece to move, your queen aka deathball, meanwhile Terran and Zerg have a queen (main army hotkey), a rook (specialist counter attack 1, aka liberator), and a castle (specialist counter attack 2, aka double medivac drop).
The crazy thing about multiple hotkey use is that you can decide whether you want a rook or a castle by what units you put in the hotkey. So there are more positioning and manuevering configurations available, but there are also more unit comps available. Toss just f2’s his entire army down the middle lane, and it’s supposed to be considered a real race that plays REAL real-time strategy? Nah dude it’s the MOBA race of Starcraft.
It is no secret that zerg APM is highly inflated by queueing units, injects and creep spread. These abilities generate lots of actions but are very easy to use. Zerg players like you conveniently deny this and bring zerg highest APM as a false argument that “zerg is the hardest race to play”.
Let’s put it this way - suppose that Blizzard changes the way APM is calculated - action is counted only when you “tap” the key - if you keep it pressed then it only counts as a single action. Zerg would have lowest APM of all 3 races because zerg mechanics mostly rely on macro abilities which benefit from rapid fire or simply keeping 1 or 2 buttons pressed (for queueing units or shift-injects).
I have explained this to you hundreds of time and your response is always the same - ignoring or gaslighting with some pseudo-mathematical logic.
That’s what EPM is and, guess what, Protoss is the lowest in EPM of the three races.
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…and as of right now there are no zergs in the top 16, with protoss claiming the top 6 places. It’s sad to see a game I once loved as a kid go down the toilet like this. It was nice knowing ya SC2.
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But 
there’s 3 randoms.
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Well the crazy thing is that this was the inevitable outcome and it was painfully obvious at least 6 years in advance. Looking at data going back a decade, Blizzard has been struggling to nerf protoss without handicapping it at the pro level. The data shows unequivocally that protoss has had a large advantage basically all of SC2 history. Blizzard’s final balance patch was to say “Screw it” and buff the void ray. Toss shot up to 50% of grandmaster, and hit 61% win-rates in the pro scene, which is the largest imbalance that has ever occurred if you exclude the first few months of wings of liberty (when the game was brand new). The balance counsel was given a problem to solve that paid professionals at blizzard could not solve after a decade of work. Failure was the only option from the very start. The question is, how do you want to fail? Do you want to fail to make protoss win a premier, or do you want to fail at making the game balanced and fair? You can’t do both. They picked premier protoss as the priority. Now the top 20 worldwide is 80% protoss. It was obvious they’d pick that because they are esports people and so they want protoss to be in the finals of tournaments for a variety of reasons, so it was the obvious choice. The next obvious thing is the collapse of sc2 esports from the sheer amount of sameness that will occur due to protoss flooding tournaments. Every matchup is going to have a protoss in it, half the game will have two protoss in them, and Zerg, but especially ZvZ, will be rare. This will make esports boring, and that will cause them to lose viewers (some of them permanently).
The most entertaining match, historically, has been TvZ and that’s going to be almost as rare as ZvZ. It’s gonna be mostly PvT and PvP, and the Terrans are going to get absolutely wrecked so the outcomes are going to be predictable.
I watched Cure vs Hero and Cure sets up an incredible tank position at Hero’s third. Hero sends a bunch of zealots around to flank, but kept f2’ing them back to his main army. This delayed his a flank by easily 10 seconds, allowing 3 or 4 more tank shots than necessary. He still cleaned up the push with ease. Well, these kinds of interactions are going to dominate PvT and it’s going to look very hilariously unfair and highly repetitive.
It’s a game of chicken between the balance counsel and their own nerves as protoss f2 amove through every opponent in every tournament. Eventually they will lose this game of chicken, against themselves, and nerf protoss. That’s the prediction. Book it. Write it down and don’t forget to make the payment out in cash when it turns out I am correct.