Those that say Protoss is the easiest, have not played it

General Discussion
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So i used to thought that Protoss was the easiest, after all… All units are very strong …

I used to think Terran the hardest, then Zerg middle ground, then Protoss the easiest…

I Think that whoever says so, have not played them all 3…

Zerg is the easiest by far … seriously you can do so many mistakes its unbelievable, and its very forgiving since you can produce everything from hatchery, and even recoup very easily drones, and stuff youve lost. The only unforgiving mistake is vs terran not getting stuff like ling speed, bane speed, etc…

Then it comes Terran, second, being moderately hard and being also easier than Protoss… Your tier 1 units are the best in the game, fast, you can drop everywhere, mines are OP, and yes you need micro and positioning but if you master your timming pushes its not that complicated thereafter …

Then Protoss, … It is by far the hardest race… Anyone that says its the easiest its because they havent tried it themselfs. Go ahead try it yourself… everything is expensive, really expensive… you always need to do wonders with very little units, one bad rally like a colossus ? it could be game over … it gets its reputation of being the easiest because its air units are the strongests, but to get there against good people is quite the challenge, one bad rally ? dead… one small mistake ? dead… lose a unit to bad micro ? dead… the only saving grace is its warp in mechanic, but if the game is chaotic and fast, Protoss is 90% dead…

I welcome anyone that disagrees to tell me their own expirience, playing all races …

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My experience is that Terran is the easiest to handle at lower play because its units are more competent in an all-around sense – You really don’t need a complex army in a lot of cases, which makes producing fairly easy because of how Marine heavy you can go.

Like, 4-1-1, reactors on 2 barracks and on the starport, with tech labs on the other 2 barracks and on the factory for marine-marauder-tank-medivac is a complicated enough army to win games except against some mass air transition, and Marines still shoot up so they can usually contribute plenty.

That being so ‘simple’ in turn means it’s pretty easy to get to, which saves a lot of attention that can be spent on the units. Of course, an issue there is that… you need to spend that attention on the units, since you care about them but they’re so squishy?

But it feels more natural to play to me because you’re there to watch the battle, that’s ‘the point’ – which is the thing that made me bounce off of Zerg so harshly, that I won many more games by almost never trying to influence fights and instead just focusing on the results of that fight and building units or adjusting my unit proportions reactively to how that fight went; or sending units in many places without giving them attention.

I ended up playing Protoss the most because I found that very difficult - injecting is harder because it requires looking and actually clicking by hand if you don’t have the silly set-up to do it rapid-fire automatically. To me, it had been this nice middle where I’m not fighting the game to do what I want but also not building Marines, by far my least favourite Terran unit.

And by the time I came back, the Disruptor had become an abomination that did everything I hated, and playing ladder games with/without using it were night and day in terms of how much value my resources earned me - but also how much fun I had playing against human opponents, I hate the Disruptor to the point that I’m not sure anymore if the Marine is my most hated unit in the game.

So I’m trying to get back to Zerg, and I really do feel that Protoss was easier, but I think a big part of that is my extra familiarity with the race. Each race kind of has their executional difficulties in different places, so my brain doesn’t really think of them as comparable difficulty.

For a more clear example in that vein, an action game is difficult in an entirely different way to a platformer and to say that one or the other is “harder” kind of depends more on how your personal tastes go.

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Game is asymmetrical. One race is easier by definition. If unthink different then thats a small brain problem.

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Of course 1 race has to be easier than the other but i think it depends on the levels of play. Are we talking Bronce league or pro level ?

Im only around 3K MMR thats only Platinum. And at this level i found Protoss the hardest.

Is it because im wired differently ? Like Zerg wired ? I think Zerg the easiest by far.

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If a trait flip flops within a group then that’s the definition of having no correlation with the group. If protoss is easier it must be easier at all skill levels. To be a trait of protoss it must affect protoss.

The problem is your measurement criteria. You don’t have an objective way to measure if something harder or not. I “feel” it is harder is worth zero in scientific terms for proof. There are already ways to measure whether One race is harder or not. They are called skill metrics. Protoss lag in all metrics for the same performance level and that is cut and dry proof that it is easier to play protoss.

If protoss lead in 1 or 2 metrics and lagged in 1 or 2 then you could make an argument that protoss are equally skilled for the same mmr level. But they are behind in every metric, metrics which have a high correlation with performance. The only conclusion is that it takes less skill to achieve the same rank as protoss.

If a variable correlates with skill, then you take the average for a group for this variable, amd it will predict their average skill level with high accuracy. So protoss lagging by the thousands in several skill metrics is cut and dry proof that eztoss is ez.

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What are this metrics you talking about ?

Also ive played all races… And by far Protoss has been the most frustrating

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APM, EPM, SQ, SPM, Hotkeys. Apm measures how many actions you do a minute. EPM measures number of actions minus rapid fire. SQ measures how big your bank is relative to your economy. SPM measures how frequently you move your screen per minute. Hotkeys is just how many hotkeys you use.

It’s easy to see how each of these contributes to high level protoss losing games. It’s not uncommon for some of the best protoss on earth to be floating 1200 minerals while defending an allin, or to not have their screen in the right place and lose an oracle in a random spot on the map. Another common one is that they don’t use many army hotkeys, sometimes even using 1 hotkey + f2. Obviously it’s very limiting in what maneuvers you can do if you have 1 hotkey – multiprong becomes an “amove and forget” mechanic, for example.

The fact that top protoss are able to get away with this is proof that protoss is much easier to play than T/Z.

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This is absolutely not the case. There is a reason representation fluctuates so much by league; Diamond has notably high Zerg representation, for example, while bronze/silver have very low Zerg representation.

Different traits that impact difficulty/performance can have different impacts on people of different skill levels and with different sets of skills.
Not everyone finds the same race to be the most difficult or easiest; there have been plenty of anecdotal examples of that on these forums over the years.

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Kid this the the basics of cause and effect. If protoss is the cause it must affect all those who play protoss excluding perhaps 1% as outliers. If you think difficulty flip flops depending on skill level then you think race has nothing to do with difficulty.

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Are mostly heavily influenced by race mechanics. APM in particular gets heavily inflated for Zerg players with rapid fire setup because of how their macro works.

You’d know that if you bothered to play all 3 races and look at your APM. What units you’re making as what race have a very significant influence on APM. I get 40% or so more APM with Zerg than I do with Protoss.
You can’t use those metrics to evaluate/compare skill between different races.

Not all actions are equal. Different types of actions contribute differently to APM/EPM with the same effort from the player.

As for floating resources: Protoss floats more because of warpgate, which should be extremely obvious. Can’t queue units → must look away to produce → etc… If you have 12 gateways, you’ll bank 1200 resources during your normal macro cycle, then dump it all at once to produce units, and it’s not suboptimal play to do so.

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Sorry kid, anything that correlates with skill can predict the skill level of a group of players as long as the sample size is large enough to average out the variance. Unfortunately these trends are so massive that the skill metrics meet the Bradford-Hill criteria for causality. Not only can we say that they predict performance but we can say they cause performance. APM alone has a correlation of 0.65 so that means the majority of the game is decided by how fast you click. Add in the other metrics and you reach a very high correlation that describes the causality of winning in SC2. Protoss cannot have lower skill metrics and yet be equal skill, it’s literally impossible. That’s like calling black, white.

Furthermore, alphastar essentially was an experimental study on SC2 and they found protoss provided the highest performance with the lowest skill metrics, which is identical to the trends in the human population.

We have correlations meeting the bradford hill criteria and an experimental study. You can’t get better than that when it comes to proof. You might as well call the earth flat if you are going to deny that protoss is easier.

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Go play all 3 races. Look at your APM with each after every game. I guarantee you will have more APM with Zerg than you will as Protoss or Terran, and more APM playing bio Terran than mech or Protoss.

Reynor, probably the fastest pro player, gets significantly more APM when playing Zerg than when he plays Protoss. His APM with Zerg is usually close to 100 higher; sometimes 200. Does that mean he’s playing the game slower when playing Protoss? Obviously not; it’s the same person doing things at the same speed; the actions being taken just take more time per click.

APM has a high correlation with skill, but it can’t be looked at entirely independently of race. Arguing otherwise is obviously just in bad faith.

As for the whole alphastar thing:

  1. AIs are not people. How they perform actions is completely different. An AI is entirely unaffected by things that require mouse movement from a player, and its click accuracy is 100% perfect. For an AI, all actions are the same, which is not true for players.
  2. How AIs make decisions is different from people. They never “forget” to do something at the right time, so things that ease play, like being able to queue units, or having effectively longer macro cycles don’t matter. A player will almost always be losing some time on warp gate cycles; an AI won’t. Zerg being able to bank larva, and Terran being able to queue units are helpful mechanics for players that aren’t always on top of things, but that isn’t going to be reflected in an AI.

So of course, alphastar did better with Protoss, since the advantages of the AI and the limitations put on it both favored it.

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I been 2 gm as random.

Correct and that’s why its harder. You spend more time doing rapid fire macro cycles and that results in less time for tasks like unit management.

Yes because Protoss is designed to play slower and that makes it easier to play. There is a reason why Reynor can take games off Serral with his offrace, meanwhile top protoss are 4-0’d by serral with their main race. Reynor is a faster player. He’s playing a slower race. That means tons of extra time to consider things like positioning and your next macro cycle.

It’s called objective analysis. Let’s imagine a scenario where all three races have equal skill distribution and equal skill metrics. What happens if we buff one race to have a 60% win-rate? The ladder equalizes the winrate by promoting and demoting players. The result is that the skill metrics are skewed: players with lower APM will be higher on the ladder than they should be. That’s what we observe with protoss.

That’s exactly why it’s a useful study. They removed human bias from the equation, measuring raw game balance, and protoss was the best.

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I think you are wasting your time. In the past I tried to explain to him what APM is, even by showing how it works in the replays. But he still assumes that APM has something to do with skill and not with number of units in the army. Even Rapid Fire can be removed just like regular noise or outliners for him, so that it does fit his “knowledge”.

Trying to explain that Alphastar can give more commands due to the protoss having lower number of units, will not bring anything, because he thinks that a-click with 25 zealots = a-click with 100 zerglings.

I am not even speaking about SQ… Where rounds of warp-ins should be self-explanatory.

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This is what APM is:

A Bradford-Hill analysis of the APM/win-rate correlation:

  • Strength. There must be very low odds of occurring by chance. APMs correlation with mmr is 0.65 and there is a statistically significant correspondence between lower APM for the same performance level within the Protoss group (237 p vs 290 t/z in gm). :ballot_box_with_check:
  • Consistency. Findings of the above correlation must be consistent across multiple sources. Data from sc2replaystats, blizzard’s own employees, and a variety of other sources are in agreement that the correlation between winrate and APM is very large, but lower within the protoss grouping. :ballot_box_with_check:
  • Specificity. A factor is likely to be causative of an outcome if the outcome occurs within a specific population with no reasonable explanation other than involvement of the factor in question. Protoss in GM score lower in every known skill metric ranging from apm to supply blocks to spending quotient to screen movements; the only possible explanation is that it requires fewer substantive tasks within the game, as protoss, to achieve the same rank as a terran or zerg. This relationship is especially stark when contrasting the effects on pro level play, where high level protoss often forget key upgrades or lose multiple oracles due to unforced errors that are APM-related. :ballot_box_with_check:
  • Temporality. The outcome must occur chronologically after the cause. The actions inputted into the game cause the win or the loss of that game which affects ranking and so the substantive actions within the game clearly have a temporal relationship with the probability to win. :ballot_box_with_check:
  • Gradient. The relationship between the cause and the effect should be proportional, meaning if the cause increases a little then the effect increases a little as well; if the cause increases a lot then the effect increases a lot. APM and winrate have a very proportional relationship all the way from bronze up to serral. :ballot_box_with_check:
  • Plausibility. The association must have a known mechanism that causes the effect. Obviously being able to do more tasks within a game where time is the most important resource results in better performance, thus higher APM causing higher performance is plausible. :ballot_box_with_check:
  • Coherence. The interpretation of the relationship cannot conflict with what is already known about the relationships. According to industry experts ranging from the creators of Command and Conquer to the lead designer of Supreme Commander, “The manual dexterity and ability to multitask and divide one’s attention is often considered the most important aspect to succeeding at the RTS genre”. Additionally, the AlphaStar research team found that Protoss achieved the highest performance with the lowest APM, thus recreating the relationships observed in ladder data, which is, in effect, a defacto experimental study. Clearly this theory is in coherence with industry experts. :ballot_box_with_check:

Translation, the 0.65 correlation between APM and win-rate meets the Bradford-hill criteria for causality, and thus APM causes the majority of SC2 performance. For a given skill level, such as Grandmaster, Protoss are lower in skill metrics (like APM) and this is proof that lower skill achieves the same performance level, which is analogous to saying Protoss is overpowered. This effect is so extreme that Protoss in GM have been measured to have lower APM metrics than Masters-level Zergs, which suggests the effect that Protoss has on performance is rather extreme.

Possible explanations:

  • High supply cost units. Protoss armies are made of fewer units which are bulkier and more durable. This means fewer units to build, fewer units to micro, fewer units to position and maneuver. The durability increases the time-window where an action can take place to save the unit with micro. This obviously reduces the multitasking requirements of the race, making it less likely that they make multitasking-related errors.
  • Units that are designed to have no micro, such as zealots and their “auto-charge” ability. Remove the auto-cast from charge, make charge have to be casted on a target enemy unit, so that it operates similar to blink, and we’d probably see an increase in the difficulty required to play protoss.
  • Plain old overpowered. Carriers and storms have a very high power level, and this makes the units easy to use. It’s very hard to mess up when messing up still results in a favorable outcome due to the sheer strength of the abilities involved.

How do we fix this:

  • Stop listening to protoss whiners who cry about “muh serral wins muh premier tournament”. Clearly the pro level performance is a skill issue. Their whining is not going to help solve the real issue (which is skill).
  • Prioritize the ladder gaming experience over the crybabies in the pro scene. The actual players of the actual game are far more important to the survival of the game than the elitists at the top. The elitists at the top are professionals who are paid to solve the game problems with their absurd skill; the idea that we cater balance to them is absurd when the entire premise of their profession is the polar opposite of what is healthy for the game.
  • Increase the micro and multitasking of Protoss units until the correlation between APM (and other skill metrics) and MMR is roughly equal to what it is for Terran and Zerg. Remove auto-cast from abilities like charge. Reduce the power level of carriers and storms. Remove auto-micro from the interceptors / make protoss have to use micro on the individual interceptors. Etc.
  • Decrease the multitasking requirements of terran and zerg. Add auto-cast to the inject ability, for example.

THANK YOU FOR ATTENDING MY TED TALK

(and please place your counter-arguments in the trash bin on your way out)

BONUS (LMFAO): https://i.imgur.com/7iF8S7R.jpeg

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You found an article. Have you even read that? It literally says that protoss performs on the same level with lower APM, which I explained why. It says that higher APM will grant you higher league, which again makes sense as protoss in plat has 80-100 APM, in GM 250-300.

But the funny thing about it, that possible explanations literally mention what I just said above…

Why post it, if it only confirms what I say?

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I am glad we agree that skill metrics are causative of performance and can be used to establish the balance of SC2, which, when applied, give the result that Protoss is yields higher performance for the same skill level.

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Of course it is. I am waiting when protoss will finally get nerfed for taking all the prize money from tournaments.

p.s. hero did play horrible in that quarter-final. I was literally face palming so many times.

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https://i.imgur.com/wyy2dm0.png

They win the majority of tournaments so yes you are right.

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I hope you included there only tournaments from the recent patch? You did not use the data from WOL, right?