Why it's a waste of time to play vs protoss, illustrated

General Discussion
62

can only agree saves time and frustration. just leave ZvP. as long as the early game is so one-sided.

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I agree, but this playstyle is born out of not really having other good choices.

If you nerf the Queen’s ability to hold its ground, you need to find a way to give Zerg the ability to not hose its economy by building early combat units; and to make actually useful anti-air units.

The entire rest of this post and the next one are completely impossible to engage with because they have no relation to reality.

You don’t play Protoss, do you?

No, this has nothing to do with it, and you know that.

And how large is this data set? How do you determine each player’s elo - from the beginning, or purging the data each balance patch?

Except that’s not strictly true, because your data is based on… what, again? A limited number of individual players. You’re the smart one, you know that you can’t eliminate skill that way; that’s like saying that the match results are skill-independent.

After all, elo is based on match results in the first place.

Also suddenly we’re pivoting to pro play when I swear you were complaining about ladder.

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64

Marco polo was one of the best tv series of our time. It failed because it was too realistic. There was no way the feminists were getting on board w/ that tv show lmao. They have a disney-princess interpretation of reality, and a TV show like that just obliterates their world view. Cut-throat mongolians boiling dead bodies to produce a boiling soup they launch in a catapult at the enemy? But disney taught me the world is magical! Yeah, dark magic.

By the way, do you remember how a couple years ago I said DRUMPF was a moderate democrat who was splitting off from the mainstream Democrats who had become a hard-right party? Well, Dick Cheney just endorsed Kamala Harris. :grimacing:

So anyway I happened to overhear a kid talking on the road down the street from me. I happened to see a post on reddit w/ a similar style of speech. I click on the account name and sure enough there is this kid asking for hairdoo advice with selfies. It’s definitely him. I am so flipping good at spotting alt accounts that I accidentally spotted the reddit account of a rando kid that lives down the street from me. Honestly, my own brain amazes me. It keeps track of all this crap without my consent. Because if I could have a choice, I would never remember any of this. But it remembers not just what the kid said, but his style of speech. It’s unreal. I do not consent to this. I am being held hostage. Send help, please.

The thing that really ticks off the apetoss abusers is how much they hate PvP. Grandmasters play like 60% of their games vs other protoss because there is an avalanche of protoss sliding uphill towards grandmaster. Because they don’t have a balance advantage in that matchup, it feels really hard, and it’s the only matchup they play. So when you start leaving games vs them, it denies them the ability to play the matchup that is super easy for them and it fast-tracks them back to PvP. Now if you go on social media and start explaining to other people how and why you are doing this, it causes their brains to explode because they realize they are going to play nothing but PvP for the rest of sc2’s miserable existence.

If lots of people start doing this, Protoss players will be begging for forgiveness within a couple months. Their biggest assumption is that they are entitled to your time. They are not. I will not waste one minute on these clowns. Since they love protoss so much, they can play PvP against other protoss players. Oh wait, even protoss don’t want to play against protoss? How about that. Nerf protoss.

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Zerg can easily win without queens. They don’t because zergs are dependent on them the same as protoss are dependent on carrier f2. The balance patch would simply read:

Zerg:

  • Queen: removed.
  • Metabolic Boost: removed.
  • Roach: removed.

And I would cackle as the chaos ensued.

To quote Puscifer:

:musical_note: Time to knock the train off the rail
No more sweatin’ to jail
No more buckets and bail
(It’s time to lighten it up) :musical_note:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9S0FLuVM1U

As I said, shake your fist at Mount Olympus as much as you deem necessary, mortal.

Nah, way too boring. There’s legit nothing to do and the wins are so easy that it’s not interesting and doesn’t feel rewarding.

23,142 players.
456,716 games.
142,671 events.

That’s exactly how it works, cupcake. The data shows that pretty darn clearly. I am sorry but “the data is wrong because it hurts my feewings” is not a valid argument. Go outside and shake your fist at the sky because that will have the same effect.

:man_facepalming:

That’s exactly how you eliminate skill. We’re rolling 665 dice (343 P, 322 Z) each with 201 sides that range from -100 to 100. Every time we roll for PvZ, it lands on +27 and every time we roll for ZvP it lands on -35. It’s a statistical impossibility unless PvZ causes increased performance for Protoss.

The proper statistical test here would be a z test. We need to know the mean/standard deviation of an elo ranking system knowing the K,S factors. These are arbitrary numbers. K is usually set to 32 and S is usually 400. Now we make 10,000 players play 1,000 games each & to decide who wins we flip a coin. That means there is no variable predicting what happens. The distribution that produces is the base line elo distribution assuming no variables biasing the result. That chart looks like this:

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

Mean: 0.
Standard deviation: 55.

So now we ask ourselves, “if we select 322 players from this pool, what’s the probability they all have -35”. We need to know the probability of selecting one, first. That’s: (-35 - 0) / 55 = -0.636. We look this up in a z table, giving us a 26.24% chance of producing <= -35 and a 73.76% chance of producing > -35. We then raise this to the 322 power, because we have 322 zerg who average out to to that -35. 0.2624^343=5.0e-200

Translation, 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000005% chance that every Zerg happens to land at <=-35 in PvZ. Remember, this is the base-line elo distribution assuming no variable predicts performance. If there is no variable, including “ZvP”, that predicts performance, the probability the average elo for the group is -35 is so small it has 200 zeroes. These answers are as easy as answers come in statistics. They are literally black and white. If you can’t tell that protoss is OP, you’re living in another flipping dimension.

PvZ favors protoss. It’s a fact of reality. If you don’t understand this, you need to go to school and further your education. There are plenty of universities out there that have courses on statistics. However, you’re gonna have to get your highschool diploma first, ok. They aren’t gonna let you in until you have a GED or a diploma.

To be clear, I did make some simplifications in this analysis but when the answer is this black and white it’s fine. It’s close enough. It should be a t-test between two sample means, but whatever. We’re measuring the average random walk distance for a zerg with ZvZ elo X → X-35. He starts out with X elo in ZvP, equal to his ZvZ elo, and we’re seeing what the odds are that all zerg’s ZvP rankings happened to randomly walk their way to -35. That’s what this test measures. It’s just very unlikely. It’s crazy unlikely. Any time you get a number this crazy, you start to think your data is biased. But, no, this trend has been going on for 6 years with Protoss hitting 60% PvZ win-rates in the pro scene, so it’s right on the money. Additionally, other people are reporting similar things. Contrast my PvP/ZvZ elo chart vs Maguro’s win-rate vs aligulac ranking chart:

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

Same exact trend. Make way for the avalanche of toss sliding uphill at 1 trillion to 1 odds :sled:. One of the obvious counter arguments is “WHY AREN’T PROTOSS HOLDING 59% STEADY?”. The answer is simple: win-rates fluctuate, and tournaments don’t ensure equal skill matches, so you can have really good zergs against really bad protoss. In fact, the tournament format guarantees that outcome because the zergs in later stages of the tournaments are, by definition, the better zergs. The only way you’d reliably get the 59% win-rate is if you randomly assigned matches. So you’d pick 2 people at random for each match.

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pathological liars need psychologists

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Balance counsel needs iq points. :kiss:

By the way, “leave league”-ing all your accounts out of na gm isn’t going to fool a statistician, my man. Also, if they did leave league out of GM to manipulate the stats, that proves the balance counsel has a bias issue. Manipulating data is way worse than merely interpreting data with bias. But I imagine the conversation went something like this “there are too many protoss in gm.” “but but but I have 4 alt accounts in gm” “leaves league to prove a point without considering the ethical implications of data manipulation”.

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I never knew it was a show. To me it’s a game you play in the swimming pool. Good to see Mongolian propaganda is being reinforced in unique ways. Just like how Disney has to get approval from the DoD any time they put out a marvel film just to make sure it aligns with American imperialism. I bet even Dick Cheney has a say in these since his stock portfolio will suffer if a film puts anti war sentiment at the forefront.

The kid needs to steal your stream and force you to play some nightmare mode WoL or Terran/protoss gameplay. Even David Kim played random in tournaments yet Batz is super glued to the bugs. Smh my head.

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Marvel is pretty corny, but if you want perhaps the worst example of the american propaganda then you need to look at Top Gun. Don’t get me wrong, the music kicks butt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siwpn14IE7E

Obviously designed to fast-track sports car loving young men into the air force. Funny enough, 99% of them won’t make the cut. They think it’s just a joystick. It’s not. It’s 500 buttons and 100 flashing lights and 50 buzzers and the little birdie giving you orders through your ear. The control of the plane is very complicated in other words. It also requires thinking under pressure. The irony is that most GMs at sc2 probably could be airforce pilots with minimal effort. The two have a lot of overlapping traits. The one trait in contradiction is that to be an airforce pilot you’d have to be adventure seeking, while most sc2 players are the opposite of adventure-avoidant.

EDIT: also gotta love how the Danger Zone video equates the danger of chasing women with the danger of flying airplanes. Didn’t you get the message – flying airplanes for the US air force is sexy.

I feel the same frustration trying to convince my buddy to even try sc2. He loves turn based strategy games. He introduced me to Angband and Baba Is You (both incredible games, by the way – my only complaint is that they are a little too easy). He says sc2 is for people with fast hands. He’s not wrong. 95% of the skill in the game is speed.

Terran is pretty boring because you follow one preset build order and hard counter everything with micro. Protoss is boring because slower paced and has a win-rate advantage. Winning with it is so flipping easy it’s like why did I even waste the time. Zerg is the same way if you spam queens and drones. I copied SortOf’s TvZ opener vs PracticeX and clapped him in 8 minutes. It wasn’t even close. His bc did nothing vs the 12 queens and he died to a roach amove at his third. I didn’t even do it well. So if you play zerg that way, it’s also incredibly boring. Literally the only interesting playstyle in the game at the moment is pure swarm hosts in all matchups. The game is rigged in a million ways to never let a swarmhost player ever win a game. Roach apes can just deny the nydus twice then amove you when +1 finishes. Mutalisk apes are even harder to beat because I don’t allow myself to make any anti air except spore crawlers. You should’ve seen Livibee’s frustration when she lost over and over again to swarm host ultralisk or berry’s frustration even though he goes lurkers every zvz. Do you know how fast locusts die to lurkers? It’s crazy fast. Lurkers are easily the best unit in ZvZ and he’s tryharding the heck out of the game in order to win. See, that’s where I like it. SC2 is just too easy dude. Apeing your way to high gm with roaches is just cliche. That story has been told a trillion times over.

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so like

you leaving all your vs peotoss games?

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MMR is self equalizing. They receive +20 or whatever but that increases the probability they face vs tougher opponents, pushing them right back where they were before they faced me.

Taking entire accounts out of grandmaster through leave-league by comparison would completely invalidate any correlations you could generate between GM and balance. And yes, I wouldn’t put it past Protoss players to pull these kinds of stunts. They’ve been acting like the victims for years as they bash everyone over the head with skytoss while gaslighting you that it’s purely a skill issue. Frankly it’s soviet-esque levels of gaslighting. Toss in the finals of tournaments refuse to make anything except zealots, when a single phoenix would be a slam dunk, and we’re all supposed to pretend like he’s as skilled as the terran who is struggling to maximize every possible advantage which accumulate into a victory by the width of a hair. “Don’t believe what you see with your own eyes, because we say so.”

So yes, I would not be surprised if Protoss balance counsel members use every gaslighting tool at their disposal, including leave-league to manipulate GM stats.

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that word doesn’t mean what you think it means

because losing to slytoss kinda means you lost which means you got outplayed???

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I wasn’t going to bother doing this but it seems like it’s necessary.

This chart also falsifies the theory that PvP is the most random matchup, by the way. I will briefly debunk that claim because it’s a common one brought up in this context, but we’re beating a dead horse at this point. I’ve proven my point so completely and utterly that only a lunatic could disagree, but let’s add one more cherry on top.

This is the distribution of Elo rankings assuming the outcome is 100% random. We can vary the randomness by degrees of 10% random, 50% random, etc, and see how it changes the result. Then we can score each matchup on their randomness factor. Charting change in standard deviation vs randomness factor gives us this chart:

https://i.imgur.com/xulZ6Qh.png EDIT: relabeled the axes.

An exponential function is fitted to this data with a high R2 value (meaning a good fit). We can now plug the standard deviation of each matchup into this function:

TvP TvZ TvT PvP PvZ PvT ZvP ZvZ ZvT
Standard Deviation 206.9205706 234.4564921 210.498604 218.7852305 223.6184679 223.3365241 205.7349355 196.8285858 212.4476338
Randomness Factor 0.3137433276 0.2596678834 0.3061251895 0.2891845339 0.2797400192 0.2802823879 0.3163093014 0.3362675622 0.3020535439

There you have it. TvZ is the least random matchup. PvP is one of the least random matchups. ZvZ is the most random matchup. If balance counsel members try to say PvP doesn’t represent the skill of the Protoss players because PvP is too random, then this chart disproves their theory. PvP is an accurate representation of their skill as players. PvP consistently under-estimates PvZ performance by about 60 elo which is a 59% win-rate.

To quote Judas Priest:

With weapons drawn we claim the future
And then seep out through every storm
Bring in the foe to be defeated
To pulverize from dusk to dawn

Protoss as a matter of fact have a 59% winrate advantage on an equal skill and equal effort basis and this causes them to win over twice as many tournaments as Zerg (esl cups, for example). Remember, win-rates are only affected after every other option is exhausted – build order variety is reduced to only the best builds, effort is set to maximum – and after all this is when win-rates are affected. If we were to factor in effort and build order variety, the problem is much larger than 59% (as if 59% weren’t massive enough already).

This is exactly the kind of gaslighting I mentioned, by the way. We have data showing protoss has an advantage. We have video examples of a zerg and a protoss playing about as well as one another, but the zerg loses his whole army while the protoss loses maybe 5% of his army. What’s your response? Zerg can’t lose unless they were outplayed.

This kind of bias is so bad it’s probably deliberate. If it’s deliberate, then manipulating statistics via leave-league and a variety of other methods are definitely a very real possibility. This is exactly why they can’t be trusted. They will use literally every option at their disposal to paint themselves as the victims while they cook the books behind the scenes. That’s the level of bias in this thread – denying what your own eyes see. So if this thread is indicative of how the balance counsel operates, it is definitely having an integrity crisis.

Side note: Effort is very easy to factory in, by the way. It’s called APM/number of army hotkeys/screen movements per minute, for example. And, yeah, you won’t like the result lmao. Protoss in GM have APM metrics similar to masters-2 level zergs.

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https://i.imgur.com/EmXIAJR.mp4

More satisfying than a world cup victory. I’ve been bouncing around between rank 100 and rank 50 with these builds. Hardest to make it work vs zerg by far. VS fast third protoss, they lose their main. VS void ray openers, you nydus off to the side & build spores then continually send waves while establishing another spore beachhead on the other side. Then you can hit both sides at once. Build up your gas count while going for neural or parasitic depending on carriers or voids. Flipping hilarious when he thinks he gets to dislodge the spore cluster when he finally gets tempests out and then vipers yank all his tempests into the spores. VS terran the burrow is a huge vulnerability due to limited scans. So burrowed infestors with neural and waves of locusts just delete his marines while he is run ragged. If he makes a raven, you neural the raven.

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That’s a lie. I bet in HotS you have a few hour long ZvZ’s that were just swarm host viper infestor going at it and now in lotv they can attack from any spot on the map and negate terrain with FREE units. I’m just proud you continued showing how good infestors are. I have a feeling anything Zerg can work as long as you have exceptional viper+infestor control.

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https://i.imgur.com/X2xtgl8.mp4

Got a no gg from Maynard. You know, the tournament caster. Last I heard, he was salty about the state of late game PvZ. I wonder how he feels after this game. This one was lurker swarm host. Burrow swarm hosts everywhere off 2 base. You then take a third using about 5 lurkers. Once third is up w/ spines, you nydus the main while they are distracted w/ a locust wave. Then you put the lurkers and swarm hosts in their main for a combo move:

https://i.imgur.com/l2VXNup.png

Most protoss don’t last this long. Only reason he did is because I thought it was stargate, and did the spore beachhead thing I mentioned. I found it it was blink after the spores were built.

https://i.imgur.com/Pc41itu.png

Got him again. He said “don’t care” and lagged out of the game after I tried to make conversation with him. It’s all in a days work down in the :salt: :pick: mines.

Infestors are absolutely insane. Basically everything toss and terran can use to counter mass swarm host is hard countered by the infestor. BCs? Neural. Carriers or voids? Neural. Tempests? Neural if no detection. Marines? Fungal. Blink stalkers? Fungal locust combo. Observer? Neural. Oracle? Neural. Keep those swarm hosts safe w/ neural lmao.

Infestors combo so flipping well with this swarm host style because you send out burrowed infestors to spot for the nydus. If he tries to kill the nydus, you unload anyway, start another nydus, and fungal his army so it can’t run from the swarm hosts. If he sends detection to find the burrowed swarm hosts, you just neural it. An oracle you waste the energy. An obs you walk it back to a queen and kill it.

It’s a pretty legit style. If the zerg can get a third, I don’t think it’s possible to beat this. I think the balance counsel should give burrowed swarm hosts +1 armor. That would be awesome. But until a toss is aclicking through serral and clem, it’s probably more toss buffs to infinity and beyond. That’s why you gotta develop out of meta strategies. You win not because the strats are good, but because the toss don’t have any practice vs them.

ALSO the reason this style is so good vs your average GM toss is that probably 75% of them only use F2 and or 1 army hotkey. You just can’t do that vs this style. You need at least 2, if not 3 hotkeys. The way you stop the repeat nydus is by patroling a zealot in every spot I place a nydus, and they can’t do that because their F2 causes them to mess up all their patrols. It’s a hard style to make work, but once you get it down the F2 abusers in GM simply can’t deal with it. You get a double nydus going and it’s just over. It’s really silly to balance SC2 around Protoss’ inability to use hotkeys but it is what it is, I guess. I’ve got a 62% win-rate vs protoss on this account, and probably half the losses are from me just leaving vs the protoss because I don’t want to play against them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1f3ig9s/is_this_true_mtx_horse_makes_more_money_than_sc2/

Also if you haven’t seen this, it’s absolutely wild. Apparently a wow pet (a sparkle horse) made more money than all of SC2. It goes into what I was saying with SC2 appealing to the cluster C disorders aka ocd etc. The gameplay is extremely repetitive, so people with ocd are going to be very good at it because they have repetitive thoughts & they form processes around these thoughts and will restart the process if they make a mistake somewhere in the process. They will clean their house over, and over again even though it’s sparkling clean already. That’s SC2 training in a nutshell. With the game designed to be repetitive, it’s going to appeal to a very small minority of ocd people. But, it gets worse. These people NEVER spend money because their anxiety biases them towards staying in known territory and keeping your money is known territory while spending it on something new is uncharted territory. You have something worth guaranteed value and you’d be exchanging it for something that maybe has value. Their brain doesn’t like that. That’s why they end up living in their mother’s basement for decades while they refuse to ever go outside. This explains why they never spend money, have endless time to repeat the same build over and over again without getting bored, and it also explains why they are so flipping sensitive to banter because their brain is terrified of doing something wrong. That’s why they repeat the process until they have it perfected. It’s also why they had a melt down over the new map pool. It’s harder to create a perfect process using simple repetitive build orders when the shape of the maps are a bit more complicated.

Blizz designed SC2 to appeal to a class of people who have no money and who would never spend the money they have.

This is why I am critical of buffing economical plays, by the way. It funnels all the games down a certain route because you just can’t get enough value out of upgrade or tech styles to compensate for how big their eco is. Eco scaling means everyone expands and masses units and that makes all the games look the same. Part of that is how SC2 tech is structured. You have so much money that you can go every tech path. We see brood, lurker, infestor, hydra, viper ling. If players didn’t have as much money, they have to pick a tech path and make it work and that’s a lot more interesting than having infinite money and making whatever you want. It would also make all the games different because in some games you’d get hydra broodlord and in others you’d get swarm host ultralisk and these two unit comps play out totally differently. But no, sc2 is about maxing, splitting the map in half, getting every tech option to build the ultimate army, blah blah blah. No interesting decisions being made. Imagine instead if a player had to pick a path and make it work because he simply can’t afford anything else. Those kinds of games are “scrappy” low economy games and they were very common in HotS. The way HotS eco played out was better than LotV too because LotV is about splitting the map and fighting over the last one or two bases. In scrappy games, you’d give up bases because you just don’t have the money to defend everywhere. So you stop defending the easily defendable bases because they are mined out. Everyone is pushed towards the harder to defend bases and have to deal with the turbulence of losing their main. So the game is designed to climax while current LotV is designed to stalemate. It’s all because the economy plays are just too powerful.

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There is a reason I call them “roach apes”. Taking a third and spamming roaches has to be the lowest skill and most boring and unoriginal idea ever conceived in sc2. If I were designing starcraft for myself, I would legit delete the roach just because players are too reliant on it to win. Gotta pump up the strategic diversity of the game. Unfortunately sc2 was designed by apm spammers for apm spammers to do the same builds on repeat like robots. They might vary the timing of a building or the ideal worker count for an attack but that’s basically all the strategy in the pro scene.

You can tell SC2 isn’t a strategy game because the strategical players (sOs, Rogue, Gumiho) are struggling. It’s all about spamming apm to manage a 7 base eco while doing mirror styles.

The fundamental issue behind SC2 is that the Korean scene is enamored with SC:BW despite its numerous design flaws. That game’s design is absolutely horrible but it was novel for its time and is deeply entrenched in the Korean esports scene. At the end of LotV, the final design changes were made out of panic because Korea was returning to Broodwar, which would effectively cut SC2’s popularity in half. The problem wasn’t the game design, it was that Blizzard deleted Korea from the pro scene via the region lock. They thought it was bad for Korea to win all the tournaments, so they banned Koreans and now 1 guy (Serral) got to win them all. It shows how affirmative action policies backfire. There was a lack of diversity in tournament victors and so they took action to fix that but ironically caused the problem to explode. Misattributing cause and effect as to why Korea was returning to Broodwar, SC2’s designers panicked and made SC2 more like broodwar in an attempt to avoid splitting the player base in two. This failed to bring back Broodwar players while simultaneously offending the mainstream gamers who don’t like broodwar’s style of 40 minute turtle games that emphasize mechanics over all other factors (not to mention the severe balance issues).

Now SC2 is living in the reality created by designers who were obsessed with Esports & designed the game for that purpose at the detriment of casual gamers, effectively killing the game. Continuing in this tradition, the balance counsel has had an obsession with nerfing Serral and now Clem. I am sure they will roll out big nerfs to the ghost, maybe a supply cost increase or a gas cost increase, because “apm spammer” Clem clicked 0.5% faster than Serral. And we’re all going to have to live with the design consequences of people who absolutely refuse to design the game for the players who play the game.

The 12 worker start is perhaps the perfect example of how they prioritize Esports over the experience of the casual gamers. Casual gamers aren’t interested in 40 minute macro games where there is so much going on that the entire game is a blur. Early game cheeses were the casual gamer’s life-blood in sc2 because these rushes were simple, micro-oriented, and emphasized unit-retainment and build orders. The 12 worker start is the primary reason why SC2 went from a mainstream game to a meme of spamming apm faster than the other guy.

SC2 pro players will object to this reality, but everyone outside SC2 knows that this analysis is spot on. Here is Asmongold, a SC2 player turned super-famous twitch streamer, talking about RTS:

“It’s a game where you make a bunch of guys and you go around and do stuff. Well anyway, this was really complicated and so people stopped playing these games.”

He’s obviously criticizing the insane complexity of long macro games & how that’s unappealing to casual gamers. The great thing about the 6 worker start is that the casuals could do their 6 pools and their 8 pools and their 9 pools w/ gas and the hard core sc2 players would get really good at defending these so the games would go longer to the more complicated aspects, but only for the experts. So it was well designed for casuals and experts alike. Then the morons in the esports scene were too darn lazy to fast forward their casts to the 1 minute mark and decided to nuke a billion dollar game to save themselves a few minutes in each cast. They replaced the 6 worker start & removed “game ending moments”, effectively meaning the casuals have no choice except to play a long macro game. It’s flipping insane. What’s even crazier is that nobody at blizzard has noticed the pattern & they are OK with the same kind of people as the ones who created this mess now being allowed to do the maintenance balance patches.

SC2 failed because the designers made mistakes. It could be a mainstream game like League of Legends if they were to put someone in charge who actually has a brain and gave them a budget of 20 million or so. That’s all it would take to bring sc2 back to greatness. As long as SC2 is designed by elitists in the esports scene, it’s going to be designed around the mechanical abilities of players like Serral and casual gamers just aren’t interested in that style of game.

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I agree with the worker change being bad the one base all in and strategy in WOL was better even with the more clunky early implementations and imbalances. I play the old 6 worker maps with my kid all the time.

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81

It was a bad design decision on its own but if you analyze it embedded into a broader context it shows a pattern of deference for elite SC2 players & tournament casters over the casuals who play the game. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle where mechanically gifted players are the ones to make it pro, they give feedback to the designers thereby biasing the design towards the mechanical elements. None of the strategical players can make it high enough for their opinion to matter because the game favors speed over quality and by a very enormous margin. I’d estimate that the speed of an action is roughly 4-8x more important than the quality of the action. That’s how you end up with a game that has so much going on that it’s a blur, and of course the typical casual gamers aren’t going to be interested in that. The deference the designers show for esports is ironically what killed esports because they alienated the casuals and that hurt esports viewership numbers¹.

A good example of how SC2 is strategically dead is that if you analyzed PvZ under a strategical lens you’d quickly conclude that Protoss has every strategical advantage in the book. The way pro players beat Protoss is through speed. The “speed above all else” design philosophy has ruined the balance of the game at any level below the top 10 in the pro scene, and a lot of people are just fed up. It’s about to boil over. The number of streamers complaining about Protoss for example is just off the charts.

The current scenario provides a unique opportunity to knock some sense into the game designers. Data indicates protoss has an advantage and if they are compelled to fix the balance they will automatically fix the over-emphasis on speed as a by product. Their attempt to balance patch protoss to beat higher speed terran and zergs is one of the biggest factors driving the balance issues. They seem to be putting their thumb on the scale to give protoss strategic advantages to overcome speed disadvantages at the player level, which would be unethical (and possibly illegal) given it affects million dollar tournaments. IF these people can be reasoned with to see how their actions are detrimental to almost everyone then maybe they will back down on their extremism. Nobody benefits from the design of the game requiring you to beat protoss through Serral-esque speed. Every race needs strategic advantages that can be leveraged for wins:

When late-game battles are this one sided, despite both players doing more or less the same thing, Protoss holds all the cards. In a properly balanced game, protoss could have an advantage here but not one this large. Cut the size of the advantage by 80-90% & give terran and zerg equal access to advantaged scenarios. So for every scenario where protoss has a 20% advantage, zerg/terran also have one scenario with a 10-20% advantage. Maybe instead of winning this fight with 200 supply, the protoss wins it with 130 or 140? You know, better than the zerg but worse than the current scenario, that way protoss is still in a good position following the fight, but not an insanely good scenario. The only way Protoss should achieve such insane efficiency is with spectacular micro in the hands of players like MaxPax. Otherwise they should trade more or less the same as zerg and terran on an equal effort basis.

Footnotes.

  1. SC2 twitch viewership peaked at 6.7k average viewers and is current at 1.7k aka a reduction of 3 viewers/day. Following that trend, SC2 has 1.5 years before reaching 0.
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are you stupid or justpretending to be

i actually can’t tell anymore.

the only redeeming feature of these posts is they’re so long discourse thinks i actually read them
you can’t be real

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Spirit near top of EU has played 175 protoss this season, 24 zerg and 50 terran. Seems legit