GM is a statistical marker for the balance of the whole game. A common misconception is that “balance varies by skill level” but that’s a load of baloney because if performance varies by skill then skill is the cause, and the word “balance” contributes nothing to the causal relationship being described. It’s like saying “cars with larger engines drive faster, and that’s why I paint my car red”. “Red” has nothing to do with the relationship being described. For performance to be caused by the design of terran/zerg/protoss, it must affect all players of the sets [protoss, terran, zerg], and this is required for balance to be the cause. So, what’s happening in Grandmaster is what’s happening to the entire ladder and the pro scene.
I’ve posted numerous analyses unifying the ladder, gm, and pro scene under one model, and have shown they do in fact follow the same trends. This includes true-skill analysis of the pro scene, gumbel analysis of the pro scene, 4 analyses of grandmaster, an analysis of skill metric distortions on the ladder, and an analysis of the mmr distribution of the whole ladder. My findings are in line with other sources, including Aligulac which has been showing Protoss making monumental gains in performance via multiple metrics. It’s simply a fact, balance affects the whole player base from bronze to serral, and protoss is busted no matter where you look.
It’s also not just about you, but the health of the game at large. Having a fair game is important to keep players from rage quitting the game. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Zerg’s popularity, on the ladder, has tanked proportionally to how much Protoss has dominated Grandmaster? Protoss goes up in grandmaster, and zerg’s numbers go down on the whole ladder. Zergs are quitting the game because they play the game, get wrecked, close the game and never open it again. It’s not rocket science.
Protoss start dominating grandmaster in 2019: https://i.imgur.com/RQZFIwb.png
Zerg’s popularity on the ladder plummets starting in 2019: https://i.imgur.com/zNNQY6k.png
The difficulty of the game depends on the skill level of your opponent and the ladder guarantees you will have a fair match. How racial trends impact this is that players of one race have to work slightly harder to maintain the same rank, and this shows up in skill metrics like apm, screen movements, spending quotient, etc. Protoss lag in these metrics for the same performance level, which is equivalent to saying you have to exert less effort to maintain the same rank. So while the ladder guarantees to equalize your win-rate to 50/50, it does not guarantee it will equalize the amount of effort required to play each race. Because protoss requires the least effort, and zerg the most, players are less likely to play zerg long term due to increased pressure to race switch or quit the game via the stress created by increased effort requirements. And as this process plays out en masse, we observe zerg become the least played race while protoss dominates the upper leagues including grandmaster and masters. We also observe that the low-skill brackets of the sc2 ladder are the ones the least likely to select zerg, and this makes sense when they would be the ones most sensitive to the increased effort requirements (being unable to provide the required effort, they instead lose games if they select zerg, incentivizing them to not select zerg).
Correct. Nerf protoss so that zerg players return to the game.
Well done, chaps. Well done.